The American Academy in Rome presents Artists Making Books: Pages of Refuge, an exhibition looking at the relationship between arts, graphic design, publishers, and books—ultimately exploring their physicality and their power of circulation.
Artists Making Books is based around the books that Ed Ruscha donated to the AAR Library while visiting the Academy in 2001. The exhibition brings together over one hundred books envisioned, conceived, and made by artists from 1905 to the present, from AAR’s Arthur & Janet Ross Library and two major private Italian collections.
Carrying experiences and experiments, the exhibition will explore the intrinsic qualities of books with a particular focus on the experimentation of artists with the medium. From materiality and size, letter presses to pamphlets, three-dimensional constructions, source engines, and classifications, artists who make books conceptualize and redesign the media.
The exhibition presents examples of radical approaches to books. Subverting, inventing, inverting and celebrating letters, words, texts, form and shape; it shows a selected history of how books were created with different creative and graphic solutions. Looking at the relationship between the historical avant-gardes and the contemporary moment, Artists Making Books wants to prove how the book was, and continues to be, an object of experimentation, a way of resisting commercial constraints and becoming, ultimately, a space of refuge.
Friday, September 27–Saturday, December 7, 2024
Friday - Saturday: 4-7 PM
