Tag Archives: Chloe Barnett

Hidden Collection — Artist’s Books

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The Smithsonian Institution Libraries (SIL) has a “hidden collection” of artists’ books that is underused by researchers and the public. Artists’ books are diverse in form and concept, making them difficult to define. Some are handmade, published as unique works or in limited editions. Others are inexpensive and mass-produced, available for nearly everyone to purchase and consume. Despite these differences, scholars generally agree that an artist’s book is a book or book-like object that reflects an artist’s creative vision and is intended as a work of art. Our assignment this summer was to investigate the SIL’s artist’s book collection, consider it in the context of other local collections, and develop a proposal to increase access to this relatively unknown resource.

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Stephanie and Chloe with National Museum of African Art librarian Janet Stanley, photograph by Sam Schubert.

Our internship is part of a collaborative effort among three SIL branch libraries to bring their artists’ books holdings to light. We spent significant time examining the collections of artists’ books at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Library, the Smithsonian American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery Library, and the Warren M. Robbins Library, National Museum of African Art. We also conducted research on artists’ books as a genre, focusing specifically on the challenges they present to art libraries. We first consulted librarians Anna Brooke, Doug Litts, and Janet Stanley about their collections, and then we met with rare books cataloger Diane Shaw and metadata librarian Doug Dunlop to explore ways to improve access via the library’s catalog, an artist’s book blog, or a database of digital images.

A major component of our internship was a series of research visits to other local libraries and artists’ books collections. These visits greatly informed our overall understanding of artists’ books, refined our definition of the genre, and improved our ability to analyze the books in the Smithsonian’s collection. They also gave us the opportunity to meet professionals knowledgeable about the creation, distribution, curation, and exhibition of artists’ books, including librarians, curators, book artists, and booksellers.

At the National Museum of Women in the Arts, we met Krystyna Wasserman, the curator of book arts. She oversees a rotating display of artists’ books in the library’s reading room and curates the museum’sBook as Art exhibition series. During a visit to the Rare Book and Special Collections Reading Room at the Library of Congress, Mark Dimunation showed us a small percentage of the nation’s impressive artist’s book collection. He expressed a desire to increase the collection’s visibility and use, a concern that other librarians echoed. We also met with Lamia Doumato, head of reader services at the National Gallery of Art library, who showed us a selection of artists’ books that are now on exhibit in the museum.

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Chloe and Stephanie study artists’ books at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, photograph by Anna Brooke

Another enlightening visit was our trip to the Corcoran College of Art + Design, where librarian Mario Ascencio collects artists’ books that refer to the theme “social consciousness.” He also acquires books that are excellent teaching resources for the college’s book arts program. We learned how private booksellers market and sell artists’ books during our visit to Joshua Heller Rare Books, Inc. Joshua and Phyllis Heller, the owners, taught us the importance of networking with artists and impressed upon us the very personal nature of the bookselling business.

Toward the end of our internship, we toured Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, an art community that specializes in papermaking, printmaking, and artists’ books. Their artistic director, Gretchen Schermerhorn, showed us how to make paper and how to create letterpress prints using movable type. These research visits brought us full circle, allowing us to explore everything from the creation of the artist’s book to its exhibition.

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Detail of the artists’ books display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery Library,
photograph by Stephanie Fletcher

Our research culminated in a report that included a survey of the artists’ books holdings at the Smithsonian, recommendations for improving access to the collection, a proposal of themes for a future exhibition, and an extensive bibliography. We also created a small exhibit of artists’ books at the Smithsonian American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery Library, which will be on display for the next year. Our internship was a headlong foray into the world of artists’ books. We emerged deeply informed and excited to reveal this “hidden collection.”

—Stephanie Fletcher and Chloe Barnett

Stephanie Fletcher and Chloe Barnett are Smithsonian Institution Library interns. Stephanie holds an MA in art history from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and is an MLIS student at Dominican University. Chloe received an MA in art history and an MSIS from the University of Texas, Austin and recently accepted a job as arts and humanities librarian at Bucknell University.

Artist’s Books on Display at the AAPG Library

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Hypotenuse

This display presents a diverse selection of formats, media, and conceptual approaches from the Smithsonian American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery Library’s artist’s book collection.  An artist’s book is a book or book-like object that is intended as a work of art by its creator. Often issued in limited editions or produced as unique works, artists’ books exist in a variety of shapes, sizes, and media. They challenge our common perception and understanding of the book, demonstrating that the book is not limited to the codex format. The inventive combination of form, text, and image in artists’ books invite us to unfold, unfurl, read, respond, act, and create.

The artists’ books on view demonstrate the variety and depth of the genre. Maria Pisano’s Entangled reveals a delicate, layered floral design, whereas her X Y Z is a playful accordion-style book. Kurt Allerslev’s Hypotenuse (a2 + b2 = c2) juxtaposes organic materials with the form of a right triangle to communicate the parallels between mathematics and nature. Laura Davidson’s creations, including Visible Invisible, Inner Workings, and The Body Temple, artfully combine prints, found objects, paint, text, and wooden boards to produce sculptural books in codex form. Seasonal Turns: Four Accordion Books by Bea Nettles is a series of photographs that represent the four seasons. Finally, Fluxus artist George Brecht’s Water Yam is a conceptual work that invites participation, while Don Celender’s Artball is a set of “baseball cards” that encourages conversation and exchange.

Visible Invisible

This installation is part of a larger project to discover and highlight the artists’ books in the Smithsonian Institution’s art libraries.  A team of Smithsonian Institution librarians and interns is analyzing the accessibility of the collection through the library catalog; investigating new ways to explore the collection through digitization and social media; and exploring options for collaborative projects both within and outside the Smithsonian Institution, including an exhibition and an ongoing artist’s book blog.

—Chloe Barnett and Stephanie Fletcher

The AAPG Library is located on the second floor of the Victor Building at 750 9th Street and is open from 10 am to 5 pm.

Image 1: Hypotenuse (a2 + b2 = c2) by Kurt Allerslev, 1999, unique, mixed media: beet juice, algae, turmeric, flower pigments, etc., mixed with plant and seaweed particles.

Image 2: Visible Invisible by Laura Davidson, 1992, 7 of 35, consists of one continuous sheet of cream paper folded to form 6 p. with handprinted lino cuts and other hand stamped illustrations mounted on 5 p.; bound in painted wooden boards with aluminum angel wing mounted on front cover.

Listen, Listen: Adadam Agofomma — A Fine-Press Artists’ Book in the Warren M. Robbins National Museum of African Art Library

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Listen, listen. This is a story about paper, printing, and a book. But first, it is a story about music.

Imagine that you are standing in a private courtyard in Kumasi, Ghana, tapping your foot to a relaxed drum rhythm while voices rise in harmony over a fluid guitar melody. At the center of the performers is Koo Nimo, a Ghanaian music legend. Although he has been inspired by a variety of musical styles, including classical and jazz, Koo Nimo and his music group, Adadam Agofomma (Roots Ensemble), are celebrated for preserving Ghana’s palm wine — or highlife — music tradition. Influenced by both Portuguese guitar and the Calypso music of Trinidad, the palm wine style combines acoustic guitar, percussion, and vocals and is meant to be played in intimate settings among friends.

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It is easy to place yourself in that courtyard as you listen to the recording created in July, 2009, when Koo Nimo invited a group of musicians and artists into his home for two weeks to make music. British recording producer Ben Mandelson taped the sessions direct to stereo and captured amid the music the background noises of the city — rain, roosters, taxi horns. For those who were there, it was clearly a remarkable experience. Ghanaian painter and printmaker Atta Kwami, noticed an “energy amongst the musicians” and described the atmosphere as “relaxed and reverential.”1 Mary Hark, the American papermaker and textile artist who raised funds to produce the CD, recalled the sense of elation present in the moments after a song when the audience and musicians would all burst into applause.2 

I spoke with Mary Hark by phone about Listen, Listen: Adadam Agofomma, the fine press artists’ book honoring Koo Nimo that she was instrumental in creating. One of the fifty limited-edition copies of this book belongs to the Warren M. Robbins National Museum of African Art Library, and I had the opportunity to enjoy it while surveying the collection of artists’ books at the library during my internship at the Smithsonian. Enclosed in a clamshell box, Listen, Listen is in fact a collection of work on handmade papers. There are two thin, letterpress-printed pamphlets, one describing the musical legacy of Koo Nimo and the other encasing the CD that contains his music and a series of digital photographs documenting the recording session. A larger, accordion-fold pamphlet is printed with the lyrics from one of Koo Nimo’s songs in both Twi and English. Like most of Koo Nimo’s music, “Obra Ne Nea Wabo” (Life is What you Make It) uses traditional Asante proverbs to tell a story containing a moral lesson. Finally, at the bottom of the box, is a suite of three etchings entitled Sound Fabric by Atta Kwami.

In many ways, Listen, Listen is meant to showcase the thick, textured papers made in Kumasi by Mary Hark, Rita Yeboah, a graduate student at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), and Michael Adashie, lecturer in printmaking at KNUST. When Mary Hark was in Ghana on a Fulbright Grant in 2006, she and Adashie co-taught an undergraduate workshop in papermaking at KNUST. The class began experimenting with local botanicals, cleaning, breaking down, and cooking fibers by hand to make beautiful papers with different textures and colors. For Hark, an assistant professor of Design Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Kumasi is “like a botanical garden.”3  She and her students made papers from cashew, maize, plantain, avocado, papyrus, and several other fibers. At first, they strengthened their papers with kozo, a fiber traditionally used to make Asian papers. Then, after consulting the Ghanaian Forestry Department, they realized that a plant producing similar fibers was growing in Ghana. The pulp-mulberry, imported to the closed forest zone of Ghana in the late 1960s, has become a serious invasive species, and the government Forest Research Institute was only too happy to allow the Department of Fine Art at KNUST to use some of the plants for papermaking.

Funded by the University of Wisconsin, Hark was able to return to Ghana to help develop the papermaking initiative. “We had a bottomless pit of high quality free material,” Hark recalls.4 With the artists Atta Kwami and Pamela Clarkson, who have operated a 1950s snatch-proofing press from their Kumasi home since 1992, Hark founded Take Time Press to explore the creative possibilities enabled by hand-papermaking and printing in the Asante region.  Listen, Listen is the first publication issued by Take Time Press. The book’s papers are made from cashew, papyrus, pulp-mulberry, and other local fibers.  While the letterpress printing for the text was completed at the Minnesota Center for the Book Arts in Minneapolis, relief printing for the etchings was done using the snatch press in Kumasi.

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Atta Kwami and his wife, Pamela Clarkson, are painters and printmakers who live in both Ghana and the United Kingdom. Black and Red, Kintampo, and Zongo, the three etchings that comprise Sound Fabric, resemble Kwami’s painted abstractions, which combine flat swaths of color in vivid, textile-like designs.  Distinctively modern, Kwami’s art responds to the visual environment of Kumasi, the artistic center of Ghana, where bright, hand-painted signs mark shop fronts and patterned kente cloth is sold in street stalls.  His work is also influenced by music, especially traditional Ghanaian music and jazz. For Kwami, the music of Koo Nimo “conjures images of colours, shapes, and patterns.”5 The Sound Fabric etchings are derived from Kwami’s earlier series of acrylic ink and watercolor drawings of the same title made on Xeroxed copies of musical scores from his father’s music books. Pamela Clarkson ground the black ink for the etchings by hand. The limited color scheme of black, yellow, and red is unusual for Kwami’s work, but makes the fine parallel and intersecting lines forming the flat, geometric surfaces much more evident.  Kwami writes, “To me, the lines, texture, structure and grids with fluid-pattern embody the style of Koo Nimo’s music. It was a play on musical form as well as notation.”6

Take Time Press aims to celebrate the unique culture of the Asante region of Ghana and to support international collaboration among artists. Although Hark, Kwami, and Clarkson spearheaded the publication to honor Koo Nimo, Listen, Listen was in fact made possible by what Hark terms “a partnership” between dozens of individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds and experiences.7 Record producers and musicians, student artists and translators – each contributed their own perspective to the project and “brought something to each other’s work.”8 Hark is optimistic that future projects of Take Time Press will continue to foster these kinds of partnerships. “I’m hoping we’re creating a space where things I couldn’t even imagine could happen,” she told me.9 

—Chloe Barnett

Chloe Barnett is a Smithsonian Institution Libraries intern. She received an MA in art history and an MSIS from the University of Texas, Austin and recently accepted a job as arts and humanities librarian at Bucknell University.

List of References:

“An Artist’s Sense of Place: The World of Atta Kwami at Nicolas Krupp Gallery in Basel.”  Art Daily.  Accessed August 4, 2011. 

Brown, Jennifer Spears.  “Atta Kwami,” in The Poetics of Cloth – African Textiles, edited by Lynn Gumpert, 64.  New York: Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 2008. 

Clowes, Jody.  “Mary Hark’s Paper of Substance.”  Surface Design 35, no. 4 (2011): 8-13.

Court, Elsbeth.  “Atta Kwami.” Griot, 8 (2000):  151-158.

Hark, Mary.  Listen, Listen: Adadam Agofomma, a limited-edition, fine-press book by Mary Hark.  Publisher’s advertising pamphlet.  Minneapolis: Take Time Press, 2011.

Hark, Mary, et. all.  Listen, Listen: Adadam Agofomma: Honoring the Legacy of Koo Nimo.  Minneapolis: Take Time Press, 2011.

Hark, Mary.  “Report from the Field.” Surface Design 35, no. 4 (2011): 14-19. 

Kaye, A.L.  “Up-Up-Up and More Up.”  Rakumi Arts International.  Accessed August 4, 2011. 

Picton, John.  “The Picasso Bar, Kumasi,” in Kumasi Junction, 8-12.  Llandudno : Oriel Mostyn Gallery, 2002.

1 Atta Kwami, e-mail message to the author, July 28, 2011. 

2 Mary Hark, interview by the author, July 29, 2011.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Atta Kwami, e-mail message to the author, July 28, 2011. 

6 Ibid. 

7 Mary Hark, interview by the author, July 29, 2011.

8 Ibid.

9Ibid.