 Well, welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us here today. My name is Eli Boyne, and I am the Rare Book Library Associate here at Tulane University Special Collections, or as we like to call it, Tusk. And we are so excited to have three incredible book artists here with us today to speak about three of their books that we're very fortunate to have here as part of our collection. They're going to give some presentations on three books, one from each one from each book artist. And then we're going to engage in conversation, talking a little bit about why, why make artists books, talk about their processes, the stories that they tell and what artists books mean for them mean to them. So I will introduce our artists. And thank you so much for being here and being part of this event today. First, we have Elisa Banks. And Elisa Banks lives in Dallas, Texas and explores identity politics through the lenses of home, terrain and the body. Her work includes fibers and found materials and references traditional craft techniques such as twisting, knotting, crocheting and sewing to create sculptural and textile based work. Using Southern Louisiana as a point of entry, her practice investigates connections to contemporary culture and the African diaspora. Elisa's work has been exhibited in Canada, Europe, Asia, Africa and throughout the US and is hosted in several private and public collections, including the Smithsonian Institute, the US Library of Congress and the New York Public Library. We also have Caden Henningson here. Caden Henningson is a PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he works on 19th century American literature, book history and print culture as it intersects with transgender studies. He also holds an MA in gender and women's studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a BFA in performance art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Caden is the proprietor and co-founder of Meanwhile Letterpress, a trans-owned letterpress collective resisting erasure through the power of print. And last we have Sarah White. Sarah White draws from creative inspiration and from the wild industrial landscapes around New Orleans where she works as a book and paper conservation specialist at Tulane. Sarah serves as the founding member of the artist's book collection at Paper Machine and her own artist's books are held by collections around the United States. So thank you again so much to Sarah, Elisa and Caden for joining us today and we'll go ahead and start with Elisa and she is going to be speaking about her artist's book called Yeen. Okay let me share my screen. Well first of all thank you so much for that introduction Eli and thank you everyone for for joining us today really excited to get our conversation started. I see Sarah and Caden but as Eli stated the book that I'm speaking about today is called Yeen and so much of my work is inspired by actual people experiences or events and I'm really drawn to those that are outside of the mainstream and in some way relate to broader themes. So both of my parents keep my go back here but it looks like my screen doesn't want to go back. I forget. So both of my parents and my extended family are from southern Louisiana and although I grew up in a military family and didn't live in the area save one year that area seems to be my kind of my spiritual home even though I do have folks outside of that area particularly in the New Orleans area as well but this is the area that I keep coming back to over and over again in my work. So this is Yeen and it's a house shape box that features an image of a now dilapidated shotgun style cottage and it was one of the homes that my dad lived in as a child. You can see some stuff kind of garbage and what not in there because when I took this photograph at the time it had been abandoned for quite a number of years. So the house particularly the shotgun and creole cottage style houses are recurrent images in my work. So the top of Yeen lifts off and it'll reveal a base with a backyard view and on the base also is an accordion book that's surrounded by a necklace that's fashion that's passing to the base. So Yeen was the daughter and wife of sharecroppers and was larger than life to those who live with who are within her circle but unknown and invisible outside of it and this book is a tribute to women particularly those in rural areas who like her like Yeen were invisible within mainstream society. So the backyard you can kind of see it on the in the image to the right has an ancient tree with a chicken coop and there's some chickens there and I really don't know why that ladders there against the tree maybe it's to gather moss hanging from it the moss was used for mattresses and other types of things but I do like the potential of the ladder as a symbol and whenever I'm making a piece I always find that there's some unexpected gift and I'm not always aware of it even as I'm constructing it I'm more and more likely to notice these things after the fact but I call them gifts and I usually just those those little things that you really can't plan every single thing in a piece but sometimes things just happen and they happen in good ways and so to the right to the left you'll see the accordion closed and then that the necklace that surrounds it and that necklace is it has all types of goodies in it it has paper and gemstones and hair metal thread and little medallions and it's asymmetrical and coated and it's deliberate but off-kilter it's a little improvisational as well so the top of the accordion lifts up and underneath in the back of the cover is just a scene of cotton cotton balls and inside there's a poem or text and I'll read the text to you uh Severine dark curvy competent a woman of her figure would likely be invisible or looked upon with disdain outside of her neighborhood though she read it early venture that far at home her tongue offered sparks and laughter her hands were generous she was a good cook and kept a tidy house her spirit would not be broken not by poverty the overseer or her husband's hand she worked the fields and could not sew but her boys could she birthed eight in the span of 20 years and was lit out early when her youngest was three she liked parties even with her sons this last part was taboo in our country town she was blunt and opinionated though not always factual and was loud but tender when the situation called for it her boys adored her yin she loved that genie ling the flashy jewelry that moved as she did it was her signature and she wore it proudly always adored her selections range from the conventional metals to thread depending on her circumstances and no matter the material there was always a movement her fringe i will stop the share and that is me thank you wonderful thank you so much alisa um next we'll have kaden kaden hennington and he'll be presenting his work uh maryan waters is a free black woman thank you so much uh for um putting this together illa and i'm really excited to be in conversation with alisa and um sarah and and people who have joined us um so uh my artist book maryan waters is a free black woman uh came out of some of my uh a research um in a graduate seminar on uh 19th century uh black print culture uh and so i am used to looking at a lot of newspapers a lot um and a lot of print material uh and so uh i uh for this book was working with um a pickup notice which i'll i'll get to in in a minute um that was the pickup notice is a sort of form of um slaving literature uh used in newspapers um and i'll and i'll talk more about that in a minute in a minute but first before i get into the actual mechanics of the book i also want to um briefly talk about um some of the artists and scholars whose work i'm drawing on um and inform sort of my approach to making this book um first is glenn legan uh his piece i feel most colored um winter run against a shark white background the um accumulation of um ink as it smears across the page as he continues this phrase using a stencil and the sort of overlapping and sort of accumulation and how it sort of breaks down through a kind of accumulation um and so and and in other pieces glenn legan has also worked with um particularly runaway fugitive slave notices um another kind of slaving literature and so his work has been um all sort of on the forefront for me and then the other um other artist is poet emna borce philip uh and her book zong which uh takes the archives of the slave ship zong um and pulls out these poems from them and so we have this zong number one poem that um gestures towards the waves of the middle passage when the poem is read out loud gestures towards the sound of drowning um and there's just a beautiful uh beautiful collection of poems and so i was thinking uh visually um along the lines of some of the work that glenn legan is doing and then also visually especially thinking with emna borce philip um and then i was also thinking about the um theoretical work of christina sharp who in her more recent work in the wake on blackness and being theorizes a kind of mode of engaging in the world is what she calls wake work where she calls it um a means of understanding how slavery's violences emerge within the contemporary conditions of spatial legal psychic material and other dimensions of black non-being as well as in black modes of resistance and i'm really interested in the way that she is thinking about um modes of resistance and in particular uh i use her um approach of black redaction as a mode of seeing and reading otherwise that makes visible something in excess of what is caught in the frame uh so i uh in visually thinking about the wake work that um philips is doing in zong the the visual referencing of the wave the waves of the middle passage and the legacy of slavery and then thinking about christina sharps a process of redaction and what it means to redact texts in order to make um what is what she calls something in excess that is caught in the the frame of of a text so i was working with uh this uh pick up notice um from the daily national intelligence sir on 1851 uh that is about this figure mary and waters um so was committed to the jail of baltimore city county on the 23rd day of september 1851 by dc h boardley esquire justice of the peace of the state of maryland and and for the city of baltimore as a runaway a negro man who calls himself mary and waters about 28 years of age five feet two and a half inches high stout belt very black complexion and has a scar on his left ear said negro had on when committed a dark figure uh mousseline delaying dress blue velvet mentilla white satin bonnet and figured scarf says he is free was born in elkridge and has been hiring out in the city of baltimore as a woman for the last three years um the owner and then there's a sort of plea for the owner to come and collect uh mary and waters and so i'm thinking with christina sharp about the way that a pickup notice is a kind of disciplinary apparatus a way that is trying to fix uh mary and waters um in very particular ways um both as uh someone who's enslaved uh as a man and what i'm trying to do through black redaction is remove and and redact the text that actually shows the way that the pickup notice as a disciplinary apparatus tries to confine her so the redaction operates as a way to as a way of seeing what is in excess of the the pickup notice and so what i did for the book is i um i hand set the the text of the notice and then um over the course of printing it i slowly removed uh bits of text as a sort of form of redaction i'm thinking about the way that in the 19th century print is assumed to be fixed and stable uh but we know that that is not true and one way is mid print i'm removing uh text and so what happens is i'm left then with a book that is a flip book that over the course of the book that as you flip it the text slowly disappears uh it disappears in a wave uh like movement that then leaves behind the sort of what is in excess of the frame which is what mary and waters uh perhaps thought of herself and i feel like i've always got to point this out um let me get my laser pointer and um there are a few moves uh you know in the original ad it says calls himself mary and waters but over the course of the flip book himself becomes the neutral here self hir and then eventually herself and then uh the word black uh isn't in that location and i have to slowly pull letters from around uh and resituate them in order to get uh the text um and so i will leave it at that and uh hand it on over to sarah yeah thank you so much kaden um it's wonderful to hear um the stories from all of you about your processes and and all the elements that go into your books um sarah if you'd like to present your book riverine sure thanks thank you both so much for those presentations they're both really moving and um i'm honored to be included on this panel thanks elie and tusk so i'm going to be speaking about my book riverine which i completed in 2016 while finishing up an mfa and book arts at the university of alabama so that curriculum and that program really allowed me to dive deeply into the traditions of hand book binding so um i was learning things like hand paper making letter press printing and um sewing and constructing various book structures all all of those elements kind of go into this particular book which was my thesis project so the book is seen here and printed sheets before it was trimmed down and assembled into its final form um i want to jump into the content of the book this book was inspired by a landscape in new orleans called the batcher uh this particular area is located in the uptown riverbind neighborhood of new orleans um and the term batcher is used for the area between the levy and the mississippi river or really any river um so it's sometimes completely submerged by the river and sometimes it's dry depending on the seasons and the interesting thing about this particular location is that there are 12 homes that exist here on stilts um and it's always been since i was introduced to it and i wanted to learn more about this place and in doing some research i discovered that the current community is a vestige of much larger communities that existed on the orleans parish side of the batcher prior to the 1950s um so this is an image of the book and it's constructed form so it's an accordion structure with stone pamphlets and the the inner or valley folds of the accordion and i use line drawings and photographs throughout to illustrate its history and with the text i wanted to have kind of a fragmented essay um printed traditionally on the page which is what you see um printed in the darker ink here and then i also wanted to have this running thread of a more poetic text that speaks to the experience of the place and that's printed in that sort of orange red ink there um getting back into the history this is an image on the right it's a bird's eye view of one of the communities that existed in the late 1940s early 1950s on the orleans parish side and i learned that there was a union that had formed around that time called the bachelor dwellers association and these people were organizing against um what was then the orleans levy board which was sort of the overseeing entity at the time um they were fighting multiple eviction notices and threats of the destruction of their homes so they lived here totally legally but under the condition that if the levy needed to be expanded or maintained they would be forced to leave um so this on the left is a quote in the book uh from one of the members of the bachelor dwellers association that i thought evoked um the uh the feeling of living there very well these are a couple of documents from a small archive that exists at Tulane devoted to the bachelor dwellers association um i found that these folks actually printed their own cell phone publication called these were our homes this was a pamphlet that they printed and distributed around town for a dollar a piece in order to spread the word shine a light on what was happening to to their community um it not only showed you know what the orleans levy board was was doing and threatening but it also um some of the inner spreads there are collage images of some of the people who live there and provide kind of a uh profile of of the community members because prior to this really the only way that um that this situation got any publication was in the newspaper and these people were often depicted as sort of a tourist attraction or just often using dehumanizing language so um i really wanted to incorporate the voices of this community into my book as sort of the the most important thread um and i also wanted to weave in current um experiences of the bachelor my own and current residents so this is my my friend making fry who has lived on the bachelor for nearly 40 years um i should say he's actually an expert on the history and he's about to release his own book which i can put in the chat later if anyone is interested um about the bachelor and its history but uh spending time with him there at his home and in the river um really informed the poetic writing for my book so this is a spread that has layered pages that are meant to give take and reveal information as they are flipped through and with this particular structure i just wanted to give a sense of the the way the water rises and falls and the sense of palpable change that exists on the bachelor this is um just a brief illustration of how litter press printing can work with photopolymer plates so the top left is an image i took of this looming um electrical tower that stands on the bachelor and has a really strong presence there uh so i created this line drawing that suggests the lines of the tower and then i was able to create a photopolymer plate that was printed on a vander cookpress and you can see it here printed across the book and these muted tones this is a spread that pops up uh and is intended intended to indicate kind of a house shape um when it's flipped down it's speaking to kind of the paradox of living on high and how that the meaning of that changes depending on who and where you are and it opens and the text on the inside speaks to the mississippi river and the 31 states that it touches before reaching new Orleans and as a result the the man made and household items that can wash up on shore and there's kind of an imaginary running list of items running down the side of the page so this is the uh the book as a whole and i'll end with this slide um with this book i was just trying to um to capture kind of the feeling of living in between spaces on a place that's always in flux and kind of defying boundaries and definition um i chose the accordion structure so that it would flex within the viewer's hands to reinforce that sort of uh riverine feeling um so i think i'm going to stop there and i'm looking forward to completed uh continuing the discussion with you all thanks a lot okay thank you so much um to all three of you it's really um incredible to be able to see um your books so closely in this way and to hear directly from from your uh your your mouth like how how you made them and all the layers of research that went into making um these books so i'm going to quickly um do some little formatting changes here so we can make sure that we can see our three um artists in conversation um i'm going to kick us off with a question but i'll also be checking the chat so please if anyone um watching or listening has any questions for our artists please feel free to pop them into the chat and i will try to incorporate them into the conversation here um but again as i said it's really just incredible to see um the ways that you each approach making your artwork um and the stories that you're able to tell in these many different layers in your books um so maybe you could give us a bit of background um and tell us a little bit about when you first started making artist books and what drew them to you as a medium guess i'll go um so i started off as a painter and um i just it just so happened that i took a printmaking class and i needed to get some paper for the class and there was a um notice for a workshop that says want to make the book and i thought make a book is that possible so it was it was just something i never thought about making i didn't even know that artist books existed and the books that we made in the workshop were very uh very basic like accordion and pamphlet style books so very much a book structure and it wasn't until uh maybe a couple of years later that i was actually introduced to the artist book format and i i'm really um i'm really drawn to it because i think of pretty much everything as a book and everything can be um discussed addressed introduced um in a in a book format visited in a book format and the book format can be so many things and i love playing around with the possibilities of how information can be presented in a way that um that maybe mimics or touches upon a book but not necessarily in a traditional book format um i can go next i um i got into book making through um i guess after college i went to school at Loyola University for um studio art and one of my teachers there Caroline Schlay kind of introduced me to this idea of artist books i guess but i didn't quite have the language for it but i was often incorporating text and of the the pieces that i was making and kind of went in a printmaking route and then after college i started working in independent bookshops in New Orleans and getting more and more interested in letter press printmaking started working with a local printer John Fitzgerald and tabling at the New Orleans Book Fair and eventually after a few years of getting really interested in zine culture and community you know literature culture um i discovered the paper and book intensive which is a yearly retreat that happens amongst librarians and bookmakers um up in Michigan and i got a scholarship to go and that's where i really discovered what artist books were and um saw a talk by Sarah Bryant who's now one of my favorite book artists and and then i applied for grad school after that um i feel like my uh my story with book arts has been very sort of meandering um i when i started thinking about this question it um it wasn't until like the middle of the night that i remembered that my BFA thesis back in 2001 that i had made uh made some books as part of that thesis um they were just little um little workbooks part of the thesis was i was uh doing the performance where i was simulating from being left-handed to right-handed and so i had these workbooks to teach myself how to write with my right hand um but book arts came in and out of view for me right out of college i um uh managed luckily i think to get a job at the newberry library and so i became familiar with the wean collection um on the history of printing and sort of like working with their their files and collections of like fine fine letterpress printing what i'm critical of the fine letterpress printing but the fine letterpress printing um and so had always been from the newberry i worked in the newberry and then at the huntington library in california for 10 years and so i'd always been around books in some way and thinking about books and also as in in the history i was coming out and figuring out my queerness and understanding my queerness and my identity as a trans person through other people's reading of me and so i had been thinking about um thinking a lot about how the body is a book and um questions around you know what exactly constitutes a book and what are the sort of like things that what are the like norms or conventions of what a book is or can be um and so i started uh my research thinks about those questions like what what are the norms of a book um how can we push against those norms i think artist books for me is one way that i can sort of resist traditional modes of scholarship um and the my book marianne waters became a solution to a problem i was trying to think through a question about the relationship between ideas about gender and race being fixed and ideas about print being fixed in the 19th century and i needed a way to work through how to write about this question and so the the artist book format became a way to deal with an issue that i was having in my scholarship um and artist books for me have always been a way to sort of push back and resist sort of like the normative sort of aspects of of books right i'm i'm glad you bring that up kaden because i think that one thing that always makes me so excited about artist books is the so many different forms that they can take and just looking at the three of your books today we have so we have one panel here and for our participate participants in case you aren't um looking at the zoom panel this way it's great to look at it through the speaker view because then you can see our three speakers and we have something here where we can actually um move the books and look at them um and so here we have kaden's book where you can see how it works as a flip book and um just through flipping the pages has this active um as he noted in his presentation like transformation and liberation for mary and waters um and so and then in sarah's book we see um as she referenced things like um the roof lines of houses or levies and alisa's books is is shaped like a house but it also has the air of like a jewelry box so could you guys talk a little bit about kind of the structural elements of your book and why um why you choose to use those kinds of structures and what they can add to your stories that you're telling um thanks for the question um and in my book i um i decided to use this sort of hexagonal shape it's kind of a repeating motif throughout it it happens on the cover and then it happens again in um line drawings later on and then in the pop-up that i showed and um i was drawn to that shape because anytime i've looked up a map of this area uh the levy is always depicted as this like very clean line hexagon and you know it all also called to mind uh rooftop so i think um i was lucky in that this location and this landscape and this history was just really fertile with um metaphor um these things kept revealing themselves to me that were sort of reflecting one another if that makes sense and and that was really fun to work with visually i felt like there was a lot i could do with layering paper and um showing you some content and and forcing you to kind of pace yourself to to discover you know what was underneath what was hiding behind the next page so i have a question um sarah on your like on that page down there is there's kind of a green there are some layers of green are those like paper different pieces of paper is that part of the print process as well because there's layering not just in the unfolding but the layering of the text and then those those bands of color down there i really wanted to have um some kind of wash kind of you know flowing throughout the book and i i tried different techniques and a few just didn't work out and i ended up um using large linoleum pieces that i just cut into shapes and then layered on top of one another just to show that rising water falling water mm-hmm i wanted to have some pages kind of appear dry and others appear damp um i was really i'm sorry i just wanted to tell you that i was really excited to see your letter press process because i don't think that i knew that it was handset type before and that was super exciting to me to see that it was a physical like analog um process for you and can you talk more about that yeah i mean i um it took for it took me a long time to print it because it was took me forever to handset the the first set block of type the first form of type and then slowly remove the type but then figure out how and where to move the type was a challenge i knew that i wanted in order to sort of like convey what i wanted to convey through this process of um what sharp is calling black reduction i knew that i wanted people to be able to move through the book slowly but also in order to really see the movement that's happening to be able to move through it quickly as well and so the flip book made the most sense to me that there you can just because of the um you know not technically perfect printing i was using uh a line of scribe i didn't want to tie up the um Vander cooks from other students because it was i think like two months i had this type like locked into the line of scribe and no one else could use it um but in order to get a print um i had to really apply some pressure and so the the print does sort of cut through in some areas to the back i broke some type in the process through constant use uh so there's something even the kind of like what's in the wake i guess of the um the process of setting the type and printing it is the sort of like the damage type that can't be reused to to recreate this particular text and so is redaction sort of a mode of removing type and also damaging the type to prevent it from being used again um in those ways um but the flip book format seemed like the most logical sense um oh yeah for dealing with this issue yeah yeah i like the way that that type in some ways limits the the ad exactly it's not it wasn't perfect and it looks intentional yeah yeah and i i just think the flip book was perfect for this for this content i love the gift too it feels like there are so many directions you can go with this book the the digital version the physical version i feel like you could also make like a um deluxe box with your type that's been destroyed you know that yeah there is you know this this book was just a small edition of five plus the artist proof just because of how labor intensive it was um and i've been reluctant to reprint it because the only press i have right now is a a Chandler in price and the dealing with taking a chase on and off the press with when you're constantly removing type just feels like a big mess um but i will have an opportunity to start reprinting it with a Washington hand press um and so i'm starting to think about what i learned from making this to um how it can evolve the gift is its own thing i don't even know what to do with it yeah at least so could you talk a little bit about you your your use of textiles and the different materials that you have as part of your your necklace here in me yes so um first of all the piece itself i'm very interested in in sculptural type work and so many of my books have a sculptural aspect and even the performance of taking the cover off of the box and then revealing underneath i like that reveal and in the movement but um the necklace itself outside of what it you know the relationship of yin's love for wearing jewelry in spite of you know working you know doing unglamorous work that you necessarily wouldn't have to have jewelry on where to wear um but that she took that type of care of herself um i also the necklace itself is is kind of coated so in that area of where where she's from it's probably was primarily catholic i'm not sure if it still is or not although i suspect it probably is um so there's kind of like references to that um in the the kind of the code work of the beads um then there's other things like hair and calorie shells in there as well so there's there's kind of a mix of of items and i wanted it to reflect how that you know spirituality or religion is kind of part of the cultural fabric even though it may not be in a in a particular person's personal belief system that is is just part of the culture and so i felt that using kind of a necklace made out of different types of materials would work and i often do use um some type of hand stitching in this case it was crochet in my pieces because those that are um from that place or or have some touch upon that part of the of Louisiana in my family there was a lot of creative creative output as far as needlework and you know quilting crochet tatting that that type of thing so i usually include something of that in it i'm also really interested in using things that are not traditionally thought of as book material although books use cloth paper which could be made out of cotton um i'm always playing with the fact that you know there's the notion of things that aren't written down in a historical record as how how authentic is that but then when i think about a book based on history a lot of times that might be oral communication that's transferred into text and so in that case really the book itself is the word which is sound and if sound can be a book what else can be a book and so i was playing with that if you can use if you can use paper to to put words on it couldn't you do the same thing with cloth when they're both made out of cotton and so those are the kind of things that i play with um and as far as the particular shape of of this piece is just to mimic the house you see the house i would see these houses um from the highway and it's like they're completely foreign objects i'd never not ever having been in one what is it like to live you know in the middle of a field or to back of a field in one of these houses and so i just wanted to bring the house structure a little closer thank you elisa i really love what you did with color in this book um i love like the regal purple cloth and it's interesting to me that each has the the black and white images or maybe just the one image is black and white yeah so um it's interesting you had spoken mentioned the color but yeah i mean so yin is like the queen of her world right and so maybe uh maybe that's just that's just kind of what what the color purple is but the and the black and white as far as the the cotton they're just looking at a lot of old black and white pictures even though i don't um you know i do a lot of research when i'm when i do the work when i make my work and so i'm always looking through writing or pictures a lot of times i know the old pictures and so i kind of just wanted to have a little nod to that thanks for noticing that though do you think how many of these you made is that a one of a kind yeah this one is unique okay most of my work is either unique or a small a small addition that makes sense thank you um we do have one question in the chat and that says thank you all so much i would love to know how you envision your books being used in the classroom or in a instructional context what conversations do you hope they inspire what do you hope students learn or take away thanks again i think um i think artists books are in general are just great for um for most disciplines because they kind of encapsulate critical thinking like you're literally required to look at something from different angles and slow down and um and i think that's important in any discipline and i don't know what do you guys think well i think so too um for me artists books kind of bring things to life um reading about something on a flat page is so much different from the aspects of of of experiencing an artist book even if it's something that you do flip through that you're flipping through it you're not reading in it the same way as a book and like in sarah's work you're you're flipping things open and kaden's you're flipping the book um the placement of the text i think that does something different to your mind when you're reading text that's curvy or you know disjointed in some way versus reading get straight through and i also think that you can look at an artist book from various disciplines for yin for example there's a structure of the house and so someone who's interested in houses or interiors i think that that might give them something different than say someone who's looking at um oh i don't know uh sociology or something i was throwing something out there but i i think that there's always something different it reaches people on multiple levels and artists books can reach you wherever you are and show you something that maybe you aren't really um i'm not really familiar with yeah i mean i think you were all touching on the sort of like tactile sort of haptic quality i mean risk codex regular codex books books are that way also but you're right that there's a way that we're forced to engage with the artist books in ways that we don't typically engage with books and both the structure of the artist book and its content lend the book to be um used in different sorts of classrooms so i could see um you know at least like you were saying like if it's a class it's on like housing in some way um instead of looking at a bunch of sort of like architecture drawings of houses and then all of a sudden there's this artist book in the shape of a house it might challenge what it is we think of when we think of a house um right um like and there's also with um with sarah's work like what would it mean in a class on housing to have sarah's book and alisa's book as part of a collection of materials that people are looking at when thinking about housing um in that way um so you know or they could just also be in classes that are about the history of the book and how do these books actually challenge what it is we think of when we think of a book um so there's like so many ways that you can go with an artist book that sometimes as much as i love the codex book you know you like you can it's just and i find i mean i take my students to special collections wear books all the time at the university of illinois and they like the books okay but they really love things like um um the sort of like double folio newspapers that are too big to hold that open up this way and then open up that way and they're just kind of like um astonished by that um and so it's always about what kind of things can you bring into the classroom that disrupt whatever preconceived ideas they have so my book disrupts perhaps preconceived ideas of what a book is and can do but also preconceived ideas about both print and race and gender um that they might not get through a standard sort of textbook um and i i really like that um what you said about even though the traditional codex is performative in some way whether you're flipping through the pages or the story that's written down takes you places i think that's performative as well and what i'm really interested in now is how many ways in which um information can be shared um book format i mean even even something that's not tactile you know like your digital flip book that's one that's one way of experiencing it what if the book were smell you know what if it were sound i think those kind of things are really are really interesting interesting i find it interesting too that we all i think draw from archives and historical records to produce our books so i think any class that is trying to encourage you know using the library's resources would benefit from looking at artist books yeah when i think of the when i think of the artists the book artists whose work i like i find that so many of them are working with archival material um and are doing different modes of research whether it's um sort of like oral histories i know um elisa you've talked about or working with the the bachelor archives at to lane like they're the process is that there's a much more um it's a it's a much bigger process of what goes into constructing a book and archives whatever sort of shape archives take right or um smell right that those become um resources for uh for the work that we do kind of gives voice to the archives and make them come alive in a way so that box that that you had sarah it's like it's it's alive now it's not just a box right and kate and yours is not just like um you know a newspaper article you know it's more it's more than that and you know words words just kind of come alive i think and they and they connect us to things like how many people are now going to seek out the bachelor material right now because of because of the artist book and one of my experiences um when i first came across this pickup notice about marianne waters it was out of context it was in a um a phenomenal book by c reilly snorton called black on both sides which is a racial history of of trans and uh you know snorton just had an image of it and didn't even say what newspaper it was in and i had to track it down and as a result i was also reading all of the material in the daily national intelligence or around this ad to sort of like what was going on in washington dc in 1851 what is what is happening um and so it takes us in it connects us to archives we wouldn't normally we wouldn't necessarily connect to but then it also becomes a way into archives for other people right we have a comment in the chat which kind of reflects this conversation it's uh from one of our um it's from someone who works in head of collection management here at tusk and she says elisa i work in tusk and was part of a student group tour where we feature dean students loved it it's so illustrative of how art and book arts combine one student identified himself as a painter and realized that he created an artist book too but he didn't realize that it was a thing and it was a great moment i'm happy i'm happy to give that student the introduction that's very nice thank you for that comment we have another question um from leon miller um it says could you talk about how collectors including museums and galleries approach your work for example there are national and international societies for collectors of miniature books are there similar organizations for collectors of artist books seems to be primarily academic libraries in my experience i could then make in some museum libraries but um but yeah generally libraries i'm not aware of any collector groups there's um there are some booksellers called uh vamp and tramp who are kind of they're one of the only artist booksellers that i know of that kind of literally put artist books in a suitcase and go around the country trying to share them with various academic institutions right and i know they have a website you're curious are they based in brooklyn i feel like there used to be a a bookland book artist collaborative or collective that did the same thing and that was one of my first experiences when i worked at the newberry and paul gale who was the curator at the time whenever these folks would come into the newberry and sort of present a bunch of options he would always bring me in to look at the books with him because he knew i was really interested and was an artist um so i i think you're right sarah that there are booksellers who special who specialize they're sort of like rare rare book dealers who specialize specifically in artist books and there may be some private collectors but my experience at least um my experience is only act only academic institutions have approached me about um mary and waters there are international groups of bookbinders and other collections but um but yeah as far as offering books yeah someone some people some of these specialized stamp and trap are really familiar with i suppose the only other thing would be the college book arts association but that was like somewhat semi-academic right set up we have we have time for one more question i think and so um it's from jillian koyar uh do you have the first book that you do you still have the first book that you created and can you tell us about it and she asked she also said thank you so much um first book i created yes i still have those the first books from that workshop one of them i just put little slips of um like ribbon and fabric and ink samples and and whatnot in that um but my first artist book i actually don't have it's in a in a collection so um um i'm having a hard time remembering my first but i know that i still have this piece that i made in college um that i didn't call a book at the time but i made this quilt out of used tea bags and i'd printed an erasure text on the the entire thing and it's been wrapped up in a suitcase in my closet ever since i graduated so yeah it's similar to um the little workbooks for my bfa thesis there was one workbook for every day of the month of march um and i still have all 31 books in a little Tupperware container somewhere in the closet i wish i had thought and thought ahead and gotten an amount of storage and um because it's been a while since i've seen them well thank you all uh so much for joining us today i feel like we could continue this conversation and just keep talking about more and more about books um like i said before it's just um really wonderful to be able to see um the presentations that you gave and see directly from you um the amount of uh creativity and skill and research um that you've put into your artwork so thank you so much for joining us today and for giving us this uh special glimpse into your work um that we have here so thank you so much thank you thank you so much