PAST SEMINARS & WORKSHOPS
Artists' Books - 19-20 April 1996
Artists' Books occupy a distinctive niche in the world of the arts and the book arts. They are not to be confused with illustrated books or even livres d'artiste - a collection of a set of graphic works by an artist, housed loosely, perhaps, in a book-like portfolio.
Artists' books are unique creations in which artists use the form of the book as a point of departure for extraliterary, creative, expression. Many display beautiful papers and the finest calligraphy, while others may have no text at all - showing bolts and nails or clockworks! Some may display the whimsy of the artist; others may convey a specific idea, beginning with the concept of the physical object as a vehicle for thought.
Ingenious, provocative, highly finished or "in-the-rough," artists' books bring together the bibliophile and the art collector in an appreciation of the symbolic importance of the book in modern culture.
Friday: 19 April
7:30 p.m. Freedom from Convention
vs. Conventional Freedoms:
New Structures in
Contemporary Artists' Books
Anne Anninger
The Peal Gallery
University of Kentucky Libraries
-- Free and Open to All --
Saturday: 20 April
9:30 a.m. Continental Breakfast
Lobby, King Library - North
University of Kentucky Libraries
10:00 a.m. A Panel of Book Artists
Anne Anninger, moderator
The Peal Gallery
11:00 a.m. From A Garden in Kentucky
and other poems
Jane Gentry Vance, poet
The Peal Gallery
Noon Lunch on Your Own
2:00 p.m. A Poetry Printing
Dr. Paul Evans Holbrook and
Jane Gentry Vance
The King Library Press
4:00 p.m. Workshop Concludes
Anne Anninger is Philip Hofer Curator of Printing and Graphic arts at the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Her doctoral dissertation at Harvard was on 16th-century Parisian book illustration and she has authored exhibition catalogs on French Renaissance illustration and on Spanish and Portuguese books. She has also published an account of the growth of the Harvard College Library collections and served as a vice-president of the American Printing History Association.
Jane Gentry Vance is a writer and who teaches both in the Department of English and in the Honors Program at the University of Kentucky. Her recent volume of poems, A Garden in Kentucky, is now in its second printing at the LSU Press. Her work has appeared in Harvard Magazine, Southern Poetry Review, The Suwannee Review, and The American Voice. She received the U.K. Alumni Association Distinguished Teacher Award in 1986.
An exhibition of artists' books in the Peal Gallery will feature the work of Leo Frankenberger, Candy Parrack and Scott Scarborough of Louisville, Connie Newbanks of New Albany, Indiana, Carolyn Whitesel of Cincinnati, and Steven McCarthy and Steven Finke of the Art Department, Northern Kentucky University. Other works are from Special Collections, King Library, and the University of Kentucky Art Museum.