News about some of my colleagues at Wesleyan University --

Published by Wesleyan University Davison Art Center, Counting on Chance: 25 Years of Artists’ Books by Robin Price, Publisher won third place in the 2011 New England Museum Association Publication Award Competition in the category “Exhibition Catalogues over $10.” A Friends of the Davison Art Center blog post features an amusing & celebratory photograph featuring the artist and the two exhibition curators – Clare Rogan, Curator of the Davison Art Center, and Suzy Taraba, University Archivist and Head of Special Collections – holding five different versions of the catalogue cover: http://fdac.blogs.wesleyan.edu/2011/06/30/dac-catalog-recognized/. 

Published in connection with a 2010 exhibition, this large-format publication features a lengthy essay, “Break-through (Resoluteness): Work by Robin Price,” by Betty Bright, the well-known scholar, curator and author of the comprehensive No Longer Innocent: Book Art in America 1960-1980. Bright provides in-depth commentary and description of Price's major works and her collaborations with artists and writers such as Barbara Benish, Amy Bloom, Joyce Cutler-Shaw, Daniel E. Kelm, Yusef Komunyakaa, Pepe Romero, Keiji Shinohara, Jordan Tierney, and Gary Young. The indexed catalogue also includes a lively interview with Robin Price by Suzy Taraba, and an annotated Catalogue Raisonné by Rutherford W. Witthus. Designed by Mark Zurolo and Lesley Tucker. (2010; 144 pp.; 140 color ill.; 49 monochrome ill.; paper covers in thirty random variations generated on press using chance operations.) $20.00.  http://www.wesleyan.edu/dac/cats/2010counting.html  This catalog also may be ordered directly from the artist, who can accept payment by more varied means than can the DAC.

From Betty Bright’s essay:

“Price raises questions and undermines strictures about fine press standards without abandoning her commitment to creating a holistic and responsive work. It is a balancing act that keeps the reader in the thick of the debate today over the role of craft in book art and in the larger art world.”

Crispin Elsted, proprietor of the Barbarian Press in British Columbia, contributed a review of the catalogue in the fall 2011 issue of Parenthesis: the Journal of the Fine Press Book Association, #21.

From Crispin Elsted’s review:

“Robin Price’s work preserves the most important elements of anyone involved in bookmaking: enthusiasm for the craft, sensitivity in design and execution, and a delight in marrying form and content — those two constructs in the arts which no amount of critical waffling has ever managed to subjugate.”

Regards,

Susanne

Susanne Javorski, Art Librarian

Wesleyan University, Art Library

301 High Street

Middletown, CT 06459

Phone:  860 685-3326

Email:  [log in to unmask]