The New England Chapter of The Guild of Book Workers is pleased to announce our multi-state book exhibition, Geographies: New England Book Work. The exhibit opened March 3, 2014 at the Rhode Island School of Design’s Fleet Library in Providence, Rhode Island. Over the next two years, the exhibition will travel to venues in each of the six states within the region.
This show represents current work from our membership, who were asked to submit work that related to the theme of New England or the individual New England states. The exhibit includes classic regional texts, such as Elizabeth Curran's binding of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and Gerritt VanDerwerker's binding of The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett. More personal connections to the region appear in Susan Bonthron's Stones, Anne McLain's Place, and Laurie Whitehill Chong's Snow Bound In September: A Re-Imagining.
A number of works deal with New England history from a variety of perspectives, including an 1874 copy of the Gazetteer of the State of Massachusetts bound by John Nove, and 28 Fort Square: What Charles Olson wrote on the window casings of his apartment in Gloucester, Massachusetts, an artist book by Rutherford Witthus. Nancy Leavitt's Plant Corridors, Penelope Hall's Wildflowers Around Tufts Pond, and Lindsley Rice's Some Plants Endemic to New England all explore some aspect relating to New England's natural world.
While many of the books are the traditional representation of the codex form, Bexx Caswell's Mind Map and Graham Patten's Call Me Trimtab might give viewers new ideas of what a book might look like.
Geographies: New England Book Work opened March 3, 2014 at the Rhode Island School of Design’s Fleet Library in Providence, Rhode Island. The exhibition is open to the public and located on two floors of the library with varying open hours. Three cases are on the first floor main area, open all library hours: M-Th 8:30 am - 11 pm, F 8:30 am - 8 pm, Sat 10 am - 6 pm, Sun 12 pm - 11 pm. A large single case is on the second floor in Special Collections. The open hours there are M-F 8:30 am - 4:30 pm. The show will remain there through May 31. See: http://library.risd.edu/exhibitions-current.html
Subsequent tour stops include the University of Southern Maine, Portland, ME; University of Vermont, Burlington, VT; Williams College in Massachusetts; Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and ends its run in Fall of 2015 at Connecticut's Creative Arts Workshop.
For more information on the exhibition and the complete schedule please go to the post on our chapter blog:
http://negbw.wordpress.com/2014/03/12/geographies-new-england-book-work/
At the bottom of the post there is a first iteration of a "catalog" with details about the work and the exhibitors. We hope to expand it with additional images in the months ahead.