Standards of Excellence 2017

Registration

Registration is limited to 150 people. The deadline to register is September 30, 2017, or until the conference is filled. Online registration is available and encouraged. If you are paying with a credit card, you must use the online registration form.

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General Information Sheet (11"x17" pdf)

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View the Attendee List

AIMEE LEE

Make and Use Hanji: Applications for Korean Paper

[Friday Morning]

This presentation will use still and moving images to describe how hanji— Korean paper—is made in both Korea and the U.S. It will also provide insight into how contemporary artists are using hanji for books, sculpture, jewelry, and artwork. The accompanying demo will show the steps for making paper cord by cutting down a sheet of hanji, making paired strips, and twisting and plying this paper to create strands and continuous string. This will illuminate conservation uses, as well as creative ones, for this luminous, durable, and versatile material. Samples of hanji and hanji artwork to handle will accompany the talk.

Aimee Lee is an artist, papermaker, writer, and the leading hanji researcher and maker in the United States. She holds a BA from Oberlin College and a MFA from Columbia College, Chicago. Her Fulbright research on Korean paper led to her award-winning book, Hanji Unfurled, and the first North American hanji studio. She has shared her hanji knowledge in Australia, Austria, Chile, Korea, Northern Ireland and at sites that include the American Museum of Natural History, Asian Art Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Detroit Institute of Arts, and Metropolitan Museum of Art. Academic engagements include Oberlin College, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Mills College, University of the Arts, University of Iowa Center for the Book, and University of Michigan. Craft centers include the Center for Book Arts, Haystack, Peters Valley, Penland, North Bennett Street School, and Women’s Studio Workshop. Her work has been exhibited at the Fuller Craft Museum, Islip Art Museum, Museum of Nebraska Art, and Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking, and published in the New York Times, Korea Daily NY, Korea Times, American Craft, Surface Design, Hand Papermaking, and Textile Fibre Forum. Her artists’ books reside in library collections that include the Flasch Collection, Jaffe Collection, Indiana University, Museum of Modern Art, Wesleyan University, and Yale University. (www.aimeelee.net).

SUZANNE MOORE

Much Ado about Nothing: Concept, Design & Techniques in Editioning “Zero: Cypher of Infinity”

[Friday Afternoon]

New renditions and applications of traditional bookmaking techniques are the key to making this edition of 53 “variant” books. The layering of techniques produces rich and unexpected images in this book presenting the many facets of Zero and the Void. Suzanne played out designs by “layering” processes: painting, letterpress, silkscreen, hand-work, and gilding, in a collaborative process with Jessica Spring, of Springtide Press, Tacoma. This presentation will guide us from inspiration and research for a pair of manuscript books, through the process of “translating” text and imagery into an edition book. From the first strokes of paint on paper, to the final details of hand-coloring and tooling, we will see how Suzanne has developed paste paper techniques to create an array of images. Hand-coloring with gouache, gilding and freehand tooling, assisted by Gabby Cooksey (who also bound the book in Cave Paper), makes each book in this edition an original.

Suzanne Moore is a printmaker, painter and lettering artist whose eclectic interests fuse in the diversity of her artists’ books. Born to a family of gifted inventor-engineers and raised in post-Sputnik middle-America, her aptitudes in math and science channeled her into those areas at an early age. She made her way into the world of art at 20-something, and earned a BFA in Printmaking and Drawing in Wisconsin. She mixes an array of media in her work, layering pages with color and forms which create rhythmic unfolding narratives with painted, lettered and printed images, lettering, and typography. Suzanne’s work is exhibited widely, and her books have been acquired for private and public collections in the U.S. and Europe. Among them are the Pierpont Morgan Library, The Library of Congress, the rare book collections Smith College, Scripps, Stanford, Yale, Harvard and Princeton. She lectures and teaches in the US and abroad on contemporary manuscript design, painting and lettering and developing conceptual ideas in book form. Suzanne has made manuscript books since 1984, on a variety of subjects. She recently completed her first edition, Zero: Cypher of Infinity. It presents many facets of the digit “0” and the Void, from the perspectives of history, philosophy, mathematics, spirituality, color and light, language, and its kinship with Infinity.

GABRIELLE FOX

Covered and Visible: Protected Multi-section Pamphlet Stitch Structure

[Saturday Morning]

“Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.”
- Alan Jay Perlis, the first recipient of the Turing Award

This basic structure creates a binding with a full leather, cloth or paper spine over inner exposed and visible sewing that creates a natural combination of tight back and hollow all in one structure. Based on Project 8 in The Essential Guide to Making Handmade Books, this variation provides the strength and flexibility of a tight backed book with the action of a hollow tube.The full leather spine can be titled or decorated as in a traditional binding.The delight of this structure is the ease with which it opens, closes and the possible variations that can be used for both design and conservation binding.The entire case or cover of the binding is completed before sewing in the text, which is the final procedure or step in the binding.This structure can be kept very simple or adapted to something as complex as a full leather traditional binding with a difference.

Gabrielle Fox is a bookbinder based in Cincinnati, Ohio. In the 1980’s she taught throughout England and worked from her studio in Sussex before returning to Ohio in 1990. She travels often to care for collections and to teach, most recently to The Daffodil Barn (Wiltshire, UK) through Binding re:De ned and jointly with Designer Bookbinders and Society of Bookbinders. Each year she now teaches miniature fine binding at the American Academy of Bookbinding (Telluride, CO).

Her work is represented in many public and private libraries, and in 2016 was exhibited in“The Poet of Them All”at the Yale Center for British Art and will be exhibited this autumn with Designer Bookbinders’ “Heroic Works” at North Bennet Street School. Gabrielle is the author of The Essential Guide to Making Handmade Books and compiler of LARKSPUR PRESS: Forty Years of Making Letterpress Books in a Rural Kentucky Community. (www.gabriellefox.com)

DON GLAISTER

Gold Tooling in the 21st Century

[Saturday Afternoon]

Perfectly executing gold tooling on the surface of leather bindings has been a goal—often elusive—of bookmakers for centuries. Done successfully, gold tooling is magic. Done unsuccessfully, gold tooling...isn’t. This demonstration will introduce fundamental techniques and practices that can enable observers to successfully transform drawn designs on paper to sparkling gold designs on leather. Don will begin with a finished drawing on drawing paper, transfer the drawing to a working drawing, then transfer that design to the surface of a book. Next, Don will demonstrate blind tooling on leather, and lastly, the application of gold leaf to the blind lines.

As well as explaining and demonstrating the sequence of gold tooling, Don will demonstrate the application of color to tooled lines, and give tips to help with avoiding and repairing mistakes. He will also speak on the use of gold tooling in an age when economics seem to preclude the use of such a time consuming technique..

Don Glaister is a book artist now living and working on Vashon Island, Washington. He began his bookbinding career after taking degrees in painting and sculpture from San Jose State College, California, and studying binding privately with Barbara Hiller in San Francisco and Pierre Aufschneider and Roger Arnoult in Paris. His over thirty-year professional career in design bookbinding has centered on the exploration, development and use of unexpected binding materials, visual humor and spontaneous visual expression, while working within the classical framework of the European binding form. Beginning in 2002, Don’s work expanded to include the design and production of editions of his own books which include painting, sculpture and poetry. Don has taught binding and design privately, and as Professor of Book Arts at The University of Alabama. He currently teaches classes and serves as the Director of Fine Binding at the American Academy of Bookbinding (Telluride, CO).

Don's work appears in private collections throughout North America and Europe, and in institutional collections such as The Library of Congress, The National Gallery of Art,The British Library,The Victoria and Albert Museum, The Getty Center, Scripps College, The Lilly Library, The Ruth Mortimer Collection at Smith College,The Bridwell Library, The Houghton Library, The Cornell University Library, The Jaffe Collection at Florida Atlantic University, The Pierpont Morgan Library, and The National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague.

The conference hotel is The Hotel Murano

• 1320 Broadway Plaza King Street (Map)
• Tacoma, WA 98402
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• Phone: (253)-238-8000

Book your online reservation here.

The Guild room rate is $139 nightly for a single or double occupancy room for the dates October 24-29, 2017. Room tax (subject to change) is 13.5%. Reservations must be made before October 3, 2017 to receive the Seminar room rate.

For Reservations: Call The Hotel Murano toll free at (888)-862-3255 or book online. See Newsletter or Registration Confirmation Email for URL and discount identification code.