Bound Together: Seeking Pleasure in Books

On view in the Main Gallery
February 9-July 13, 2013

On February 8, the UNM Art Museum will open Bound Together: Seeking Pleasure in Books, an exhibition that celebrates the book, from nineteenth-century photographic albums to limited edition and unique artist books, elaborately illustrated works of literature, unusual pop-up books, mediaeval manuscript facsimiles and architectural folios, to name just some of the objects in the exhibition. Though the digital age is very much upon us, carrying with it many publishing casualties, books continue to be produced and cherished as they have for millennia. The dichotomy that books present is that they are simultaneously private objects meant to be held in one’s hands and read often in private, yet are also objects mass produced, available to large audiences and viewed and or read in very public arenas.
Some of the works in the exhibition include Henri Matisse’s Le Florilege des Amours, Some Memories of Drawing by Georgia O’Keeffe, a first edition of An Autobiography by Frank Lloyd Wright and The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, illustrated by Sir Edward Burne-Jones and printed at Kelmscott press by William Morris. Select contemporary artists in the exhibition who have used the book as a vehicle of expression include Kara Walker, Robert Heinecken, Ed Ruscha, Barbara de Genevieve, Julie Chen and Enrique Chagoya.

Main Image: Unknown Anonymous Photographic album, n.d. Lacquer, silk painted pages Private collection, Lent in memory of Mary and Joe Putnam.