Campus, Community, Arches

An exhibition at Collins Memorial Library highlights how artists’ books can challenge beliefs and ideas—even the very idea of what a book is.

Artist book from the Changing the Conversation exhibit

Is a book a book if it has no words? Must a book’s content be constrained within its cover? While the vast majority of Collins Memorial Library’s holdings meet the traditional definition of a book, a new exhibition in the library introduces visitors to a category of works—artists’ books—that challenges not only the very concept of a book but many long-held beliefs and ideas facing our society.

Changing the Conversation: Artists’ Books, Zines, and Broadsides From the Collins Memorial Library Collection, which runs through Dec. 16, showcases examples of this highly creative medium of artistic expression, which uses the structure or form of a book as inspiration. The exhibition is the brainchild of library director Jane Carlin, who has a deep knowledge of, and affection for, artists’ books.

For 20 years, Carlin was head of the Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning Library at University of Cincinnati. Upon joining University of Puget Sound in 2008, she started acquiring artists’ books for the library’s special collections division and also helped form the Puget Sound Book Artists organization, which now has more than 100 members. Each summer, the library hosts the organization’s annual member exhibition. Changing the Conversation is the first exhibition that showcases only the library’s own collection of artists’ books.

“Our goal,” Carlin says, “is to demonstrate how these publications can help change the conversation by promoting discussion about difficult issues and by learning from personal narratives and stories of the artists who created them.” The exhibition features a range of voices that together form a compelling chorus on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

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Carlin invited two members of the Puget Sound Book Artists group to serve as co-curators of the exhibition: MalPina Chan, whose work reflects the Chinese American experience, and Carletta Carrington Wilson, an African American poet and fiber artist. Both have a piece included in the exhibition.

The trio selected works for the exhibition that grab the eye. “I wanted to focus on works that were visually striking, that would draw a person in from across the room to check it out,” Wilson says. Her contribution, George and Bitty’s Quarters, is a wordless trifold representing the poorly constructed living quarters of enslaved people. “People would say to me, ‘Aren’t you going to put any text there?’” Wilson says. “I replied, ‘No, because the form has to tell its own story.’” In the 19th century, 90% of enslaved people were illiterate, so they would have been in a daunting position when trying to understand words on a page; by creating a wordless book today, Wilson turns those tables and creates a similar challenge for literate people.

Wilson added a stripe of paint around the work’s three door frames, a shade called haint blue, often used among enslaved people in the South Carolina Sea Islands to keep ghosts out. “If you think about the plantation, the quarters, they are haunted spaces that still haunt the country,” Wilson says.

Poet, artist, and co-curator of the exhibit
Carletta Carrington Wilson

"I wanted to focus on works that would draw a person in from across the room."

For her work, Coaching Book, Chan pairs family photos with images of Chinese writing taken from letters that her relatives in America wrote and sent to family members back in China. “It was a common practice for Chinese immigrants already residing in America to send letters to relatives to coach and prepare them for the intensive interrogation by immigration officers at Angel Island Immigration Center in California,” Chan writes in her work’s description.

Carlin commissioned two new works for the exhibition. One of them is Paige Pettibon’s Urban Cedar, inspired by a cedar tree that the artist, a member of the Puyallup Tribe, found on the Puget Sound campus. The cover is in English on one side and Twulshootseed on the other. “The book can be read from either side, as many storylines in Indigenous cultures are told in a nonlinear way,” Pettibon writes in her work’s description.

Artist book from the Changing the Conversation exhibit

Carlin hopes the exhibition will inspire faculty to consider how they might use artists’ books in the classroom. The exhibition’s catalog includes an essay by Amy Ryken, dean of the School of Education, who chronicles how the Master of Arts in Teaching Program has used artists’ books since 2017 to foster dialogue about social justice and equity. “Artists’ books are powerful teaching resources,” Ryken wrote, “because the text and book’s structure communicate a narrative and invite readers into an intimate and reflective experience.”

Several interactive experiences have amplified the exhibition’s message. Book artist Alisa Banks, whose work Wrongful Termination is in the exhibition, gave a Zoom talk that’s available for viewing. In September, a printing workshop at the library invited participants to work with artists Jessica Spring and Yoshi Nakagawa to design and print their own “thought bubble” patterned after the broadsheet the duo created for the exhibition. Carlin is also planning an “open case” event, when artists’ books will be removed from their cases to allow closer examination.

“Artists’ books offer new points of view,” Carlin says. “They support narratives and stories that would not be addressed in traditional scholarly publishing and help ‘decolonize’ the library’s collections with unique voices.”