DAAP Library Portion of Two Hundred Years of Curation Exhibit

Women Directed, Women Curated

The Robert A. Deshon and Karl J. Schlachter Library for Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning has been collecting artists’ books since 1970, and a portion of these books are on display at the Two Hundred Years of Curation exhibit. Artists’ books come in many forms, among them: a traditional codex, a stack of playing cards, a flip book, a tunnel book, and a scroll. Some forms toy with the boundaries of how a book is read, inviting more active participation by the reader than reading alone and some forms cross the boundaries into a more sculptural realm. They are often published in small editions, though they are sometimes produced as one-of-a-kind objects.

The DAAP Library’s collection includes works by many famous artists: Sol LeWitt, Edward Ruscha, Dieter Roth, Jenny Holzer, Yoko Ono and others. The collection also comprises several hundred hand-crafted books, many of which serve as excellent examples of fine binding and book illustration and reflect a focus on the artistic movements of the 1970s and 1980s. Recent efforts in collecting reflect the collectors’ interests in sculptural form, identity politics in relation to race and gender, and other recent artworld trends.

In celebration of the centennial of woman’s suffrage, all of these selections on display were created by women artists, and selected by women librarians.

Another view of DAAP Library Portion of Two-Hundred Years of Curation