BRATTLEBORO-A new exhibition at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC) celebrates the 50th anniversary of the pioneering Brooklyn-based arts organization Franklin Furnace, an early champion of artists' books.
On Thursday, Aug. 7, at 5:30 p.m., Franklin Furnace Founding Director Martha Wilson will give a talk at BMAC, along with the exhibition's curator, Mark Waskow, president and founder of the Northern New England Museum of Contemporary Art.
Wilson, a feminist performance artist and gallery director, founded Franklin Furnace in 1976 to serve artists who were creating artists' books, which were a new and somewhat controversial art form.
The organization built one of the largest collections of artists' books in the world, a selection of which are featured in the BMAC exhibition, "Founded on Artists' Books: Franklin Furnace 50th Anniversary Tribute."
According to Waskow, artists' books are not simply books containing art, but three-dimensional works of art utilizing the structure or concept of a book as the medium for creative expression.
"During a variety of postmodern movements, artists began to use the print medium as a way to distribute their ideas, bypass the gallery system, and gain more control over their output," Waskow said. "Eventually, the artist book became its own free-standing genre-not an 'art book,' which is about art, but a book that is art."
The BMAC exhibition, on view through Nov. 2, includes 65 artists' books published in the United States, Germany, and England between 1972 and 1979, and 16 volumes of "Flue," a periodical published by Franklin Furnace from 1980 to 1989.
Among the works on view is one of Jenny Holzer's early artists' books, featuring a selection of her "Truisms": short, impactful statements she created and posted in public places, arranged in alphabetical order from "A little knowledge can go a long way," to "Your oldest fears are the worst ones."
The exhibition includes Claes Oldenburg's More Ray Gun Poems, a 16-page collection of fine-line illustrations loosely styled after comics and children's art; John Baldessari's halftone photo-lithograph cruciform accordion book titled Fable: A Sentence of Thirteen Parts (With Twelve Alternate Verbs) Ending in Fable; and Gordon Matta-Clark's Splitting, 34 pages of layered and overlapping photographs documenting his project of cutting a house in half and removing its corners.
Today, Franklin Furnace is a downtown New York art space based at the Pratt Institute whose mission is "to present, preserve, interpret, educate, and advocate on behalf of avant-garde art, especially forms that may be vulnerable due to institutional neglect, cultural bias, ephemerality, or politically unpopular content.
Admission to the talk is free. Advance registration is recommended, but walk-ins are welcome. Register at brattleboromuseum.org or by calling 802-257-0124, ext. 101.
This Arts item was submitted to The Commons.