I am excited to announce that in August I was accepted to the Scholarship for Advanced Studies in Book Arts Program at the Center for Book Arts in New York City. I am honored to be working alongside fellow scholars Laura Byrne and Ben Denzer during the 2017- 2018 scholar program. The program began in September and I have just been settling in and getting to know the other residents, scholars and artists that make work at the center as well as taking a few classes. I was involved at CBA before as a shop steward and studio renter, and I am so happy to now be a book arts scholar.

So far I have been able to take two intensive box making classes with fine bookbinder Uriel Cidor where we learned to make a basic clamshell box as well as a clamshell box with a rounded leather spine. I also had the opportunity to take a really inspiring workshop with book artist and printmaker Felicia Rice based on the multimedia collaborative artists’ book “Doc/Undoc” that was made over a period of seven years by Felicia, Guillermo Gomez Peña, Jennifer Gonzalez, Gustavo Vazquez, and Zachary James Watkins. In the class we re-interpreted the material from the original book and collaborated on our own short book.

I am interested in the book as art medium because it provides the opportunity to see ideas in a completely different way. The book’s sequential nature allows for a more in depth dive into one idea and, because of its intimacy, expresses those ideas in a much different way than a series of paintings might. Experiencing a book can be very personal, because they are usually designed to be held by only one person at a time. A book is like a secret exchanged between artist and viewer.

The Scholar program is one year long and will culminate with a special project and an exhibition. Bookmaking has been a central part of my art practice for a long time and I am looking forward to more fully exploring the possibilities of the book medium, and deepening my work in this field. I am super excited about this opportunity and really look forward to being more a part of the CBA community. To find out more about this program see the CBA opportunities page here. I will continue to write updates about what I am working on during this residency.