Artists’ Books and Africa (review)

The recent “Artists’ Books and Africa” exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art was a testament to the dedication and vision of Janet Stanley, librarian at the Museum’s Warren M. Robbins Library and the show’s curator. It highlighted an often-overlooked art form, presenting a range of historical and contemporary approaches to book arts by both well-known and lesser-known artists.

Mounted in a hallway gallery, the exhibition consisted of twenty books from the Robbins Library’s collection and five from the Museum’s. Since viewers could enter the gallery from either end, each entrance featured a panel of text introducing the idea of artists’ books and impressive elephant folio volumes to set the bookish context (Fig. 1). Inside the gallery, the show was organized in subcategories such as “Democratic multiples,” “Multi-part books,” “Accordion folds,” and “Artists’ illustrated books.”

Scholars and librarians expend a lot of energy articulating how artists’ books are original works of art created in book form, distinct from fine press publications and livres d’artistes. As a book artist and researcher, I was initially put off by the “Artists’ illustrated books” and “Fine art editions” categories, along with the fact that the gatekeeping elephant folio volumes weren’t by strict definition artists’ books, but rather illustrated volumes by nineteenth-century European explorers. The exhibition’s labels and website, however, addressed the distinctions within the field clearly and succinctly, while acknowledging that the categories are hardly black-and-white. Even so, the show’s subcategories remained a slightly problematic mixture of broad production styles, like “Fine art editions” and “Democratic multiples,” and very specific physical features, like “Gatefolds.” The featured items fit within those categories well enough, but the categories’ inconsistencies detracted a bit from the overall story of the show.

Fig 1.

Elephant folio volume at one of the entrances to “Artists’ Books & Africa,” showing one of the more impressive custom supports made for displaying the books.

Fig 2.

Page spread from The Ultimate Safari, by Nadine Gordimer, with original hand-printed lithographs by Aletah Masuku, Alsetah Manthosi, and Dorah Ngomane (Johannesburg: The Artists’ Press, 2001). The lithograph shown is by Masuku.

all photos by Franko Khoury, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution

However, it’s hard to imagine a perfect alternative. More than many other media, artists’ books exist across the entire, diverse spectrum of art making. There are artists’ books as purely aesthetic objects, with emphasis on craft-intensive practices like printmaking, calligraphy, papermaking, and bookbinding. There are conceptual artists’ books, eschewing craft in favor of embodying the creator’s idea in the long-lasting, reproducible, portable, shareable-yet-intimate format of the book. And in the digital age, when the death of the book has been proclaimed repeatedly, artists constantly use new technologies to produce books, to generate or appropriate content, and even to create new multimodal reading experiences that oscillate between analog and digital media.¹ Exhibitions with more tightly focused narratives about artists’ books can end up excluding whole swathes of exciting work in book form.

Fig 3.

Atta Kwami (b. 1956, Ghana)

Grace Kwami Sculpture (1993)

Paper, millboard, cloth; 7.5 cm × 27 cm × 37.5 cm Purchase funds donated by Brian and Diane Leyden; 93-17-1

This show demonstrated that engaging bookworks are being created in (and about) Africa across that full spectrum. The “Artists’ illustrated books” category of the show featured work in the livre d’artiste tradition. One striking book in the category was The Ultimate Safari (The Artist’s Press, 2001), based on Nadine Gordimer’s short story about the harrowing flight of refugees from Mozambique to South Africa. The livre d’artiste formula usually pairs famous writers and artists for maximum aesthetic—and commercial—effect. The Ultimate Safari subverts that formula effectively by illustrating the story with lithographs created by several of the refugees themselves (Fig. 2...