Artists' Books

With so many Brooklyn-based artists producing innovative books, the Brooklyn Museum decided to mount an exhibition of them. The special challenge was to create a catalogue that was an actual artists book in itself. The solution was to show how the very idea of the contemporary artists book grew out of the kind of innovative catalogue design propagated by the museum earlier in its history, specifically in an El Lissitzky–inspired book called Modern Art created in 1926. The binding materials of Artists' Books—corrugated board with gold foil stamping—were chosen to reflect the rough-and-ready brilliance of Brooklyn. Within the small, pocketsize format of the book, a rich density of text and images was smoothly and elegantly accommodated in a lucid, legible design concept. The three categories of books in the exhibition—unique works, limited editions and multiples—were divided into three distinct sections by “guillotine” tabs.