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Design Category
Book design, 2005
Design firm
Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, New York)
Collection
(2006) 50 Books/50 Covers of 2005
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The 2006 Whitney Biennial catalog is, on the one hand, a traditional group exhibition catalog that presents the work of 100 artists alongside 10 essays by the exhibition curators and invited critics. But it was also important that the book embody its own ephemerality as a document of a show that occurs every two years.
The design needed to respond to the curators’desire for artist participation in the book project, as well as address all the traditional needs of an exhibition catalog. Curators Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne invited each artist to submit an image for the book; and after many conversations, the project team conceived the design solution.
The book’s innovation is that it presents two fundamental book spaces simultaneously, each space having an entirely different scale, dynamic and content. The book is composed of 99 posters (the artist submissions), bound by glue-pad glue on one fold—thereby allowing the reader to remove one or all posters. The posters, when folded and bound, create a 398-page book form for the more traditional content of essays and plates. The resulting form adds complexity to a straightforward group-exhibition-catalog presentation.
Flipping through the pages of this catalog, one sees text and artist biographies in a straightforward format. But then each two-page spread is its own signature, which cleverly unfolds to a photo of the artist’s work—a larger-than-life presentation in a compact-sized book.