Pushing the Boundaries : Artist Books 2024

Learn more about the artists

Alvey Jones

“With books of ghosts and shadows mid shades of text and image I take you on a journey, but you provide the music and libretto.”

As a graduate student at the University of Illinois writing a dissertation on John Constable, the great 19th- century English landscape painter, I bound my first books. I wanted to emulate Constable’s practice of wandering his native Suffolk sketching the fields and trees. The sizes I needed were not available in art supply stores so I decided to make my own. Starting with Manly Banister’s “Bookbinding as a Handicraft,” using dental floss to sew the binding of typewriter paper and upholstery fabric on the covers, I set to work.

When I moved to New York I discovered the early Macintosh SE computer, Pagemaker and MacDraw. I could then compose and print my own texts. Color digital printing followed, which I combined with rubber stamps, collage and experimental structures.

When I arrived in Ann Arbor I found Hollander’s paper store and a wonderful group of artists and bookbinders. I joined the WSG Gallery, where Barbara Brown taught me the mysteries of the clamshell box, the wire-edge binding and the hexaflexagon, and where Jean Lau encouraged me to become a member of the Miniature Book society. I now specialize in miniature books.

Alvey Jones is a Michigan painter, printmaker and book artist whose work has been exhibited locally and nationally and is in many public and private collections in the United States and Europe.

In 2022 he won a Distinguished Book Award from the international Miniature Book Society for his book, “My Trip to the Crab Nubula.”

**Karen Anne Klein**
“Portrait by Donella Reese Vogel”
I am at a point in my life where everything I do has been coming together in one large, “endless” project. Building a Cabinet of Curiosities in my house has allowed me to weave together disparate ideas based on fact combined with myth. The title I have given this work is Ecological Fiction, a concept acting as an umbrella for a host of subplots. One of the elements that has developed without me planning it is a series of cabinets that house small libraries. One idea led to another, and I finally noticed what was happening. Most of may libraries are inspired by things I read or images I want to work with, such as “Birds Sitting on Chairs.” The books I make usually do not depend on text unless I have the pleasure of collaborating with a writer. Working alone, I create visual essays.

**Joana and Meghan**
In 2022, Jim Horton and Barbara Brown invited us to participate in a collaborative book-making project, called Replace Existing. The idea was for each artist to contribute one page in multiple, to be assembled into a limited edition book of 25 copies. We were so happy to be invited to join and also a bit over-eager! Rather than produce one print twenty-five times, we decided to produce twenty-five unique pages of drawings and text that could each stand on their own but if brought all together in sequence, would tell the story of how we met and fell in love. Each copy of Replace Existing has one scanned and printed page of the original line drawings and type-written text, which we hand-colored. We got playful pleasure out of the idea that only if all the books in the limited edition were to ever find their way into a single room, could the narrative of the story we wrote be reassembled.

But now, two years later (& fortunately, still in love!) we have the opportunity to present the original text-image collages that tell our story in a single bound book. At the kind invitation of Barbara to exhibit a book in her bi-yearly book arts show, we?ve assembled in sequence the original twenty-five pages of those dispersed copies added end pages and a cover from photograms we made in Vermont this summer. Since we have a tendency to make extra work for ourselves we actually made two books: the ?draft? and the ?original,? put them together with some objects of personal significance for us, and enclosed it all in a modified clam shell box. Returning to the original prompt of Jim and Barbara?s Replace Existing project, we?ve made a self-contained time capsule of our love, past and present.

**Howard White**
Howard White is a multimedia artist, designer, producer and developer. He recently retired from teaching at the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan. At Stamps he taught courses focusing on animation, time-based art, sophomore studios (non-media specific student directed design) and many others. His company, OmniMedia, has created interactive displays for tradeshows, auto shows, museums and corporate centers with a worldwide footprint of installations. He is a musician and composer, having scored dozens of award-winning documentary and experimental films. A current music project involves producing original music for an interactive installation that was part of the 2024 NFL draft event in Detroit. His current animation projects include studies in rotoscoping and abstract color animations inspired by the work of the abstract expressionists, especially Mark Rothko.
His animation is entitled “Color Fields: A work always in progress.” It is a hand drawn digital cel animation created on an iPad Pro using Procreate Dream, ClipStudio Pro and the Apple pencil. It has a run time of 8:40. The final compositing was done using Adobe AfterEffects.
It is loosely based on the color studies of Mark Rothko. The entire focus of the piece is both the juxtaposition of color within a frame, and the movement of color hue and density over time. The additional soundtrack was designed and composed to create a meditative moment that varies with each animation, but adds a consistent flow to the experience of the piece.

**Dick Cruger**
Dick Cruger has spent his lifetime in Detroit creating art.
From magic and cardboard illusions in grade school, to scenery and props while studying at Wayne State University in Detroit, he has tried to find ways to interpret what rumbles through his brain.
He uses whatever techniques and materials that help illustrate his ideas. In his years in car design andfabrication he learned skills that he still uses in his art—clay, woodworking, metal craft, mold making, plastics, graphics and stereo lithography.
One small book he made 25 years ago prompted a change in the direction of his work. He began exploring artist books to interpret his ideas. The success of a 2003 show in Tokyo encouraged him to continue.
Found objects and words have always played a part in his work. Many of his books and sculptures include his own poetry.
In 2005 he began a long distance collaboration with Yasuo Tanaka, a Japanese artist. Having never met in person , they spent years communicating by postal mail. They conceived a project that would use trick photography to capture similar scenes of Tokyo and Detroit. They published the book PARALLEL UNIVERSE, and in 2011 they had a joint show BONES in Michigan.
Currently he is using the figures that he and Tanaka have developed to create automatons and Bunraku puppets to be used in film.

**Claudette Jocelyn Stern**
Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words.
~Zhuangzi
Claudette Jocelyn Stern has lived in NY, W. Va, Virginia, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Michigan, California and Wyoming. Home is a mobile repast, a picnic, so to speak.
She made her first book as a child and picked-up some actual know how at the Pettingell Book Bindery in the 1970s (after 94 years its doors were closed in 2020).
Mostly, she now concentrates on the innards of books and leaves the binding to more skillful collaborators, like the accomplished Barbara Brown.

**Janie Brown**
Janie statement
Any interested reader might logically conclude from a cursory google search that my career as a writer peaked at age 11, when I was published in a national magazine (honorable mention, $5 prize money) for my poem, “The Rain.” A deeper dive, however, reveals the more obscure influences that have informed my work.
Although any recognition by the mainstream press did indeed die on the vine after the initial accolades, my interest in the elements did not. My understanding has, in fact, expanded to reflect the actions of the gods in activating elemental forces, an understanding that I naturally had not achieved at age 11. Hence my recent poetic reflections channeling the more powerful players on Mt. Olympus.
Barbara Brown, with her extraordinary capacity for wading through a debris of words and literally building a bridge to somewhere, has been an invaluable partner as I engage in my own version of storm-chasing. Partnering with Barbara has always been a creative and energizing experience, and our most current collaboration, where new dimensions continually unfold in Houdini-like fashion, has been an especially exciting adventure.

Nico Lootsma

Nico Lootsma lives and works in Amsterdam. Was born in Leeuwarden in 1963.

Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts AKI in Enschede from 1981 till 1986. Started as a painter and had several exhibitions in the Netherlands and abroad. Works with found objects since 1997 and created the imaginary town of Trashtown in 1998. Trashtown became a project on which he has worked on and off since the last 20 years. The town has it’s own magazine “Trashtown Magazine”, which appears five times a year in a limited edition of twenty. The magazine has 4 subscribers and covers different subjects like traffic, art, waste management or museums.

Most of the photos and drawings I make are illustrations for Trashtown Magazine. I’m not planning too much ahead. Recently I took up painting again. I like to work with acrylic paint. It dries faster than oil paint and feels more direct. I used to think that I would have to develop a style or a trade mark like so many succesful artists have done in the past, but lately I lean more towards the opposite. I don’t really have a clear idea of what I’m doing or what I will make next. For lack of a better description I still call it art.