Book Marks: An Artist's Journey with Books

Join us for a book discussion/art workshop with local artist, Barbara Page as she discusses the creation of her book, Book Marks: An Artist's Card Catalog. It features 434 richly illustrated artworks created on old library checkout cards; each collage or drawing distills the contents of a single title. Every artwork serves as a bookmark for a moment in time connected to a specific title, and, as a collection, they present over seventy years of literature, politics, thought, and culture—as colored by one woman’s reading choices. Some images may evoke your own memories of a story. Others may feel like little puzzles that require reading or rereading a title to interpret the artistic references.

After a discussion of the content and illustrations of Book Marks, participants will have the opportunity to make their own "book marks" for favorite books on library cards. Materials will be provided but you are welcome to supplement them with your own sources of inspiration...magazines, stickers, etc. Copies of the book will be available for participants to borrow and when you register, you will be notified how to pick up your copy.

 
Barbara Page is an artist, triathlete, and avid reader. She received her MFA from Cornell University and is a fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and was artist-in-residence at the Golden Foundation. Page’s work is included in museum and corporate collections. The Museum of the Earth in Ithaca, New York, was designed around her series of 544 bas-relief paintings depicting the history of life—Rock of Ages, Sands of Time. The University of Chicago Press published a book on the project in 2001. In 2012 she completed a commission for a geological timeline on a 140-foot-long pedestrian bridge and a mural at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh. This “Bridge Across Time” displays 268 porcelain tiles and connects the two buildings of the museum. Her love affair with printed matter led to the Book Marks project, which currently includes more than 800 library checkout cards that have been converted into compact artworks. The project was exhibited at The Center for Book Arts in New York City and at various libraries as part of a traveling group show, Artists in the Archives: A Collection of Card Catalogs.