Aug 20, 2024 Now on display! Record Keepers and Record Makers

“We are all en mal d’archive: in need of archives… burn with a passion never to cease searching for the archive right where it slips away… have a compulsive, repetitive and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return of the most archaic place of absolute beginning…” — Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever

REF
Shift-lab Collective
Tuscaloosa, AL: Big Jump Press, 2019
N7433.4 S5435 R44 2019 

At the J. Willard Marriott Library, the Book Arts studio is uniquely located within close proximity to Special Collections. Established in 1995, the goal of the Book Arts Program has been to encourage appreciation for the art and history of the book.

Over the past three decades, exemplars from the rare books collection have provided Book Arts students, faculty, and community members insights into skills such as papermaking, bookbinding, letterpress, typography, and book design.

Parts Unknown
Jessica Spring
Tacoma, WA: Springtide Press, 2007
N7433.4 S713 P37 2007

However, rare books are not the only objects that can educate and inspire. Archival materials held within Special Collections can also have the potential to act as a catalyst for creative exploration and expression.  

Record Keepers and Record Makers: The Artist in the Archive explores the materiality of the archival document through a stunning exhibition of contemporary artists’ books that redefine, reuse, and reinterpret memory.

A Geniza
Raphael Rubinstein
New York, NY: Granary Books, 2015
PS3568 U814 G45 2015

Whereas traditional scholarship positions archives in relation to historic narratives, this exhibition focuses on the ways in which archival materials can inform, inflect, and influence the production of new works, as artists incorporate the archive in their creative processes across a range of visual arts.

Highlighted in this exhibition are letters, diaries, photographs, maps, marginalia, and other miscellaneous objects that shift the engagement with the archive as a thing of the past to something of our present and future. 

Learn more by visiting the Special Collections Exhibition Gallery on Level 4 of the Marriott Library.

– This exhibition is free and open to the public –

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