Bill Hosterman: "Reach" etching (detail)

Bill Hosterman was a Fulbright Scholar to South Africa where he studied printmaking, and is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Grand Valley State University. His work has been shown both nationally and internationally, including exhibits in Hawaii, Italy, Germany, China, and the United Arab Emirates.

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KBAC Good Eats exhibition

The Kalamazoo Book Arts Center (KBAC) announces a call to artists for the juried exhibition “Good Eats: An Exhibit About Food” which will be held in the KBAC Gallery, April 6–27, 2012.

From Dutch still-life paintings to Campbell’s Soup cans, our obsession with food is a readymade subject for art! Open to all emerging and established artists, this exhibition will feature two-dimensional works of art—fine prints, paintings, and collages—that incorporate food in their subject. There is no charge to participate.

Artists may submit two entries for consideration in the exhibit. Submissions must be sent as jpeg files via email to info@kalbookarts.org by February 25, 2012. Digital files must be limited to 72 dpi jpegs with a maximum pixel dimension of 1200 in either direction. Please submit artist’s name, dimensions, media, email address, and phone number with emailed entry. The maximum dimension for framed work is 36″ in either direction. KBAC Director Jeff Abshear and Studio Coordinator Katie Platte will choose the works for the exhibit. Artists will be informed of the decision by March 8, 2012.

This exhibit will share it’s grand opening with our Seventh Annual Edible Book Festival. This is one of our largest events and typically draws up to 800 people guaranteeing an excellent audience for the “Good Eats” opening.

Download 2012 Good Eats Call for Entries. Full details are included for submissions; acceptance; delivery and submission requirements; and instructions for return of exhibited work. For more information please call the KBAC Gallery at 269-373-4938 or email info@kalbookarts.org.

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Join us for this Poets in Print reading in the KBAC Gallery. Broadsides created by KBAC artists Bev Hundley and John McKaig feature works by the poets. Readings are free and open to the public. Doors open at 6:30 with time to browse current exhibitions, enjoy refreshments and view Poets in Print broadsides. Books by the poets and broadsides are available for purchase and signing.

Kara Candito is the author of Taste of Cherry (University of Nebraska Press), winner of the 2008 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Her work has or will appear in such journals and anthologies as Blackbird, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, Best New Poets 2007, and A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry (University of Akron Press, 2012). A recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Santa Fe Arts Institute, Candito is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin, Platteville.

Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of the nonfiction books, “Barolo” (The University of Nebraska Press) and “Pot Farm” (The University of Nebraska Press), the poetry books, “Warranty in Zulu” (Barrow Street Press), “Sagittarius Agitprop” (Black Lawrence Press/Dzanc Books), “The Morrow Plots” (Black Lawrence Press/Dzanc Books), and the chapbooks “Four Hours to Mpumalanga” (Pudding House Publications), and “Aardvark” (West Town Press). Recent and forthcoming work appears in The Best Travel Writing and The Best Food Writing anthologies, The New Republic, Gastronomica, The Huffington Post, The North American Review, Creative Nonfiction, The Iowa Review, Brevity, Crazyhorse, Field, Pleiades, Rosebud, The Literary Review, and others.  His work has been featured in such publications as Wine Spectator, The Chicago Tribune, Booklist, Verse Daily, and Publishers Weekly.  He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Northern Michigan University where he is amassing the courage to prepare his first batch of whitefish-thimbleberry ice cream.

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Jen Bervin’s work brings together text and textile in a practice that encompasses artist books, poetry, large-scale art works, and archival research. Her visual work has been exhibited at the Walker Art Center and elsewhere. Bervin currently teaches at Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. View the Jen Bervin website.

Jen Bervin: detail, "The Composite Marks of Fascicle 28"

The KBAC is pleased to join with Western Michigan University, the WMU English Department Speaker Series, the WMU Visiting Artist and Scholars Program, the Friends of the WMU Libraries, the Carole Ann Haenicke American Women’s Poetry Collection at Waldo Library, the University Center for the Humanities, the WMU Women’s Caucus, and the Gwen Frostic Reading Series to host poet and visual artist Jen Bervin for an exhibition, lecture, and poetry reading. During her visit Jen will also work in the KBAC studio to produce paper created with needle-woven mends in the KBAC’s papermaking screens.

Guest Artist: Jen Bervin

Exhibition
The Gorgeous Nothings

March 2–30, KBAC Gallery
Opening March 2 during Art Hop, 6 to 9 p.m.
Closing reception with the artist after the poetry reading, March 29, 7 p.m.

The exhibition will feature Emily Dickinson-based works by Jen Bervin. At KBAC, the new prints from The Gorgeous Nothings will take flight–suspended in the space at eye level in the configuration of a scatter diagram.

The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelopes by Jen Bervin and Marta Werner is a limited edition based on Emily Dickinson’s poems composed on envelopes. The large portfolio includes fifty color prints of facsimiles of Emily Dickinson’s envelope-poems at a 1:1 scale, with front and back views. A smaller diplomatic transcription for each fragment in a new font closer to Dickinson’s handwriting is quickly legible. Marta Werner’s essay, “Itineraries of Escape: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope-Poems” provides the scholarly, historic, and poetic context for these fragments. A guide by Jen Bervin discusses the edition, transcriptions, and the new font. Indexes, both scholarly and visual, are provided. The edition is housed in an archival box with an exterior drawing.

The Dickinson Composites is an artist book that focuses on a series of large-scale quilts Jen Bervin made by embroidering the poet Emily Dickinson’s unusual punctuation markings from her fascicles. The box, printed with enigmatic red crosses and dashes, contains two sewn samples (excerpts made at the same scale, in the same materials using the same methods as the quilts), large prints of each quilt, and a nested booklet. Like Dickinson’s manuscripts, the box and the works therein are encountered entirely without titles. In the booklet, an essay by Bervin elucidates Dickinson’s variant marking system in her poetry manuscripts and provides further context for the quilts.

While in residence at KBAC, Jen Bervin will create new works on paper based on mending samplers. Using the woven wire papermaking screens as sewing guides, a team of volunteers will “needle weave” thread into the screens; the mends will then be released and embedded in the handmade paper.

Lecture
Small Infinities—Emily Dickinson’s Manuscripts

Wed., March 28 4 p.m., Waldo Library, Special Collections, Edwin and Mary Meader Room – In this lecture Jen Bervin will focus on visual and verbal conjunctions in Dickinson’s manuscripts and look at how they intersect with earlier formal gestures in her herbarium, embroidery sampler, letters, and editions of books that she read, marked, or altered.

Poetry reading
Jen Bervin

March 29, 7 p.m., Kalamazoo Book Arts Center Gallery – Please join us for a reading of new work by the author of The Gorgeous Nothings (2012), The Dickinson Composites (2010) and The Desert (2008) from Granary Books, and The Silver Book (2010), A Non- Breaking Space (2005), and Nets (2004) from Ugly Duckling Presse.

Jennifer Perrine‘s first collection of poems, The Body Is No Machine (New Issues, 2007), won the 2008 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Poetry. Her second book, In the Human Zoo (University of Utah Press, 2011), won the 2010 Agha Shahid Ali Prize. Her individual poems have received prizes from Bellingham Review, Third Coast and Robinson Jeffer’s Tor House. Perrine lives in Des Moines, Iowa, where she organizes the Younger American Poets Reading Series. www.jenniferperrine.org

Glenn Shaheen received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston. He was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and currently lives in Michigan, where he co-edits the journal NANO Fiction. His book of poems, Predatory, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and is available from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Additionally, he presently serves on the board of directors for the Radius of Arab-American Writers, Inc. www.glennshaheen.com

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November 4 opening of Handmade Paper Guild and KBAC artists exhibition

View work by the Handmade Paper Guild of Southwest Michigan and Kalamazoo Book Arts Center artists and members. The exhibit will be open during the Art Hop of November and run through the Art Hop on December 2. Closed Thursday and Friday of Thanksgiving weekend.

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Seth Abramson is the author of two collections of poetry, Northerners, winner of the 2010 Green Rose Prize from New Issues Poetry & Prose, and The Suburban Ecstasies (Ghost Road Press, 2009). He is also the co-author of the forthcoming third edition of The Creative Writing MFA Handbook (Continuum, 2012). In 2008 he was awarded the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize for Poetry, and his poems have appeared in such magazines and anthologies as Best New Poets 2008, American Poetry Review, New American Writing, Boston Review, Colorado Review, and New York Quarterly. A regular contributor to Poets & Writers magazine and The Huffington Post, he is a graduate of Harvard Law School, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently a doctoral candidate in English Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Matthew Guenette is the author of Sudden Anthem, winner of the 2007 American Poetry Journal Book Prize from Dream Horse Press. His latest book, American Busboy, a Finalist and Editor’s Choice of the 2010 University of Akron Press Poetry Prize, will be published in 2011. His work has appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Barn Owl Review, DIAGRAM, Cream City Review, The Greensboro Review, Indiana Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Southern Indiana Review, and other publications. He is an English instructor at Madison College in Madison, Wisconsin.

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Guest Artist: Shawn Sheehy

Honeybee from "Beyond the 6th Extinction"

The KBAC is pleased to present a lecture, workshop, and exhibition by Shawn Sheehy, a nationally recognized book artist. Sheehy combines paper engineering and paper making with an interest in biology and cultural evolution to produce sculptural pop-up books. Shawn has taught workshops at the Paper & Book Intensive, Penland School of Crafts, the Centers for Book Arts in Chicago and New York, and many other venues across the U.S. His commercial pop-up clients include American Greetings and Pee-Wee Herman. For more about Shawn’s work visit: www.shawnsheehy.com

Exhibition
Shawn Sheehy: Process in Action

Oct. 7–28; Opening reception Oct. 7 during Art Hop, 6 to 9 p.m. – Shawn Sheehy is known primarily as a paper engineer—creating sculptural pop-up artist books with environmental themes—but he is also a letterpress printer, papermaker, bookbinder and designer. Aside from featuring several of his artist books, this show will also include broadsides, maquettes and other random process ephemera.

Lecture
Concept to Action: Artist’s Pop-up Books

Thurs., Oct. 6, 4 to 6 p.m., Waldo Library, Special Collections, Edwin and Mary Meader Room – Shawn Sheehy will give a talk, co-sponsored by the Waldo Library Special Collections, on the process of creating a pop-up book, from conception to construction, showing several artists’ work including examples from the WMU collection. A reception will follow the presentation.

Workshop
Animated Pop-Up Structures

Sat., Oct. 8, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. with lunch break / fee $75 – Bring dimension and life to your artist book! In this workshop you will learn how pop-up and movable structures work together to create a sense of animation. You will assemble a sequence of increasingly complex structures and go home with a collection of 8-10 samples that can be used for further study and practice. Beginners are encouraged; patience is required.

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Deborah Ager is author of Midnight Voices and publisher of 32 Poems Magazine. Please learn more about her at www.deborahager.com.

Marie-Elizabeth Mali is the author of Steady, My Gaze (Tebot Bach, 2011) and co-editor with Annie Finch of The Book of Villanelles, forthcoming in 2012. She serves as co-curator of louderARTS: the Reading Series and Page Meets Stage, both in New York City. Her work has appeared in Calyx, Poet Lore, and RATTLE, among others. For more information, please visit www.memali.com.

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Chad Andrews "Red Flower"

Recent Works from Studio Paper+
An exhibition of collaborative prints and works from Chad Andrews 

Artist Chad Andrews is the director of a printmaking studio in Williamsport, Pennsylvania called Studio Paper+. This exhibition, which includes prints, mixed-media pieces, and an installation, reflects the vision of a master printer and image-maker who is engaged in the art of collaboration and the exploration of traditional and new materials.

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