Amy Pirkle, "Gravity's Light Grip," 2007

The structure of an accordion book is simple: a long piece of paper is folded into pages that can be read like a book or spread open and displayed like a banner. The works on display in our exhibit The Illustrated Accordion take this form to a new level.

Artists play with form to create star books, Jacob’s ladders, and books that repeat like a chain of dolls. There are books that are photographic, painted, made of handmade paper, created from found materials, printed with letterpress, woodcuts, etchings, lithographs, or use crayons and markers.

If you have ever asked, “What are Book Arts?” come and see how people from as far away as Europe or as close as the KBAC studio have answered this question.

The Kalamazoo Book Arts Center (KBAC) presents the non-juried exhibition The Illustrated Accordion, in the KBAC Gallery during the May 4 Art Hop and on exhibit until May 25.

To view entries go to our 2012 Accordion Book page on Flickr.

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The KBAC joins libraries and book arts centers from around the world in this delightful April Fools celebration of the art of the book! The Edible Book Festival has been celebrated in over 20 countries including Australia, Brazil, India, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, New Zealand, and Russia. Our judge for 2012’s competition was WMUK radio host Lorraine Caron, producer of Arts and More.

Visit our Edible Book pages to see entries from previous years and to get ideas. A Grand Prize, was chosen by our judge was awarded to “Life on the Mississippi,” created by Amy Ferguson, and a People’s Choice Award, chosen by vote among the public, was awarded to “Catch-22,” created by The Tiara Book Club. After the judging was completed we ate the books!

Also on display in the KBAC gallery was “Good Eats,” our annual exhibition of paintings, prints, photographs, and artist’s books on the delectable subject of food.

For information on Edible Book events elsewhere visit: www.books2eat.com

Judge Lorraine Caron praises all of the entries before announcing winners.

Judge's Choice winner Amy Ferguson with her entry "Life on the Mississippi."

The People's Choice winners the Tiara Book Club accept their prize.

View entries from the 2012 Edible Book Festival below.

McCord by Lauren Scharfenberg

Corwin by Bill Hosterman

Nina Corwin is the author of two books of poetry, The Uncertainty of Maps and Conversations With Friendly Demons and Tainted Saints. Her work has appeared in ACM, Forklift OH, Hotel Amerika, New Ohio Review, Southern Poetry Review, Verseand has been nominated for the Pushcart prize. Corwin is an Advisory Editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal and curates readings at Woman Made Gallery in Chicago where she co-edited Inhabiting the Body: A Collection of Poetry and Art By Women. She has read and performed her work across the country, at times set with musical or choreographic compositions. In daylight hours, she is a psychotherapist known for her work on behalf of victims of violence.

The Kalamazoo Book Arts Center announces the second annual juried exhibition “Good Eats: An Exhibit About Food” showing in the KBAC Gallery, April 6–27, 2012.

"Good Eats" 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 features two-dimensional works of art—fine prints, paintings, and collages—that incorporate food in their subject. This exhibit shared it’s opening with our Seventh Annual Edible Book Festival.

Alice Simpson, Preserved, Acrylic on stitched, stuffed canvas

Good Eats 2012 Participants:

Karen Koykka O’Neal, The Edible Alphabet, Handmade paper/vegetable papyrus;

Michael Henninger, Ice Cream Man, Letterpress, color inks, paper, popsicle stick;

Rob Morrison Potatoes Prepared for a Root Medley, Digital Photography;

Jennifer Farrell/Starshaped Press, Happy Pigs are Tastier!, Letterpress;

Maryann Riker, Domestic Intimacy, Fabric, Paper, Transfer, Digital Images;

Alice Simpson,  Preserved, Acrylic on stitched, stuffed canvas;

Chee Wang Ng, Maxim of the Art of War—Study , Digital Photo Print;

Mary Whalen,  Lumina, Tintype;

Bethany Rahn, Pork, Letterpress Broadside;

Andrew Langlois, Cantaloupe and Pepperoom Digital Prints;

Kirk Benson, Charbroil Steak, and Bacon, Color Intaglio;

Lynn Chaloupka, Blueberry Body, Clear plastic molded torso form, Acrylic paints, silver leaf;

S. Portico Bowman, Steamed, Solar Etching on handmade paper;

Linda K Judy, Truffles #1 and #2 Pastels.

Lynn Chaloupka, Blueberry Body, Clear plastic molded torso form, Acrylic paints, silver leaf

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The Illustrated Accordion 2012 Call for Entries

The Kalamazoo Book Arts Center announces a call to artists for the non-juried exhibition The Illustrated Accordion, to be held in the KBAC Gallery, May 4, 2012. Open to all emerging and established artists, this annual exhibition focuses on books created in the accordion form. All media, variations, and interpretations of this style of book will be accepted and included in the exhibition.

There is a $15 entry fee to participate. Artists are limited to one entry for the exhibit. The opening will be May 4th, from 6:00–9:00 p.m., in conjunction with the Kalamazoo Art Hop.

Entries must be received by Friday, April 20 at 5 p.m. For full details for submissions download the entry form required for submissions. For more information please call the KBAC Gallery at 269-373-4938 or email info@kalbookarts.org.

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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" works by guest artist Jan Berman

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.

Candito by Bev Hundley

Frank by John McKaig

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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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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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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Perrine by Paddy Aidan

Shaheen by Chad Andrews

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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