Abecedarian News and Events

Earlier this year I had an enthusiastic gallery visit from Suzy Royce Cruse, whose multi-faceted lifestyle gives her seemingly endless curiosity and interest in a broad range of topics. Suzy, a librarian by passion and training, creates one of a kind, sculptural book works and has been a gallery fan for many years. During our visit, she invited me to come to her town, Winter Park, Colorado, with my Artists Books on the Road project. I love Grand County and a visit to one of the communities in the area is something I’d hoped to work out.

Suzy Royce Cruse at her Winter Park custom frame shop and gallery – Framewerx

Winter Park is a town well known for its downhill skiing. Practically every kid I knew growing up in Denver, including my older siblings, took advantage of the Ski Train – a seasonal train operated by the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad from 1940–2009. For nearly 70 years, The Ski Train left from downtown Denver’s Union Station and climbed 4000 feet, passing through 29 tunnels before reaching the final mountain underpass, the 6.2 mile long Moffat Tunnel. The Moffat is the highest railroad tunnel in the United States, and the third longest. Incredibly, it passes under the Continental Divide. The trains’ final stop was less then 100 yards from the base of the Winter Park Resort ski lifts. Sadly, the train, burdened with escalating costs, operational conflicts and the uncertainties posed by the redevelopment of Denver’s Union Station made its final run in 2009. Since then, there have been two successful promotional runs and if all goes well, periodic runs during the 2016 ski season are a possibility.

Winter Park is one of several small towns in Grand County, where town-to-town resource sharing seems to have either been strategically implemented or naturally evolved. Other towns in the area include Fraser, Tabernash, Granby, Grand Lake, Hot Sulphur Springs and Kremmling. Buying groceries requires a trip to Granby or Fraser. The best all-round store for household goods is in Granby (and many claim the best breakfast is found in Granby as well); the county seat is in Hot Sulphur Springs. All of the towns except Winter Park and Tabernash have a branch of the Grand County Library District. Grand Lake is situated on the shores of Colorado’s largest natural body of water and is well known to mountain and water recreation enthusiasts as the western gateway to the vast and undeniably impressive Rocky Mountain National Park. So, although there is a long tradition of cattle ranching and hay production in the area, along with mining, the county now relies on tourism for economic survival. Unlike other communities I’ve visited, those in Grand County aren’t yet focusing on developing the arts as a significant future contributor the county’s economic well being.

Suzy was the perfect hostess for Artists Books on the Road.

Working with Suzy in her capacity as co-host for an annual event Art Out of Thin Air (Winter Park, at 9100 feet is one of the highest elevations – and thus thinnest air – towns in Colorado), I arrived at Bistro 28 in Tabernash for the 7th Annual AOTA Member Show and Sale.

View from the window of Bistro 28

The setting was beautiful; my tables were positioned near large windows looking out on magnificent views, and also near the double doors through which over 300 artists and art lovers arrived over the course of the evening. This is a remarkable accomplishment given the reality that, as is the case with much of Colorado, cultural events are in competition with outdoor recreation and, during summer tourist season, recreation is the focus for most visitors.

Throughout the three hours of the event, I showed artists’ books to dozens of visitors, a clear majority of whom were unfamiliar with the genre. The notable exception was Douglas M. Smith Jr., whose cousin is none other than Martha Wilson – founding director of the Franklin Furnace Archive, a non-profit organization in New York City. The archive’s admirable mission is to present, preserve, interpret, proselytize and advocate time-based visual art including artists’ books and periodicals.

Thank you Suzy, all the artists of AOTA and Bistro 28 for including me in such a delightful celebration of visual arts at high altitude.

Turning appointments into encounters: transforming collection development visits into enriching experiences with faculty, students, and community

Guest Post by Sha Towers – originally posted on the ARLIS SIG blog, November 2014

For librarians, collection development work often means combing catalogs and websites and placing an order without having seen the material in person. While this can certainly be a route to collecting artists books, another (more?) common route into library collections begins with an artist or dealer making an appointment with a librarian to show their work. From my earliest experiences meeting with book artists and dealers, I remember thinking “Oh, I wish so-and-so were here to see this!”, so much so that in with the next few appointments, I invited other colleagues in the libraries to join in because I knew they would be intrigued with this medium.

In a desire to “share the love” even wider, I began inviting some art faculty members to sit in on these appointments. This generated interest in how book arts might be used in their courses and we soon began setting up appointments with artists and dealers to coincide with class times of specific art department courses so that the students could experience the works in something of an “open house viewing.” Such sessions grew into more formal presentations during visits with Bill and Vicky Stewart of Vamp and Tramp Booksellers.

In these sessions Bill and Vicky would serve as artists book guest lecturers using as examples, items from the Baylor Book Arts Collection as well as new work that they brought with them, followed by an opportunity for students and faculty to explore the new works. I still used these visits as chance to review new work, but by inviting students and faculty join in on the experience and talk about which works they responded to, I was able to incorporate works that were particularly meaningful to them into our collection. This approach has strengthened connections between librarian and art faculty, librarian and students, faculty and collections, and students and collections.

At Baylor, the book arts collection is used primarily as a teaching collection for studio arts. Individually or as a class, students use the collection as a source of inspiration for their own works as well as studying structural concepts or construction techniques.

Vicky and Bill Stewart (Vamp and Tramp Booksellers)
presenting at Baylor University Libraries, 2010. Photo by Sha Towers

The earliest group encounters happened in the library, but as interest grew, I found myself needing to find larger and larger spaces as more than one section or course would gather for these encounters. As my goal was to involve more art students and faculty, I approached the department chair and museum director about holding the next encounter in the museum gallery (located within the art department). My favorite moment during this encounter was when an art student ran out of the gallery to go down the hall to find another of his instructors because he just HAD to show them this amazing artists book he’d just seen.

Being in close proximity to all the relevant players definitely has advantages. For the next session, we moved the location to the foyer outside the gallery, which afforded much greater visibility and allowed for more classes to visit during the day. This location prompted a number of “drop in” faculty and students as well as a couple faculty members asking “can I bring my class that’s about to start?” Holding these events on “their turf” (instead of in the library) had a positive impact on attendance, departmental investment, and connections between the art department and their librarian. Connections were enriched not only with faculty and students, but also with administrative and museum staff. We’ve used these encounters as a unique opportunity for people to view much more work than they would ever have a chance to see on their own, especially since our collection budget could only allow us to acquire a tiny fraction of what’s available. Now I will rarely schedule appointments with artists or dealers that can’t be converted into an encounter for a larger audience.

Vicky and Bill Stewart (Vamp and Tramp Booksellers)
presenting at Indiana University, 2013. Photo by Herron Library Staff Photographer

These encounters benefit the students and faculty by giving them direct involvement and ownership in building the book arts collection. They are more invested in the collection since they’ve had a hand in building it. They also see their librarian as in-touch with and responsive to their needs and it keeps me on their radar. Benefits to me as a librarian include more opportunities for networking with students and faculty, more buy-in for the collection and more support for additional purchases. I have a clearer sense of what types of works resonate with the collection’s users and because of this, use of the collection is growing.

The next step in the evolution of these events moved to an even larger audience, taking what would have been a collection development appointment with a book artist Peter Thomas and turning it into a public event beyond the walls of the art department. For this visit, Peter brought his gypsy wagon and parked it in front of the busy, main campus library (great advertising and promotion, by the way!) and then gave a public artist talk in the library foyer. The event was advertised with posters across campus, front-page article in the campus newspaper, and on Twitter and Facebook. About seventy five people from the community and various parts of campus attended the talk, which was followed by a viewing of his artists books and his gypsy wagon.

When I meet with students and faculty in these sessions, they see the perspective of librarian as curator and collector. When book artists and dealers are a part of the equation, the experience is greatly enriched with the perspectives of working professional artists, promoters, and people involved in the business end of the arts.

It would certainly be easier to just meet one on one with artists and dealers to look at their work and consider acquiring work for my library’s book arts collection, but it wouldn’t be as fun or as enriching – for me or the others that I’ve invited to join the circle. For more information about the Baylor Book Arts Collection, visit: www.baylor.edu/library/finearts/bookarts

Peter Thomas, public artist talk event, Baylor University Libraries, 2013. Photos by Sha Towers and Carl Flynn.

ShaTowers is the Art Liaison Librarian and Director of Liaison Services at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Prior to that he served for twelve years as the head of the Fine Arts Library at Baylor. He first encountered artists books in 2007, promptly fell in love with the medium, and began building a collection which now numbers nearly 600 works. He is also the Vice Chair/Chair Elect of the Texas-Mexico chapter of the Art Libraries Society of North America.

Hosted by the venerable Cultural Arts Council of Estes Park, Inc. (CAC), a non-profit founded in 1990, my first Artists Books on the Road presentation was hosted at the Cultural Art Center of Estes Park in November 2014.

The community of Estes Park is primarily a summer resort town, well known as the eastern gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park. The area was hard-hit with a flood in September 2013 and during my visit, a year later, there is still evidence of post-flood damage and repair.

Mid-November is quiet in this little community. Its a time when the instinct to hibernate with some good books comes into play; a perfect atmosphere for the contemplative activity of hands on viewing of artists’ books. Using that to advantage, CAC put together a series of three book-lovers events – a book signing with Wisconsin novelist Vivian Probst, Artists Books on the Road and a mixed-media artist book workshop taught by Estes Park resident Diane Watson.

The day before my Artists Books on the Road event, I grabbed the free weekly paper from a kiosk, thinking to thumb through and see if there was a calendar of events listing my event … imagine my surprise to find a photo of me looking at books on a right-facing page, above the fold! Doesn’t get much better than that …

The inaugural event went well, above is a pic of the first two folks in the door, arriving mere moments after I’d unpacked some of the books.