Exhibit | August 22, 2012

Diamond Leaves: Artist Books From Around the World

Booklyn Artists Alliance is pleased to announce the opening of DIAMOND LEAVES: Artist Books from around the World. A collaboration between the Booklyn Artists Alliance and the Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum in Beijing, the exhibition is curated by Xu Bing, artist and Vice-President of the CAFAM, and Marshall Weber, artist and Directing Curator of Booklyn; it is the first major museum exhibition of contemporary international Artist Books in China.
 
A decade in the making, the DIAMOND LEAVES exhibition showcases over 200 masterpieces of the Artist Book form created by more than 100 visual artists, some well known and some emerging, who approach the creation of Artist Books as an interdisciplinary and multi-media practice. Using collage, drawing, painting, photography, printmaking, and digital and social media, artists are creating books that provide us with complicated aesthetic experiences and push the boundaries of book design far beyond the limits of the conventional book's form. Just as photography liberated painting from its documentary function late in the 19th century, digital media has liberated the book from the burden of operating as a vehicle for text and data, spurring the renaissance of creative bookmaking celebrated in this exhibition.
 
Focusing on books created in the 21st century, the exhibit demonstrates how an Artist Book can function as both fine art and as an experimental laboratory for global visual language development. The exhibition consists of conceptually, materially and structurally ambitious hand-bound hardcover Artist Books published in limited editions of under 100. A secondary exhibit features inexpensive, image-based, softcover, populist, intimate, and artist-produced Zines and comic books published in editions of over 100. Other satellite exhibits contain examples of the early 20th century Soviet constructivist books that revolutionized book and typography design, and a small exquisite selection of antique European and Asian illustrated books that show the trajectory from older book forms to contemporary Artist Books.
 
FEATURED ARTISTS
Ryoko Adachi, John Cage, Chuck Close, Marcel DuChamp, Colette Fu, Guo Hongwei, Roy Lichtenstein, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Robert Motherwell, Méret Oppenheim, Raymond Pettibon, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Dieter Roth, Ed Ruscha, Veronika Schäpers, Kiki Smith, Jean Tinguely and over 100 other artists.????

CATALOG??
An accompanying full-color catalog published by ARTRON features essays by Mark Dimunation, Chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress; David Senior, Librarian and Bibliographer at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, as well as both of the exhibition's curators.????

DIAMOND LEAVES is sponsored by ARTRON, with generous loans of works from the Special Collections Division, Newark Public Library, Newark, New Jersey; John Koh of Bernard Quaritch Ltd., London, England; the Long Island University Brooklyn Campus Library Artist's Books Collection; Stephen J. Beyer; and the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. 
 
DIAMOND LEAVES: Artist Books from around the World
SEPTEMBER 18 - OCTOBER 28, 2012
OPENING RECEPTION SEPTEMBER 18, 2012 3PM - 6PM
 
Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum (CAFAM)
No.8 Hua Jia Di Nan St., Chao Yang District, Beijing, China
 
For more information contact:
Marshall Weber at mweber[at]booklyn.org, 1-718-383-9621
or Gao Gao at gao.gao.msn[at]hotmail.com, 86-10-6477-1695