Critical Convening on Approaches to Criticism for Activist Material as Artist’s Books and Publishing as Practice

The Book Art Review initiative was launched in late 2020 with Center for Book Arts to  promote and strengthen book art criticism by providing resources for critical writing about the book arts. These activities are built around an evolving set of core principles developed and maintained collaboratively across the community. This convening of international art critics in 2021 will take stock of the current state of criticism for book art, identify what is currently preventing the growth of critical discourse around this medium, create sharable resources to support arts writers now, and develop ways to close the gap between book art criticism and that of other mediums.

For this session, we will consider critical approaches to activist material as artist’s books and publishing as practice:

1. Is a different framework needed for artist’s books with activist purposes?
2. What role does the publisher of an artist’s book play in content creation?
3. What is needed to write critically about publishing as artistic practice?

After a brief introduction, we invite you to join the founders of BAR and a group of international guests in this convening as we split into small breakout groups to explore these questions and work on developing recommendations. Each breakout group will discuss the same items before returning to the large group to share and combine responses.

Funding for this program is provided in part by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Founded in 2008, CABC has been a long time programing partner of Printed Matter’s Art Book Fairs. This year CABC will be presented as part of Printed Matter’s Virtual Art Book Fair.