Master Faculty Fellow: Richard Minsky: Material Meets Metaphor

FEATURED ARTIST PROJECT

Organized by Jae Jennifer Rossman, Assistant Director for Special Collections, Haas Arts Library, Yale University

In 1974, Richard Minsky founded the Center for Book Arts, the first not-for-profit organization in the nation dedicated to promoting the art of the contemporary book. Minsky’s work has not been shown at the Center in over 10 years, thus the presentation of this major body of work is timed to coincide with the Center’s 40th anniversary.

The selected works in this mini-retrospective exhibit Minsky’s Material Meets Metaphor methodology that has evolved over the last four decades. The works on display range from one of the earliest examples of this methodology, a rebinding of Pettigrew’s History of Egyptian Mummies (1973) in strips of airplane linen, to The Philosophy of Umbrellas (2008), which alters an everyday object with text that gives it new functionality. Minsky’s most recent work, Notes (2014), is also on display as a Featured Artist Project. The craft of bookbinding has a long history of both tradition and innovation. The power of Richard Minsky’s work comes from his ability to embrace these seemingly opposite traditions and unite them in a well-crafted and aesthetically-pleasing object that engages the reader/viewer emotionally and intellectually.

Our Master Faculty Fellowship provides for a luminary in the field to come to the Center to teach a Master Class in conjunction with an exhibition–a small retrospective–showcasing their work. Past Faculty Fellows have included such noted artists as Barbara Tetenbaum, Julie Chen, Johanna Drucker, Susan Joy Share, and Robert Bringhurst.