I am an independent scholar and curator committed to exploring the artist’s book and its larger interdisciplinary terrain, where art and literature engage with concept, format and material. Book art takes form in the time-based medium of the paginated book, as well as, beyond the book, in sculpture, installation and performance.

As a curator, I worked at Minnesota Center for Book Arts for its first nine years, where I had the opportunity to study hundreds of artists’ books. From there I combined my historian’s training with my curator’s advocacy to write No Longer Innocent: Book Art in America 1960-1980, a comprehensive history that traces the emergence of book art in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s.

As a writer, I examine issues that affect the arts as a whole, such as the conflicts (or not) between perceptions of art and craft, as embodied in the artist’s book. My recent thinking on this subject will appear as a chapter in the forthcoming anthology, Extra/ordinary: Craft Culture and Contemporary Art, edited by Maria Elena Buszek (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2010).

Artists’ books transform the reading experience into a participatory interaction involving intellect and emotion, the body and the senses. When I write or talk about book art, I convey that immersive quality of an artist’s book, as the reader experiences it, page by page, reading by reading.

Please visit my blog: letterpressbkart.blogspot.com