Artist’s book accepted to juried gallery exhibition

I’m excited to share with you all that my artist’s book _We Are Writing These Things_ has been selected for a juried gallery exhibition at Galaudet Gallery (Chicago and Eau Claire, Wisconsin). The show is called Sense of Place: HERE and will run from 1 June to 25 September 2018. Over 650 artworks from over 250 artists were submitted for this show, so i’m thrilled to have been accepted.


#artistsbooks #calligraphy #handlettered #watercolor #sumi #wacocalligraphyguild #baylorlibraries #baylorbookarts #createeveryday @baylorlibraries @baylorbookarts

wonderful interview with an artist and letterpress printer

http://www.commarts.com/column/stop-calling-yourself-creative

One of my favorite quotes from this interview:

“One does not master skills. Skills allow one to interpret the world. There is an energy that flows throughout life, and skills help you understand that energy. So, I have no desire to master anything. I wish to experience it with wonder.” -Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr.

Baylor Department of Art Photography Print and Portfolio Sale

reposting for my friends in the art deparment!

2015photoprintsale

2015printsaleWhen: Monday, December 7, 2015 at 5:30pm-7:30pm
Where: Hooper Schaefer Student Lounge
Come check out the latest work created by Baylor University photography students. Come join us for creative art, stimulating conversation, and good food. All prints are available for purchase. The event is free and the experience priceless.

KnownUnknown selected for more gallery shows

I’m thrilled to announce that my artist’s book, KnownUnknown has been selected to appear in two more juried shows after it’s debut in the Ideation Experience show at Abecedarian Gallery in Denver this summer.

My book is currently part of Words|Matter: A Library for Artist’s Books exhibition in Chicago (October 3-29) and was also chosen to appear in Blood Quantum (November 6 – December 19) at 23 Sandy Gallery in Portland, Oregon.

I am honored to have been selected for these three juried shows alongside many well known book artists that I admire and have collected as part of the Baylor Book Arts Collection.

Shā Towers
Art Liaison Librarian and Director of Liaison Services
Baylor Libraries

An embedded librarian

In the spring semester of 2015, Baylor University offered its very first book arts course, “Typography and the Artist’s Book” (ART 4338). For this upper level elective, Virginia Green (Associate Professor, Graphic Design) and I planned the course in such a way that students would gain experience creating a number of artist’s books in various structures. In preparation for their own projects, we planned several visits to the Baylor Book Arts Collection (BBAC) for the students to experience and study various structures. My position as art liaison librarian and curator of the BBAC has enabled me to develop valuable connections in the book arts world. Throughout the semester, I was able to integrate several opportunities for the students to engage with book artists, gallery owners, and dealers from across the country. Bill and Vicky Stewart of Vamp & Tramp Booksellers (Birmingham, Alabama) came to campus and exhibited works by numerous book artists with particular emphasis on some of the types of projects the students were working on. Peter and Donna Thomas (Santa Cruz, California) gave a public talk about artist’s books, held a workshop with the class, and led a paper making experience. Alicia Bailey of Abecedarian Gallery (Denver, Colorado) shared her works with the students, talked about her work as an artist, and led a creative writing experience. Alicia worked with us to shape the final student project that would be submitted to a juried exhibition this summer where the works were all based on the Julie Chen and Barabara Tetenbaum’s Artist’s Book Ideation Cards. Even Virginia and I created artist’s books for this show! As the art liaison librarian, this was a great experience for at least five reasons:

• Collaborating with faculty to design and enrich the course was rewarding and helpful in strengthening the relationship between librarian and teaching faculty.
• Integrating the BBAC throughout the course was a great opportunity heightened awareness of the collection and how it can be useful to faculty and students).
• Embedding the librarian throughout the course experience and working alongside the students on projects allowed me to gain a much greater appreciation and more focused view of the experiences and needs of the students and faculty.
• Embedding in the course and creating alongside the students and professor gave me valuable experience as a practicing artist in book arts (where previously I had just been involved from an academic and curatorial perspective).
• Sharing this experience allowed me to build strong relationships with the students and professors (including other professors who sat in on the class or who hovered nearby, intrigued by all the excitement) and has resulted in a number of other collaborations, working relationships, and opportunities.

Sha Towers
Art Liaison Librarian and Director of Liaison Services
Baylor University Libraries, Waco, Texas

my first artist’s book: KnownUnknown

In my role as the fine arts librarian at Baylor University, I’ve been building a teaching collection of artist’s book over the last eight years that now totals about 700 titles. You can see more about the collection here.

I have just completed my own artist’s book, entitled KnownUnknown, which is on it’s way to a gallery exhibition in Denver (Abecedarian Gallery). The show will include about fifty works from artists around the world, including several other first timer artist’s books exhibitors from Waco.

Working on my own artist’s book is something I’ve been chewing on for several years and I appreciate the encouragement of the many artists, book arts dealers, and colleagues. I also appreciate my wonderful partner, Ann, for her patience during the countless hours away from the family that this project demanded.

KnownUnknown explores the fragmented realities wherein the people around us are both known and unknown. Pairing stories of a grandfather I never knew and glimpses of people known through social media, this work illuminates the dichotomy of knowing intimate details of someone while at the same time knowing little or nothing of substance about them.

The work was created at BlackHare Studio, in Robinson, Texas. Type was handset using Cloister Lightface, Univers, & Franklin Gothic. Letterpress printed on a No. 4 Vandercook press. Pages include image transfers & hand drawn icons. Outer structure incorporates acrylic monoprinting (with color choice referencing the social media spheres contained in the texts).

I chose the blizzard book structure (invented by Hedi Kyle) for this work because it afforded the reader control over the order of the fragmentary texts rather than a linear, fixed order.

While much of the text was self-generated, some came from personal archival documents related to my grandfather and some came from posts on Facebook and Twitter. My image collaboration included photographs taken by various and unknown photographers. I also collaborated with letterpress printer and fellow exhibitor Virginia Green on setting type and printing.

KnownUnknown was designed using the Artist’s Book Ideation Cards by Barbara Tetenbaum and Julie Chen. Randomly selected in various categories, the Ideation Cards provide prompts in various categories. Cards used for this project included: PAPER (pretreated), LAYOUT (minimal or restrained), IMAGE (collaborate with another artist), TEXT (self generated), TECHNIQUE (mixed media), COLOR (single color), and STRUCTURE (accordion… ed. note: hidden at the core of the blizzard book structure!). From deck two of the Ideation Cards (Adjectives), I drew cards containing the following that I incorporated into this project: mysterious, fragmented, pocketed, and self reflexive.

Images of the completed work (photo credits: Bob Smith)

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Taking over our kitchen to finish up parts of the project!

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Acrylic monoprinted covers drying:

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Setting type at BlackHare Studio:

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The first proof sheets (where all the errors in the typesetting you thought was perfect show up!):

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Text blocks for the project:
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Where I spent countless hours setting type!

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Examples of early image transfer tests for images used in the book:

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manuscripts and melismas

Today I worked with Jann Cosart and her Medieval music history course to facilitate the exploration of Baylor’s Medieval music manuscript collection (the Jennings Collection). It’s always a joy helping introduce students to these amazing artifacts, dating from the 11th to the 16th centuries. It’s hard to get their heads (and mine too!) around the idea that we’re looking at a document that’s nearly 1,000 years old.

For whatever reason, sleep slipped out of my grasp about 4am this morning and no matter how much or how long I tried, I couldn’t go back to sleep. Instead I got up and relished the quiet, dark, drinking an unhurried cup of coffee and re-acquainting myself with a book I rediscovered on our bookshelves just yesterday but fondly remembered from fifteen or so years earlier. The book was Meditations On the Monk Who Dwells in Daily Life by Thomas Moore.

Two meditations caught my eye as I thought about meeting with the class today:

What is the difference between an illuminated manuscript created by a monk and a page freshly spewed out of a modern word processor? The computer page is eminently legible, quickly produced, perhaps beautiful, and created by the collaboration of human and machine. The illuminated page is beautiful, slowly produced, not terribly legible, and printed in solitude. The monk works with his hand, close to his ink, ready for a slip of the pen, meditating as he works. Is there a way to bring the spirit of the monk to the computer, and by extension to all our machine work, without making either an anachronism?

And one that was perfectly fitting for the day and the way it started:

Sometimes in their chanting, monks will land upon a note and sing it in florid fashion, one syllable of text for fifty notes of chant. Melisma, they call it. Living a melismatic life in imitation of plainchant, we may stop on an experience, a place, a person, or a memory and rhapsodize in imagination. Some like to meditate or contemplate melismatically, while others prefer to draw, build, paint, or dance whatever their eye has fallen upon. Living one point after another is one form of experience, and it can be emphatically productive. But stopping for melisma gives the soul its reason for being.