Artists’ books often involve creative collaboration.
In “Boundaries,” poet Richard Blanco and landscape photographer Jacob Hessler collaborate to explore how societal boundaries, such as those that shape perspectives on race, culture, and gender, influence people’s sense of community.
Another work on view, “Pictures from the Outside,” is a collaboration between 13 incarcerated men and artist Chantal Zakari, who photographed places outside prison walls at the men’s direction. Zakari’s photographs are presented with the incarcerated men’s annotations on the importance of the location, whether it be a school or a bodega, on their lives and memories.
“The Business is Suffering,” a work on view by book artist Maureen Cummins, provides a unique perspective on the inhumane business of American slavery.
The book presents transcriptions of letters by Americans complaining of the hassles and hardships related to the commerce of chattel slavery. The printed transcriptions are superimposed over the handwritten letters, which belong to the American Antiquarian Society. In the display, the book is opened to a letter dated Feb. 24, 1846, in which an enslaver laments the difficulty on selling Lucy, an enslaved woman, due to the woman’s “low-spirited situation.”
Illustrations of enslaved people lying side by side on slave ships accompany the depictions of the letters. As the letters move forward in time chronologically, fewer and fewer enslaved people are pictured in the illustrations, reflecting the increasing difficulty faced by those engaged in the slave trade over time, Landis noted.
The book is presented alongside documents from the Yale Library’s collections concerning the sale and transportation of human beings from Northern ports to Southern states.
A meditation on corsets considers the crossroads of fashion and physical pain.
“Upholstered Cage,” by book artist Tamar Stone, examines the tension between late-19th-century fashion and the painful experience of wearing a corset.
“Stone take quotations from 19th-century advertising expounding on the supposed benefits of wearing corsets, such as how they purportedly protected the fetus during pregnancy, and couples them with images of women wearing corsets and their testimony about the garment’s painful effects,” Landis said.
Stone’s book is presented with an advertisement for corsets from an August 1872 issue of Harper’s Bazaar from the Beinecke Library’s collections.