Visiting Book
After the success with the Venice Biennale piece, Nancy Mithlo engaged us to create a compendium of materials from the 2008 American Indian Curatorial Practice (AICP) symposium. The resulting booklet would be sent out to participants, as well as others interested in the current state of curatorial practice in the Native American arts.
We created a format that echoed the themes and goals of the symposium. Native American art curation is a decidedly collaborative, community experience. Our design therefore is anchored by a single long dialog about Native American art curation, which we presented in a loose, expressive style. But since curation is about elevating the actual art, we showcased the symposium’s writings and artwork in a formal, authoritative setting. The articles are presented in four smaller, numbered barrel-fold tip-ins. The art cards were printed on smooth white archival paper, scored and individually perforated to encourage the reader to tear them out to display.
Finally, the book jacket features an interview between Nancy and Henry Drewal — a well-known expert of curatorial practices in African and African Diaspora Art. We thought this outsider’s perspective on Native American art curation was best presented as a filter to the insider-community conversation, so we printed interview on the inside of a translucent Yupo sheet, which then serves as a book jacket for the rest of the piece.
Overall, we wanted to create an interactive, approachable, multi-faceted book that engages the reader from page to page. The different size formats and paper textures layered on top of the main content reflects the many layers of conversations that often occurs at a gathering of minds like this.