New “Galley” Exhibition Opens this Fall

Another innovative exhibition exchange program is in the works between graduate students at two far-flung schools. Following on the heels of the Serbo-American Cookbook Exchange Virtual Exhibition initiated this past spring by Professor Melissa Potter, Columbia’s Book + Paper MFA organization Pulp, Ink, & Thread (P.I.T.) will be hosting Maquette, an exhibition from the Mills College MFA program in Book Art and Creative Writing. Under the guidance of book artist and Mills College Associate Professor Julie Chen, the exhibition will feature work of Robert Borges, Kat Howard, Mirabelle Jones, and Kate Robinson.

Through their work, the artists are investigating and questioning artistic authorship, value, physicality, form and structure, and artists’ books as acts and places of intimacy.

Using the book as object and by investigating authorship and the associated authority of the book to authorize the reader’s engagement. In enacting the book, they are creating a space of engagement that crosses a multitude of psychological and physical spaces and landscapes.

The exhibition will be installed in August in time for the new fall semester in the P.I.T. Galley exhibition space at 1104 South Wabash, which is part of the Book and Paper Center. Columbia MFAs will have their chance to respond to the work, and will ship back to Mills their own expressions on the first stage of the Maquette Exchange Exhibition.

“This will be a fun experiment for both sides,” says Kathi Beste, gallery coordinator for the P.I.T. Galley space. “Our previous exchange exhibition of Serbo-American Cookbook has so far been conducted via a cloud and social media exchanges. I’m excited to use the Galley space to host MFA colleagues from other academic institutions as a way to build community and create connections for the newest generation of book artists.”

The exhibition will run from August 2012–January 2013.