The visually dynamic follow-up to Lark Crafts’ original volume, 500 Handmade Books, offers stunning new creations by an international roster of artists, showcasing the unlimited creative possibilities of books as objects and as sculptural pieces. The books selected by juror Julie Chen range from narrative to visual and sculptural. While many of the works shown are non-traditional in form, each functions in ways that we think of as typically “book-like”: they open (flipping, unfurling, unrolling), present a sequence of images, words, and/or ideas, and need a reader to be activated.

Among the pieces selected for inclusion are two recent works by InterArts faculty member Clif Meador, Grove, (2011) is a suite of tall thin accordion-fold books that when opened and assembled, display a “portable grove” of the last ten standing Giant Sequoia trees in California’s Calaveras State Park.

Meador’s second piece in the collection, A Repeated Misunderstanding of Nature, (2012) is a set of 5 leporello books that investigates ideas of landscape as a metaphor for personal experience, and how easily that concept can confuse.

Miriam Schaer’s work Hands of Josephus is an altered series of five books, created from a broken down copy of Flavius Josepus’ two-volume Twenty books of The Jewish Antiquities, The Life of Josephus and the The Jewish Wars. Each page, cut in the shape of hands is sewn on multiple beaded cords, then attached to wire hand forms, which are encrusted with beads.

Josephus was a first century Jewish historian and apologist who survived and recorded the Destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. His works give an important insight into first-century Judaism, while raising questions about who owns history.

Schaer and Meador are joined in the collection by Teresa Pankrantz, InterArts Book and Paper alumna (2010).