The art of the book has been at once visionary and documentary, imagining a future that has yet to exist while finding inspiration from the resources of the past.
The first biennial conference of the College Book Art Association seeks to bridge the worlds of book art, book history, cultural criticism, and curatorial work through appreciation of the book as an aesthetic sensorium. Scholarship, artistic practice, and the digital age have evoked for us the multimedia nature of the book experience. Animated by practices that define anew the cultural record, contemporary book creators unsettle the categories whereby art is valued and appreciated, making new objects that express the range of human experience. Roused by research into the materiality of texts, humanities scholars and institutional curators have summoned new facts to explain communication technologies, writing an alternative history of word and image in the book format. Pressed by political urgencies, artists and researchers have measured the meanings of art and fact through bookwork that serves as cultural criticism. At a time when the book arts have never been more vital, ART, FACT, AND ARTIFACT builds from these energies and will offer presentations, papers, studio demonstrations, and exhibits from artists and scholars interested in the future, present, and past of the book as an expressive form
