Watch a Video about the Center

Please click here to watch a new video about The Center for Book Arts!

This video, produced by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, is in conjunction with a recent, three-year $75,000 grant to support the Center's current capacity building initiatives.

Here is how the Rockefeller Brothers Fund describes the Center:

For over 33 years, the Center for Book Arts has challenged the public to think outside the box of what a book is and can be - to see books as more than just repositories of words, but as works of art.

The Center for Books Arts was founded in 1974 as the first not-for-profit organization in the U.S. dedicated to preserving the traditional craft of bookmaking and to promoting contemporary interpretations of the book as an art object. Today, the Center is a dynamic working studio, where artists and writers from across New York City and the United States, as well as from around the world, can experiment, collaborate, and learn.

A commitment to the development of artists and writers infuses every facet of the Center's work. The Center offers over 100 courses, workshops, and seminars in all aspects of the bookmaking process, in addition to exhibitions, studio rental, and an annual Poetry Chapbook Competition. Its Artist-in-Residence program provides New York-based emerging artists with 24-hour access to facilities and equipment, individual studio space, and admission to an unlimited number of the Center's classes. These resources enable artists from diverse backgrounds to experiment with the book art process and apply it to their own work. As Executive Director Alexander Campos explained, "People will be seeing artwork and also making it at the same time. The work that they saw will inform what they can do. What they do will inform what they produce. That is really what makes the Center exciting and thriving."

Since 1974, the Center has mounted over 175 exhibitions featuring more than 5,000 artists, and collected over 500 art objects and 300 limited edition publications. Starting in 2008, the organization plans to move on to its next stage of development by systematizing its collections documentation and management and implementing new marketing and fundraising strategies. With these initiatives, the Center for Book Arts will continue to have a major impact on the artistic community, both locally and globally, by fostering a vital space for creative exchange.

Opening Reception for Artist as Publisher and Fun & Games (and Such...)

Thanks to everyone who attended our Opening Reception on Wednesday, July 9!

It was a great evening, as you'll see from these pictures, and we look forward to seeing you again for upcoming related events:

Artist Talk: Artist as Publisher
Wednesday, July 30^th , 6:30pm
Suggested donation: $10/$5 CBA members

Artist Talk: Fun and Games (and Such)
Wednesday, August 6^th , 6:30 pm
Suggested donation: $10/$5 CBA members

"Artist as Publisher" on ArtCal.com

The Center's upcoming exhibition Artist as Publisher has been featured on ArtCal's Zine. The full article is copied below:

"Who writes? For whom is the writing being done? In what circumstances?," Edward Said said, asking after the intellectual conditions of production proper to a humanist criticism. (A modifier about which he confessed to have "contradictory feelings of affection and revulsion.") Though Said was invested in a slightly different field his observations apply equally to a a bumper crop of art writing. With regards a given professional constituency: "Once again we are back to the quandary suggested by the three thousand advanced critics reading each other to everyone else's unconcern... what is the acceptable humanistic antidote to what one discovers, say amongst sociologists, philosophers and so-called policy scientists who speak only to and for each other in a language oblivious to everything but a well-guarded, constantly shrinking fiefdom forbidden to the uninitiated?" Well one such prescription might be opening at The Center for Book Arts this Wednesday; Artist as Publisher includes a great number of artists who have "embraced independent publication as a means to bypass the gallery system, to produce new artwork affordably, and to distribute their artwork widely and on their own terms." Of course it remains to be seen which direction Omar Lopez-Chahoud's curation will emphasize - and though its hard to imagine a discourse more oblique than the one currently on offer; that's precisely the appeal of this show, insofar as we don't know what art writing might look like when pulled out from behind the lens of an overheated industry.

Saveur Magazine Features The Center for Book Arts

There's a wonderful new article on the Saveur Magazine website about the Edible Book Festival hosted this April at The Center for Book Arts. The article is copied in full below (and you can click here to see photos from the event). Thanks Saveur!

Eat Your Words

by Karen Shimizu

This April, as the International Edible Book Festival entered its ninth year, bibliophiles around the world gathered to present, then devour, books made to eat.

The festival is the creation of the book-art archivist, historian, curator, and librarian Judith A. Hoffberg. It takes place on or around April 1 of each year and is loosely tied to the birthday of Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, author of The Physiology of Taste. (Like Brillat-Savarin's gastronomical treatise, the festival is mostly playful but is guided by a firm belief in the importance of both the palate and the page.)

"It's taken off with very little work on my part," Hoffberg said. "It's a self-duplicating machine." Since its inception, in California in 2000, the Edible Book Festival has been embraced by book centers all over the world, which manage the event on their own and may choose to register at the festival website. This year, groups in 11 countries, ranging from Australia to Singapore, and 23 U.S. states signed on.

Many libraries and other nonprofit book organizations have made the festival an annual fund-raising event, and the edible books vary in their ambition and scope, ranging from the silly to the sublime. "Everybody does it a different way," Hoffberg observed. "Some are really elegant, and some are really easy."

In New York, The Center for Book Arts, which offers workshops in traditional book-making methods, has made the Edible Book Festival part of its annual benefit. On the evening of April 3, supporters of the CBA gathered in Manhattan to bid on artwork, listen to Japanese Gypsy rock, and eat books.

For the past three years, the CBA has paired book artists with professional chefs. "At the beginning, you could really tell which ones the chefs worked on," said CBA executive director Alexander Campos. "We've been moving toward greater palatability."

The edible books on the CBA's dessert table were a smorgasbord of literary and culinary tropes. An excerpt from Don Quixote on lavash-like paper occupied one side of the table. A solitary pink balloon hovered above a cake crowned with two figurines, together representing the balloon from Around the World in 80 Days.

Rough, muscular "bread rocks" by the artist Tattfoo Tan standing for Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching sat on the table in staggered rows. The brown, scorched surface of the bread was scattered with gold dust; fresh sprigs of rosemary added touches of gentle spring green. The combined effect was mesmerizing.

Lauri Ditunno, who runs the designer bakery Cake Alchemy, worked with science fiction–derived designs by the artists Rocco Scary and Austin Thomas. At one end of the dessert table, her rendition of the spaceship from 2001: A Space Odyssey—looking a bit like a thighbone cast in chocolate—hovered above a lunar landscape of nuts dusted with powdered sugar. Across the table, atop a broad rectangular cake base, accordion-fold sheets of chocolate framed an illustration from H. G. Wells's The Time Machine.

A few feet away, a huge fruit pie crust oozed over the sides of its rectangular pan like one of Salvador Dalí's postage stamps. The surface of the pie was covered in glyphs of crust and bright food coloring. "It's the tale of Momotaro, or Peach Boy," said baker Jon Zeltsman, who based the pie on a design by artist Micki Watanabe-Spiller. Zeltsman pointed to the discrete patches of sculpted crust that illustrated phases of Momotaro's journey. A cluster of cayenne-spiced sour cherries marked the home of fire-dwelling demons. In the bottom left corner of the pie, a swooning figure leaned out of a whole roasted peach: Momotaro being born. "He was meant to be standing up but fell over in the oven," Zeltsman said, then paused. "Actually, the peach is very womblike."

When it was time to cut the cakes and eat the books, no one hesitated. Knives flashed. Someone broke off a chunk of solid-chocolate spaceship and plated it beside a slice of The Time Machine. In a few minutes, Don Quixote was being dipped in roasted red pepper sauce and consumed along with red wine.

Between sweet, airy mouthfuls of Time Machine buttercream and knolls of Tao Te Ching rock bread, I remembered what Hoffberg said about an edible-book event that she'd attended in Germany, where a book artist had made gorgeous illuminated manuscripts of gingerbread and icing.

Could she bring herself to ingest them?

"I ate them up, my dear," she said. "I hated to."

This article was first published in Saveur in Web Exclusive!