Plunder The Influence is a collaboration initiated by artist Adriane Herman that examines physical manifestations and sources of influence. Sincere and ebullient thanks to the many generous individuals and one collaborative team who took time to document their shelves or stacks of books and to think and write about them for this context. (See "The Stacks" at right.)
This project was occasioned by The Storytellers, an exhibition curated by Henry Wolyniec at the Unum Great Reading Room at the University of Southern Maine's Glickman Library (January 24-March 12, 2011) and is funded in part by a grant from the Maine Arts Commission, an independent state agency supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. (Thank you!)
Photo above is by Brian Reeves. Read all (or at least half) about it here.
My love of books developed when I was very young. The sacred and serious nature of books was presented to me when I was a very small person, and I took this extremely seriously (and still do, though not nearly as seriously as my grade-school self). It was impressed upon me that I would not be allowed to borrow books from the library if I did anything at all to injure them. The librarian explained that a good person would not save their place in a book by spreading it wide on the table, text side down. This is bad for the spine. With a paperback, one should most certainly not bend the front cover around to meet the back cover. I did not fold down the corners of pages to save my place—this was vandalism. I was disgusted to find texts that were marked with other children’s crayons and could not begin to understand how someone could tear an entire page from a book. Certainly these other children were in a book abuser’s penitentiary somewhere.
The unmarred books that I did haul home were chosen for a variety of reasons--I liked the title, the illustrations were stunning, a suggested book list was posted at school or in the library, or it contained instructions for a project I intended to undertake when my parents weren’t watching. My choices were not limited by one subject or interest because the books themselves were interesting enough to me. These books provided narratives for costumed reenactments, illustrations to be carefully copied, and instructions on how to perform card tricks. In short, I quickly found that books were the solution to almost anything I might need. I loved them as objects filled with potential and I took the maintenance of these loaned tomes as a large responsibility.
In college I found my way into a book binding class that reinforced the specialness of the bound text. We made books by hand, we discussed the preciousness of paper, the importance of good craft and we handled these objects with white gloves. This is the value I had been taught to assign to books and I felt like I had found a class where I could really relate. The book classes taught me to respect materials, think about scale in relationship to people, and how to intensely focus on making a well-crafted object. My interest in books as objects is what led me to art making in a more refined way. The considered crafting of a well-made book is something I still relate to in my very labor-intensive studio practice.
In college, I began to collect books that were beautiful--books that held important information, novels that I loved, and art books filled with color images. I married a man with similarly wide taste in books and I love the library that we are constantly co-curating. We have shelves in most rooms of our house. These shelves are vaguely organized, though much of this organization has to do with which books will fit where and whether we want them near our couch or our bedroom. When I look through our shelves I am pleased to be living with a collection that includes The Things I Love by Liberace, Rosey Greer’s Needlepoint for Men, four shelves of pop-up books, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, and Walton Ford’s Pancha Tantra. I can list influences from most all of our books and the variety in our home library means I can turn to our stacks again and again for instruction and insight.
Now that I’m a mature adult, when my husband isn’t looking, I will even dog-ear a page from time to time.
bio:Claire Joyce currently lives in Eureka, CA where she teaches drawing at College of the Redwoods. Though she has worked in a variety of media, her current work uses glitter and glue to explore the grace and wit which can arise from the banal and ordinary.
I have stopped buying books. I use to collect books on artists, cultural issues, travel, and music. Now, I am spending my time making, traveling, and looking. I have to admit the intranet has replaced some of the looking.
bio:John Hitchcock is an Artist and Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he teaches screenprinting, relief cut, and installation art. He earned his MFA in printmaking and photography at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas and received his BFA from Cameron University, Lawton, Oklahoma. His current works depict personal, social, and political views that are a blend of printmaking, digital imaging, video, and installation. His awards include a Jerome Foundation grant, Minnesota; American Photography Institute National Graduate Seminar Fellowship at New York University; Vermont Studios Center Full Fellowship; the Vilas Associate Grant, University of Wisconsin, and was recently an artist in residence at Proyecto’ace, International Center for Visual Arts in South America, Buenos Aires, Argentina and the Frans Masereel Centrum for Graphix in Kasterlee, Belgium.
Exhibitions include: Kumu Art Museum of Estonia, Tallinn, Estonia; Dalarnas Museum, Falun, Sweden; London Print Studio, London, England, UK; Waldkunstpfad /Forest-Art-Path, Darmstadt, Germany; South African Museum, Cape Town, South Africa; Museu de Arte de Brasilia, Brasilia, Brazil; Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago de Chile; International Print Center New York, Chelsea, New York; Museum of Arts & Design, New York; Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, Indiana; Naples Museum of Art, Naples, Florida; Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Exit Art, New York; The Print Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks.
The Art of Memory is a history of mnemonic devices. For someone interested in memory and influenced by the systems-driven aspects of the conceptual art of the seventies, it is the perfect book.
Von Frisch is the man when it comes to writing on bees and they are systems artists for sure.
Nabokov’s Blues is a great study in passion and intellect. And the recent (Feb 2011) update is that Nabokov was even a more adroit lepidopterist than the book surmised a few years ago.
Chinese Whispers is a cousin to what I as a child called “telephone”—a game of repetition in which one spoken word slides into becoming another. Where misinterpretation meets transformation. All Ashbery poems feel like flow charts to me.
The Ornament… I made an artist book posited in 1491—a Jewish dictionary hiding inside a Spanish dictionary. I consulted with Maria Menocal online and she referred me to her book. It makes you realize how different things can be from the way they are now.
Two other really terrific books are 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei in which Eliot Weinberger brings together 19 versions of the same poem. Here the poetry doesn’t feel as if it is that which is lost in translation—but rather found in the variability of the gathered translations.
Homes Without Hands –this is the book that began my collection of old books.
bio: Jane Hammond was born in Bridgeport, CT, in 1950, and was educated at Mt. Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She moved to New York City in 1980. Currently, Hammond lives and works in New York City where she is represented by Galerie Lelong.
In 1989 the first solo show of her paintings was mounted at Exit Art in New York. Since then she has had nine solo exhibitions in New York and other solo exhibitions in Stockholm, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Bilbao, Milan, Detroit, Chicago, Seattle and Kansas City. Solo museum exhibitions have been organized in 1990 at the Honolulu Academy of Art, HI, in 1993 at the Cincinnati Museum of Art, OH, in 1994 at the Orlando Museum of Art, FL, and in 2002 at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, NY.
Hammond's paintings have been reviewed in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Art in America, The New Yorker, Artforum, Art on Paper, Modern Painters, Art News, Art & Antiques, BOMB Magazine, The Village Voice, FlashArt, Arts Magazine, and many others. She is also the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation Grant in Painting, two New York State Council on the Arts Grants, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant Award.
I am terrified of the dark. In the dark of my bedroom, a towel draped over a door easily becomes an enormous - possibly threatening - face. Vivid imagination coupled with irrational fear has had substantial impact on my work. A few years ago, in the book Mind in the Cave by David Lewis Williams, I found an image (on page 115) of a cave painting in which the painter added pigment to the natural geography of the cave wall to create an abstract face. I envision the artist inside the cave many thousand years ago, seeing the illusion of a face on the surface wall and helping it along with a bit of pigment. Immediately following the unexpected discovery of that image, I began to see myself exactly that way. I can only fantasize about why that artist chose to make those marks. They may have been made in worship, out of fear, or perhaps boredom and it was reassuring and chilling to realize irreversibly, that these are identical to my own artistic motivations.
In the summer of 2009, I moved from Providence, RI to Owensboro, KY for a teaching opportunity. The transition from self-indulgent graduate student to inexperienced professor was abrupt. Several weeks before classes began I found myself sitting at my computer with empty, but hopeful word documents titled “Art Appreciation: Day One” or “Drawing 1, Fall 2009”, and I quickly came to realize the significance of the task and became completely paralyzed. So, I began to examine my college experiences. I made detailed lists about former instructors, assignments that worked and failed, visiting artists that were fantastic and terrible, and finally, books.
In college and graduate school, I was reluctant to write about my work and would go to great lengths to avoid “real” artist statements. In the last year of graduate school, faced with the responsibility of thesis writing, my advisor Brian Shure loaned me Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artist Writings. While drafting my thesis, this text provided me with a reliable supply of stimulation, inspiration, and naturally, exasperation. Later, as an art instructor (ironically, prone to assign written artists statements), its content inspires my students and creates for us a platform, within reach, for the critical discussion of artists, their work, and writing.
bio: Erin Zona (b. Lisa Erin Jones, Nashville, TN, 1980) currently lives in Owensboro, KY and is a lecturer of art at Brescia University. Her most recent drawing series, Cosmic Thing explores the abstract relationship between the visible and the spiritual, the material and the supernatural. Zona received her MFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2009.
Originally, novels were the source of my emotional and psychological inspiration. They were often the classics recommended to me by a friend who had taken me under his educational wing. During and after college I found I was able to supplement my visual education by finding artists books with good repros and informative text. That practice has continued till the present and has been supplemented by books that also catalog other visual interests. Archaeology, quilting, textile design and primitive textiles are some of the highlights. In the past 15 years I have also become interested in comics and their history. The comics seem to answer both my need for story as well as visual stimulation. The reading of the pictures and its different concepts of storytelling has kept alive my interest in pictorial art.
bio:Henry Wolyniec is a visual artist working and living in Portland Maine. His medium at present is relief printing and collage.
Twenty years ago or so I was taking a fine art graduate seminar class with someone who I continue to have tremendous respect and regard for. The reading selections for our small group were always inspiring and led to long, thoughtful and stimulating conversations. Her approach to reading and digesting texts most definitely influenced my approach to art theory and criticism. The selections were never limited to “art” books but spanned all areas of contemporary culture. Her expansive thinking was so fluid, so supple, that she could readily make connections and references to just about anything and bring it back to art in ways that were always relevant and comprehendible. I think it was at this point that I began writing in earnest about my ideas, concerns and practice as an artist.
There is a kind of ongoing dialogue in my mind between my own writing and the texts I read. Books give me great comfort—both through their physical presence (which I cannot imagine giving up to the e-world) but also through the words themselves and the ideas that those words probe and unfold. Books are like perfect dwellings. Their tidy exteriors belie the infinite potential that reside within their walls.
I’m always touched and impressed when someone points me in the direction of the perfect book. (Such a recommendation suggests to me that the person has noticed not only the territory I’ve already covered in the past, but seems also to be anticipating where I am headed in the future.) I felt this way several years ago when a friend brought to my attention: “Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art”. (This was right on the heels of my having completed the first “chapter” of Tidal Culture.) Her recommendation was perfect for me then and it remains a relevant and compelling resource in my library.
Most of my current art practice is not studio based. That said I do have a (small) studio. It is divided into two parts, which I call the brain (where I handle the administrative end of things and edit video footage) and the body (where I set up situations for camera work, fabricate objects, etc…). There is a small hallway that connects the two and this is where my library is located. So every time I travel from the physical side to the cerebral side or vice versa I travel through my library—a kind of land of words—which is, of course, an incredibly rich territory, where ideas and materials connect and where everything is possible.
bio:Deborah Wing-Sproul is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily in video and performance. Her performances (or performative acts) permeate the genres of sculpture/installation, drawing, photography and printmaking. As a modern dancer and choreographer she studied under Merce Cunningham and many performers from the Judson Dance Theater. Wing-Sproul has also studied with voice/movement composer/performer Meredith Monk and reperformed multiple works for Marina Abramovic’s retrospective, ”The Artist Is Present”, MoMA, NYC, (March 14-May 31, 2010).
Over the years Wing-Sproul’s work has been selected by a diverse group of curators including: Jeremy Strick; Judy Collischan (while Curator for the Neuberger Museum); Patricia C. Phillips, independent Writer and Dean of Graduate Studies at RISD; Bruce Brown (both as an independent Curator and while Curator of the Center for Maine Contemporary Art); and Bill Arning (Director, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston). In 2007 Bill Arning, while Curator at the List Visual Arts Center at MIT, awarded a solo exhibition to Wing-Sproul at the Housatonic Museum of Art, (November 5-December 18, 2009). Mass MoCA Curator Denise Markonish selected Wing-Sproul’s video, Tidal Culture: Part II (Newfoundland) to receive first prize in the 2009 exhibition, ”H2O: Film on Water”. In the artist was nominated for a 2010 Smithsonian Artist Residency Fellowship and she is the recipient of the 2011 Individual Artist Fellowship in Media/Performing Arts from the Maine Arts Commission.
Wing-Sproul’s current long-term itinerant, performance-based work, Tidal Culture (2004-) has taken her to the North Atlantic shorelines of Maine, Newfoundland, Greenland, and Iceland. This project will continue onto the Faroe Islands, the Outer Hebrides and Ireland.
The book I have poured over more than any other is "Textile Designs: 200 Years of Patterns for Printed Fabrics Arranged by Motif, Colour, Period and Design" by Susan Meller and Joost Elffers. I discovered this book when I began studying textile design in 1993. Since that time I have incorporated pattern in my paintings and sculptures and I'm constantly ripping off ideas from this book.
bio: My interest in pattern and knot imagery led me to study surface textile design and work with screenprinting at North Carolina State University in the early 90's. This experience was proceeded by graduate school where I futher explored working with pattern, fabric, paper and costume to create installation based work. My work over the past decade, primarily painting and sculpture: dense, detailed, flat, botanical, is clearly born from the earlier work. I am currently working on a collection of small paintings which abstractly express the experience of living in Utah through the visual language I've developed over the years. I curently live in Salt Lake City with my partner Robert and son Owen after stints in Cumberland, Maryland, Columbia, Missouri and Olympia, Washington, whew!
I have many small stashes of books in my office, house, and studio. I didn’t really want to take a picture of any of them because my bookshelves are usually reserved for the books that I don’t use and have not read but can’t throw away. My nightstand is the most vital of these book stashes. It contains what I am reading, what I have borrowed to read, what I hope to read soon, and what I don’t want people to know that I am reading.
After reviewing the contents of the pile, I think it is very descriptive of my reading influences both now and throughout my life. The books I am currently reading are called Uncommon Grounds, The History of Coffee and How It Changed the World and Kerouac, Road Novels 1957-1960. The Kerouac is checked out from the library and I have been reading it for most of the year as it contains five novels. I don’t actually own many of the books that have influenced me the most as I frequently use the library (I currently have 13 books checked out). Two books in the pile, How to Fish with Jigs and Practical Flies, are self-published fishing manuals from the 1950’s written by Iowans Lacey Gee and Erwin Sias. Although the techniques are dated I read them purely for the pleasure of the anecdotal stories and local connections. Another fishing book titled The Moon Pulled up an Acre of Bass, by Peter Kaminsky, was borrowed from my colleague Tim Dooley. I abandoned reading this one because it seems too pretentious, but I have yet to return it. Thankfully, Tim reads more than I do and he feeds me lots of books that are a little more outside of my normal interests in modernist literature, there are two more of his books downstairs right now. The Way of Chuang Tzu is a book that I have read through many times and recently wanted to again. There are seven copies of Bass Master Magazine and two copies of Fly Tyer Magazine. There is a paper printout from the Internet of J.D. Salinger’s Hapworth 16, 1924. A large book on the subject of Film Noir and one titled German Cinema by John Sanford relate to my current art research. These are borrowed from another friend who manages a local restaurant and has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of film history. On the bottom of the pile is a sketchbook that I had completely forgotten about.
bio: Aaron Wilson a Professor of Art at the University of Northern Iowa. He has taught Printmaking and Foundations there since 1997. Prior to residing in Iowa, Aaron completed his BFA at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio and earned an MFA from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. For over a decade, Aaron’s artwork has centered on the use of non-conventional printmaking formats including its application in installation and sculpture. Exhibitions that have featured Aaron’s artwork include, BIG: Collaboration and Innovation in Printmaking, Madison, Wisconsin, Against Tradition: Trends in Contemporary Printmaking at Indiana State University, and By Hand: The Lifecycle of Ephemera, at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He has been a visiting artist and lecturer at many institutions including the Rhode Island School of Design and Columbia College of Art and Design. His most recent large project Parlor was exhibited at the Urban Culture Project Space in Kansas City. A selection from the installation was also shown as part of the Silkscreens, New Prints 2007/Summer exhibition at the International Print Center, New York. His artwork is featured in Printmaking: Theory and Practice, Prentice Hall, 2008 and Printmakers Today, Schilff Publishing 2010.
These are the nightstands that render somewhat symmetrical the sleeping quarters of my partner, Cristina, and me and the books that populate those respective places. The images may speak to our individual interests. Or, perhaps, of my trying to read her culture as she does mine. Or, of being and speaking together, in one broken language or another, in our awakeness and the way we surrender and return to our respective tongues in the dreaming time.
bio: Christopher Whittey is currently Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean at Maine College of Art (MECA). His previous post was Dean of Academic Services at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where he served as faculty from 2001-2009. After studying at the Center for Creative Studies and receiving his bachelor of fine arts degree from Wayne State University, Whittey worked as a master carpenter building stage sets and props in New York for such prestigious venues as the Metropolitan Opera, Saturday Night Live and The Conan O'Brien Show. In 1989, he returned to complete his formal education at the Rhode Island School of Art and received his master of fine arts degree in 1991.
The following year, Whittey was selected to attend the prestigious Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. His work has been showcased in numerous locations including White Columns and The Thread Waxing Space in New York and he has received a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship, Van Lier Foundation Grant (awarded by the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program), Individual Artists Grant from New York's Artist Space, and the faculty development grant from MICA. Publications include The Detroit News, The New York Times, The Village Voice, Documents and World Art.
There is an addiction to acquiring books. I find myself lured on by the idea that I can actually acquire, and remember -- the wealth of knowledge, experience, emotion and insight that these volumes represent. Of course, it’s not possible. But it’s such a worthy goal and the pleasure is purely in the exploration and the pursuit.
Nestled in this bookshelf is a very thin volume that I revisit from time to time and hold onto as a lifeline.
I’ve long sought a more zen-like nature. It is an uphill battle, yet one to which I am committed. While wandering around the Strand bookstore several years ago, I fell upon a small book that became my beacon in the wilderness of overactive thought.
I found one of the original copies of Zen in the Art of Archery, written by Eugen Herrigel and published in 1953. This book has remained beside me like a best friend. I have given many copies of the newer copyrighted version (1981) with a forward by D. T. Suzuki, to friends over the years – no doubt in hopes that they will find me more zen-like for having given them this lovely volume.
bio:Susan White is an artist known for her work with pyrographs / burn drawings, thorn works and video/installation.
In 2010, she had an artist residency at Youkobo Art Space in Tokyo. She recently created the artwork for Davis Schneiderman’s book, Blank, published by Jaded Ibis Press. Her work has been supported by grants from the Salina Art Center, The Lighton International Artist Exchange Program, The Avenue of the Arts Foundation, and the Creative Capital Foundation Professional Development Workshop among others. Writings about her work have been published in ArtPapers, The Kansas City Star, Review, The Reader, and The Salina Journal. White has exhibited her work at the Salina Art Center and the Bemis Center and she has been an active participant in the Urban Culture Project in Kansas City. She has work in the Viewing Program at the Drawing Center, and has an upcoming two person show in Tokyo in 2012. A graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute, she pursued graduate studies at Rhode Island School of Design.
