For this season’s most exciting books, look beyond the bestseller list and shops. They’re downtown at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Don’t go expecting chick lit or coffeetable tomes. The new exhibition, “The Book as Art,” displays 108 creations that defy conventional perceptions of book forms.
Culled by curator Krystyna Wasserman from the museum’s 800-plus volumes, this mesmerizing library spans fantasy, folklore, self-help, poetry, memoir, romance, gossip, politics and ecology; plot lines skim ephemeral dreams to the gravitas of slavery, holocaust and geopolitical strife.
As varied as the content are the structures. Beckoning like sirens are accordion forms, scrolls, tunnels, fans, shadowbox silhouettes, radio parts, crushed soda cans, a magic cube, crank-up toy, doll-sized bed, and quirky adaptations of those beloved pop-ups. The text-laden mingle with those expressing a purely visual dialog.
Even the handful that seem contrived or gimmicky have their charms. The only disappointment is not being able to feel the handmade papers and flip past the displayed pages of these marvelously tactile pieces. At the artists’ reception, several shared the same regret (but of course would be happy to create new editions you could thumb through to your heart’s delight … for the right price.)
Fortunately, viewers can read several of the works cover-to-cover at a computer station. The simulation technology’s fantastic — and expensive, limiting the number digitized.
Some derive the book’s structure from its subject. Brenda Watson tooled her pages into large bird wings in a story contrasting humans’ love of watching birds in flight and their compulsion to cage them.
Linda Smith’s “Inside Chance” combines an earth motif and poetry in a trick magic cube. Turning the cube rearranges the words into different message. The poem, explained the artist, communicates parallel plots: a man and woman, and a society and earth, level damage that goes ignored until it’s too late.
In “After the Deluge,” Susan Goethel Campbell reinterpretes Noah’s Ark for the 21st century in her intricately etched work. She explained her device of using elements of comedy and tragedy, and materials such as snippets of newspaper articles, to examine human encroachment on animal habitats. Look closely at the inside covers for her clever constellation of animals. Also on display: Campbell’s inventive slide-open narrative on suburban sprawl; the perfectly matched format features text atop antique rural landscape paintings.
Susan Joy Share’s “Carrots Again?” tantalizes with a cigarette-girl-style tray of miniaturized manuscripts. They impart mixed messages from society and the food industry: Eat healthy, be thin, indulge.
Drifting into the subconscious, “The Adventuress” is a nameless, topless heroine who wanders across borders of time and reality. If such events as reincarnation as a ghost, metamorphosis into a moth, an affair with Napoleon Bonaparte, and giving birth to a talking cat seem too trippy, let Audrey Niffenegger’s spellbinding monochrome aquatint illustrations carry you through the dreamscape. The book was just published — a “complete coincidence” assures the Chicago author/artist, known for her bestseller, “The Time Traveler’s Wife.”
“Volo-Volume (Flight-Volume)” arrests passersby with an ominously dark scene of a deserted beach scene, its black sprays expressing artist Elisabetta Gut’s anguish over her husband’s death.
Visual puns and wordplays add levity. M.L. Van Nice’s “Swiss Army Book” symbolizes a toolbox of knowledge with its slide-out gizmos. Julie Chen baked up her “Bon Bon Mots” from letterpress on paper, polymer clay and Plexiglas. In Miriam Shenizer’s “How to Talk About Art,” a pop-up rat (an anagram for art) offers Artspeak lessons.
There’s a literal soap opera employing the sudsy device to reveal text about a character’s attempt to wash away sorrow. For “Bird’s Head Haggadah,” Joyce Ellen Weinstein hammered, patina’dand soldered metals and fused jewels to create a metaphorical ancient artifact.
What an astonishing library this is, rich with poetry, prose, clichés, pictographs, news clips, letters, numerals, even musical score squares that in a brilliant sweep, silently play the crescendo of Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony.”
This anthology’s tame title belies its thrills. Regardless of age, gender or preferred literary genre, anyone will relish perusing the WMWA’s 20th anniversary blockbuster.
The Book As Art
On view through Feb. 4
» Venue: National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1250 New York Ave., NW
» Info: 202-783-5000; nmwa.org
» Related event: Create Your Own Artist’s Book at 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Sat., Dec. 2
