International visitor from New York’s MoMA

We were delighted recently to meet May Castleberry, Editor of Contemporary Editions for the Library Council of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

"A central focus of the Library Council is its artist's publication program. At least every other year, the Library Council publishes a specially printed artist's book or edition that is intended to shed light on the Museum collections and to give artists an opportunity to experiment with the book as an art form...To date, the Council has published projects by Beatriz Milhazes, Vija Celmins and Eliot Weinberger, Gabriel Orozco, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Olafur Eliasson, Doug Aitken, Yun-Fei Ji, and Abelardo Morell with Ted Muehling."

For more information on the MoMA Library Council see http://www.moma.org/learn/resources/library/council/index

May was responsible for the publication of Olafur Eliasson's  Your house , recently purchased for the ALA  Artists' Books Collection. The catalogue record may be viewed in Onesearch. Readers of this blog might be interested in reading May's essay on their most recent publication The island of Rota , by the neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, designer Ted Muehling and photographer Abelardo Morell.

May's visit to the State Library gave her the opportunity to explore a small selection of Australian artists' books from the Australian Library of Art collection. She was particularly impressed with Tomasso Durante's Limes, Victoria Cooper's Australian banquet, Noga Freiberg and Peter Lyssiotis' Homeland  and G.W. Bot's Black swan and Offerings. It was lovely to chat with her about artists' books generally, including the MoMA collection, and the artists' books world in the US.

Conversation did move on to how to avoid poisonous snakes in Australia and grizzly bears in the US! Thank you for calling in while you were in Brisbane May! 

Helen and the ALA team.