The opening reception for Artists Making Books will take place at the American Academy in Rome tonight, Thursday, September 26, from 6-9PM. The evening includes a conversation between two collectors of artist’s books, Claudia Consolandi and Giovanni Aldobrandini, at 6:30pm. The exhibition will be open from September 27 to December 7, 2024.

Artists Making Books: Pages of Refuge is an exhibition looking at the relationship between arts, graphic design, publishers, and books—ultimately exploring their physicality and their power of circulation. Based around books that Ed Ruscha donated to the AAR Library while visiting in 2001, the exhibition brings together over one hundred books envisioned, conceived, and made by artists from 1905 to the present. Artists Making Books searches to prove how the book was, and continues to be, an object of experimentation, a way of resisting commercial constraints and becoming, ultimately, a space of refuge.

The show will feature works by Civitellians including such as William Kentridge (CRF 1996), Rochelle Feinstein (CRF 2001, Juror), Allen Frame (DG 2021), Francis Offman (CRF 2024), Sabrina Mezzaqui (CRF 2000, Juror), and Xu Bing (CRF 1999, Juror). Learn more here.

Image: Giuseppe Capogrossi, Capogrossi, 1966, published by Cavallino and printed by Serigrafia Marchitalia-Bogoni