The Bainbridge Island Museum of Art in Washington is unusual among US museums for its dedicated exhibition space for artists’ books. With a collection of over 4,000 pieces, the Sherry Grover Gallery allows the museum to show artists’ books in all their glory, displaying the innovative approaches to storytelling and cleverness of construction that are hallmarks of the medium.
This month, the museum opened a landmark exhibition that gathers artists’ books exploring Black histories, identities, and futures. Presented with Handwork 2026, Booking: Artists’ Books By Black Artists will run through February 21.
The 47 works in the exhibition take many forms. Some are zines; others unfold like accordions or become sculptural objects that challenge the definition of a book. “Sometimes there’s no other way,” says curator Colette Gaiter, professor emerita of art and Africana studies at the University of Delaware. “Sometimes you have to tell a story in a nonlinear way.”
Poet and artist Krista Franklin has spoken about how she felt blocked in writing her memoiristic work Under the Knife until she brought methods from collage art to the project, cutting pages and rearranging words and images. Other books on display—like a handcrafted edition of Octavia E. Butler’s 1979 novel Kindred, illustrated with linoleum block cuts by artist Alison Saar—call back to a time when novels and other linear narratives often included fine illustrations.
Krista Franklin’s Under the Knife combines text, handwriting, altered materials, drawings, photographs, and a medical image, traveling through through her body’s ancestry, memory, history, present, and future, 2021, French-link handbound book blocks, Coptic-stitched to a clothbound hardcover colophon; paper wrap cover, foil-stamped on front and spined; printed on five different papers using Indigo 12000, RISO RZ 390U, and letterpress; numbered 18 of 500, 9.25 x 3 x 11.75 in. (box), 9 x 11 x 2.25 in. (book).
