ABC to Z : Abecedaria & Dictionaries from Franklin Furnace Artists’ Books Collection
ABC to Z: Abecedaria & Dictionaries from Franklin Furnace Artists’ Books Collection
Books made by artists are available to be seen by appointment
Curated by Fang-Yu Liu and Nicole Rosengurt
Detailed descriptions of the individual books are available below…
Curatorial Statement
Dictionaries, anthologies, and ABCs are universally recognized building blocks for learning. ABC to Z brings together highlights from Franklin Furnace’s Artists’ Book Collection to showcase the diverse ways artists utilize and transform traditional book formats. Some artists play with the visual structure of letters to abstract them from their linguistic associations. Others assign personal rather than universal meaning to letters, creating an alphabet for one. Artists who create alternative publications bring new order to masses of information in order to highlight specific themes, ideas and statements.
Artists’ book makers also alter traditional reference book formats to expand existing definitions, explore words and their meanings, and curate information for the public. Artists may also choose to use physical dictionaries as source material, recomposing and creating stories with the text and illustrations they discover in reference books. The sequential nature of the English alphabet offers another scaffolding system on which artists may exhibit their versions of the world.
Aesthetic experimentation with foundational reference books and traditional formats creates fertile ground for artistic experimentation. Traditional organization and presentation of knowledge, when expanded by artists, broadens and deepens meaning and stimulates new levels of reflection and subjectivity. By taking deep dives into single terms, artists underscore differing perspectives and reveal their singular views of the world. Some artists even make themselves authorities in specific fields by focusing on particular subjects and creating compendia thereof. Their final products, artists’ books which respond to and represent their chosen subject matter, are revelatory of the manners in which artists, and by extension all humans, process and interpret the world.
ALL BOOKS INCLUDED IN THE EXHIBITION
Dictionary Stories
2022
Magdalen Wong
Dictionary Stories is a collection of 13 stories that are crafted solely with example sentences and illustrations found in dictionaries worldwide. The dictionaries used were existing dictionaries in physical and/or virtual forms. There were no constraints to the type or in the number of dictionaries used. These were no restraints in the language, style, and length of the stories. Instructions for creating a narrative were given to 13 participants between 2020-2021. – Artist’s statement
A Thousand Book Titles and Contents
2022
Martin Aurand
Ed Ruscha's Twentysix Gasoline Stations photobook sparked an interest. Martin Aurand conceived a book of book titles rather than a photobook of photographs - or is it a photobook without photos. A quote by Ed Ruscha surfaced from Henri Man Barendse's "Ed Ruscha: An Interview," published in After Image in 1981: "I could see a thousand books, a thousand Titles." A Thousand Book Titles and Contents actually includes eleven titles formulated like Ruscha's photo book titles. A list of contents accompanies each title. In a web of wordplay and appropriation, each title carries associations with Ruscha, his photobooks, and/or with Los Angeles' literature, art, and urbanism. Every Letter of the Hollywood Sign evokes Ruscha's Every Building on the Sunset Strip photobook and his obsession with the Hollywood Sign. The book concludes with a play on Ruscha's Blank Sign artworks that renders the collection open-ended up to a thousand book titles and contents. – Artist’s statement
Bad Lay (The Rude Printing Compendium)
2018/2020
Rachel Zoller
A collection of 120 (rude) technical terms, phrases, abbreviations and other expressions mostly relating to letterpress printing from 1888. Bad Lay is a faulty special edition that came about during the production of The Rude Printing Compendium. Each book has been annotated by the printer and marked Defective Copy. – Artist’s statement
mo'jam al arabeia
2015
Farah Khelil & antoine lefebvre editions
This project is the fruit of a very special encounter with an object. After the death of her grandfather in 2012, Farah Khelil explored his library and found an old family dictionary in Arabic (Mo’jam Arabia), at least what was left of it, for it had been devoured by book eaters. She decided to collect some fragments without knowing what she would do with them. Impressed by how carefully cut the pieces were, she wanted to transform them into artworks that would honor the memory of her grandfather. The book is made from the 108 pages that hadn’t been eaten. This sequence of pages was used to build the lay-out structure of an artist’s book. The idea was to empty all the textual content —captions and definitions— to keep only the figures, the dropped initials, and the page numbers. The emptied columns of the dictionary were then filled with artistic contributions and texts that were commissioned by invited authors. Between 2015 and 2019, Antoine Lefebvre collaborated with Farah Khelil on project bookworm, about the relationship between book-eating and book-loving. – Publisher’s statement
The Pill Book
2015
Keith Wilson
A bright and shiny catalog of over 650 pharmaceutical drugs. With to- scale pill images originally found in an eponymous tomme from 1996, the hand-stitched book is a must-have record of marketing, nomenclature and product design.Each book has a unique cover-spine-end paper color combination. – Artist’s statement
JPA1 & JPA2
1973, 1974
Jean-Pierre Armeaux
JPA1 : Ironwhorsebook 5. Clippings from encyclopedia indexes, and mechanics magazines or catalogs.
JPA2: Ironwhorsebook 8. Clippings from various sections of an encyclopedia. Letter H-I.
The Pencil Picture Dictionary
1973
Jenny Snider
An alphabet book contains drawings by the artist and entries from Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary. "A Head, hand, heart and tooth publication." – Colophon.
Sorted Books
2013
Nina Katchadourian
The Sorted Books project began in 1993, and it has taken place on many different sites over the years, ranging from private homes to specialized book collections. The process is the same in every case: I sort through a collection of books, pull particular titles, and eventually group the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence. The final results are shown either as photographs of the book clusters or as the actual stacks themselves, often shown on the shelves of the library they came from. Taken as a whole, the clusters are a cross-section of that library's holdings that reflect that particular library's focus, idiosyncrasies, and inconsistencies. They sometimes also function as a portrait of the particular book owner. The Sorted Books project is an ongoing project which I add to almost each year, and there are hundreds of images in the ongoing archive to date. – Artist’s Statement
Alphabet Series
1974
Peter Hutchinson
Peter Hutchinson’s 1974 book Alphabet Series features each letter of the alphabet, alongside a corresponding photograph. A simple premise yes, but one that elicits Hutchinson’s own personal stories: ‘P’ for planning—for when he knew he would need to pass time at the laundromat, had made sure to bring a book and threw the book into the washing machine absentmindedly. The accompanying photo features a book, left to dry out in the oven. ‘T’ for Teeny and the Schefflera Plant—for when Teeny Duchamp had gifted him the schefflera plant made famous for a cameo in Marcel Duchamp’s film A Game of Chess. “I recognized it at once, although it looked younger then,” he scribbles below the photo. Hutchinson infuses humor and attention to detail at once, with every description. New York City’s John Gibson Gallery published the out-of-print book as an edition of 1000. – Printed Matter
Le Detente
1977
Bruce Barber
Series of text on the word detente and the word's role in USSR/ US negotiations.
The A-Z Book
1969
Thomas Ockerse
Thomas Ockerse is a graphic designer who taught at Rhode Island School of Design from 1971-2008. His interest in book arts and concrete poetry, what he referred to as "word and image equations" developed when he was an assistant professor at Indiana University (1967-71). This book was produced at that time and explores the alphabet through a series of die-cut pages in overlays in black and white. – James Cummins Bookseller Inc.
On alternating black and white papers, Ockerse deftly uses paper cutting and varied paper sizes to transmute letterforms; K becomes X, E becomes F becomes T, and so on. A testament to midcentury typographic wit. Plastic comb binding with paper covers. – Bromer Booksellers & Gallery
A Dictionary of Steps
1980
Athena Tacha
Compulsively recorded and systematically organized, A Dictionary of Steps compiles architectural diagrams of staircases. The result is a testimony to the various sculptural configurations of steps, developed and expanded upon with a kinesthetic and rhythmic language that bears similarities to Morse code. Ultimately, the reader is encouraged to take a nuanced approach to an architectural element that is often overlooked as a pragmatic and unremarkable feature of any household. – Printed Matter
100 Things Not Worth Repeating: On Repetition
2011
Marianne Holm Hansen
100 Things Not Worth Repeating: On Repetition is part of a series of projects by Marianne Holm Hansen that examine repetition in general, and the usefulness of assuming repetition as a model for progression, in particular. In 2007, and in response to a situation where repetition of the same task was beginning to seem pointless, she initiated the project '100 things not worth repeating': an online public survey with the specific aim of collecting-to-share examples of when repetition proves futile. 434 people responded to the call. As survey responses were received, conversations regarding repetition in general, and the usefulness of assuming repetition as a method for progression, in particular, took place. 100
Things Not Worth Repeating: On Repetition is the result of the survey and subsequent discussions. It presents 100 selected responses to the survey, contextualized by essays, texts and artworks 'on repetition'.
– Artist’s statement
The ABC Hate Book
1990
Lisa Day
Artist book of rhyming couplets about a presumed romantic breakup. Alphabetical exploration of hateful sayings that read like a short story. A single capital letter in alphabetical order is printed on each page followed by a hate aphorism, e.g., W Why? WHY? would I want you back? – Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection
ABC Calligraphy
1980
Marlys Skelton
This slim book of calligraphy was originally written for the author's students at the University of Minnesota. – Garden of Print Bookshop
More Funny Artists' Names
1978
Gigi Barendse
Book consists of various 20th century artists' names, e.g. "Blinky Palermo", "Ida Applebroog", "Dottie Attie", "Mary Miss", "Horatio Alger" et al.
All images taken by Franklin Furnace Archive.
Curator Bios
Fang-Yu Liu catalogs artists’ books, archives artworks and artists’ files, creates structures, organizes performance events, works/ talks with artists in their studios, knots, grows plants, learns how to think, to care and to love.
Nicole Rosengurt is an arts-worker and archivist born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated with her BA in Art History from Grinnell College in 2020, and is her MLIS from Pratt Institute in 2023. Her research and collecting interests include visual ephemera such as posters and postcards, design history, zines and artist’s books.
Online exhibition designed by Rohan Subramaniam, FF Intern, Fall 2024.
Poster design by Huiyu Yang.
