Hidden in the Stacks: Digitizing the Franklin Furnace Archive Artists' Books Vertical Files
Introduction
Hidden in the Stacks: Digitizing the Franklin Furnace Archive Artists’ Books Vertical Files is an exhibition that puts together 30 artists’ books with their vertical files, which are collections of supporting material, including bibliographic sheets, biography forms, correspondence, ephemera, news media, slide documentations, writings, and more. Much of this “behind the scenes” information about Franklin Furnace’s artists’ books collection is being made public for the first-time. Hidden in the Stacks highlights the publications of 18 artists who have worked closely with Franklin Furnace since the 1980s. While all of this vertical files material is considered supporting material, some of it was created as art and is important enough to be exhibited as art in its own right. All the vertical file materials on exhibition are facsimiles so that the original archival artifacts will not be endangered by the longtime exposure to light necessitated by public exhibition.
The Franklin Furnace/MoMA Artists’ Books Vertical Files Collection contains the materials artists provide to accompany the donations of their publications. This compilation of forms, handwritten letters and promotional literature broadens the scope for understanding artists’ creative processes, and provides insights on how the field of artists’ books developed. Scholars who research artists’ books collections mostly work with the objects in front of them – having access to the vertical files can reveal the artist’s motivations and the historical circumstances in which the book was created, and can also unearth unique mail art which was posted to select recipients only. Further, networks and connections in the international art scene are brought to light via ephemera and personal letters.
Since its inception in 1976, Franklin Furnace has assiduously preserved, cataloged, and made available to the public close to 20,000 artists’ books that were donated to its collection. With an ambitious program of regularly scheduled readings, one-person exhibitions, curated group shows, and panel discussions, Franklin Furnace developed an international word-of-mouth reputation as a premier repository of artists’ books.
Franklin Furnace recently undertook on its own a major project to digitize, catalog, and make publicly available all the original files submitted by artists from 1976 to 1993. A set of Franklin Furnace’s original collection and all corresponding materials was transferred to MoMA in 1993, and Franklin Furnace borrowed these materials back during 2019-2023 for this digitization project. Over the course of 3 years, Franklin Furnace created records for 52,737 images of 25,365 items from over 3,500 artist folders. Each image was cataloged with detailed metadata, describing the size, date, item category and source format material. With high-standard photographic documentation according to the Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative, this work resulted in page-level digitization, allowing researchers and members of the general public to explore the entire Vertical Files collection online. These newly available resources are enabling innovative research and providing long-term benefits for artists, scholars, researchers, students, and the general public. Franklin Furnace’s Vertical Files project ensures in perpetuity the long-term availability of these primary resource materials and their discoverability – all the digitized materials will be published on the CONTENTdm database and available online later this year.
Martine Aballéa
Martine Aballéa is an artist living in Paris, France. Her interdisciplinary work spans installation, photography, and artists’ books, always invoking storytelling and exploring the line between fiction and reality. Both The Elastic Hotel, postcards about an expanding utopian hotel, and her “Dream Readings” event at Franklin Furnace, investigate liminal spaces and dream worlds.
An announcement card in the exhibition is for the January 1977 event at Franklin Furnace when Jackie Apple and Martine Aballéa made a collaborative presentation: Aballéa was reluctant to read alone so Apple agreed to read with her, and invited the dancer/choreographer Erin Martin to join them. Together they created a setting for the text and the reading became the first “performance art” presentation at the Furnace. The artists read alternatively throughout the performance. On the stage during their reading, a man at a typewriter was listening to their reading, writing notes, smoking, and reading aloud.
Element Rage
1980
Jacki Apple
Jacki Apple, one of the earliest staff members at Franklin Furnace, served as curator and program manager from 1976-1980. She and Founding Director Emerita Martha Wilson also worked together as performance artists. Apple was a polymath, an artist-writer-composer working in many disciplines including performance and installation art. Her hybrid works often combined textual and sonic narrative and video; the promotional poster for one of these works, The Mexican Tapes, is displayed as part of the exhibition. Her artist’s book Partitions, shown below, is also multi-dimensional, a poetic exploration of the space between word and performance invoking symbolic imagery of windows. After the artist’s passing in 2022, Franklin Furnace co-inaugurated the Jacki Apple Award in Performance and Artist Projects, a $10,000 cash award recognizing advanced career New York artists whose practices reflect Jacki Apple’s lifelong commitment to avant-garde art.
Partitions
1976
Stephanie Brody Lederman
As a collector of language and visual imagery, Stephanie Brody Lederman also works with ordinary materials, transforming daily fragments into artistic narratives. Working with paintings, sculptures and books, Brody Lederman deploys the book as an object and expands the practice into mixed media. She exhibited her bookworks in a solo show at Franklin Furnace in 1979, including Pain Beau, bound with silver strings with handwritten tags that read “time” and “heart” on its reverse. As Brody Lederman digs into the fantasies, feelings and memories in one’s true “reality”, her work celebrates life and humanity in a heart-warming way.
Pain Beau
1979
Notes from the Couch
1985
Brian Buczak & Geoffrey Hendrick
Brian Buczak and Geoffrey Hendricks were longtime partners and collaborative interdisciplinary artists who created performances, sculpture, and artists’ books. They were both deeply involved in New York City’s Fluxus community, with Hendricks creating and organizing many Happenings. From their shared home in Lower Manhattan, they founded Money for Food Press, which published hand-made and small editions of many New York City artists, especially those associated with Fluxus and Ray Johnson’s Correspondence School. Running the length of the facade of their home is a 1984 text painting by Lawrence Weiner reading “Water Spilled From Source to Use.”
A catalog for Money for Food Press, issued with “Hell Bank” faux banknotes, and an introduction by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins, is presented as part of the exhibition. Also displayed is an item tagged “Brian Buczak and Geoffrey Hendricks Picture Collection”, presumably a play on the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection, a renowned collection of reference images available to artists and the general public. The pair lived and worked together until Buczak’s early death in 1987 from HIV/AIDS related complications. Geoffrey Hendricks continued to make visual and performance art until he passed away in May 2018.
Rulers, Ladders, and Buckets, shown below, was created to document a performance by Brian Buczak and Geoffrey Hendricks at P.S. 1 in 1977 with seven photos and drawings. The publication of this booklet marked the beginning of their press. Five Found Photos, also shown below and published by Money for Food, presents 5 tipped-in reproductions of photos that Hendricks found in German flea markets. He noticed some of the photographs were of the same people, and others shared similar structural elements, and so paired the images visually and narratively.
Rulers, Ladders and Buckets
Brian Buczak & Geoffrey Hendrick
1977
Money For Food Press
Spring Catalog
Brian Buczak & Geoffrey Hendrick
1980
Five Found Photos
Geoffrey Hendrick
1979
Guglielmo Achille Cavellini
Guglielmo Achille Cavellini, known mononymously by his surname, was an Italian artist who turned self reference into art. His methodology was to create a deliberate popular history through self-promotion. Much of his oeuvre is in the form of quotation, appropriation and reinterpretation of other artist’s works. In 1970 Cavellini coined the term autostoricizzazione (self-historicization), and from then on he produced voluminous quantities of conceptual self-promotion. His main tools, widely produced and distributed among the art cognoscenti and the general public alike, were self-portraits, postage stamps, stickers, postcards, and manifestos. In the books displayed in the exhibition, Cavellini replaces words in globally recognizable book titles with his own name, as if he authored them or they’re about him. For example, Dante’s “The Divine Comedy” becomes “The Divine Cavellini” and Karl Marx’s classic has become “Cavellini’s Capital”.
Autoritratti/ Self-portraits/ Autoportraits/ Selbstporträits
1972
25 libri per Cavellini
1973
David Cole
Longtime visual poet, David Cole, came across mail art at the time when he co-started an artist-run gallery in Brooklyn, “Henry Hicks”. Seeking a democratic community for his exploration in language and art, Cole found and took mail art as a serious way of making art that he described as “completed in dialogue and present in receipt”. Since the mid seventies, much of Cole’s work was inspired by art sent through the mail. Snippets of thoughts, drawings and diaries shared with friends are the sources of his non-linear poetic visuals. After curating a mail art show in 1985, “The Scroll Unrolls”, Cole began to focus primarily on collaboration, exchanging pages and books between visual poets and correspondence artists for a decade.
The promotional materials displayed in the exhibition are from two publications that Cole published with multiple artists, including Kostelanetz. Cole identified strongly with American poet and essayist Walt Whitman and you can see his tribute to Whitman in his Songs of the Paumonock Travellers, shown below, as well as in his autobiographical writings. Cole continued to work until his death in 2000. In 2023, David’s family generously donated a lifetime of the artists’ publications, and his personal mail art book collection to Franklin Furnace Archive.
Songs of the Paumonock Traveller
1980
No Postage Necessary if Mailed in the United States
1990
Conrad Gleber & Gail Rubini
Conrad Gleber and his late wife Gail Rubini, along with fellow artist Jim Snitzer, started Chicago Books, a publishing cooperative, in 1977. They ran their own presses, working with offset printing technology and manipulated the printing processes to produce small editions of artists’ books, prints, posters, and more. The collective regarded the production of each book as a collaborative effort between artist and printer, and extended control over all aspects of production to the artist. An exhibition titled “Chicago Books” was shown at Franklin Furnace in 1979, and guest-curated by Conrad Gleber. It included works by Chicago-based groups and individuals, and books published by the press. Some of Rubin and Gleber’s books were exhibited then and are shown here now.
Both photographers, Rubini and Gleber took different approaches with their work. Rubini frequently staged figures to illustrate her works. She used her photographs to create artists’ books, experimenting with photographic techniques, and arranging them into narratives. Rubini was Chair of the Art Department at FSU where she also taught design courses. Gleber also did figural work, turning his photographs into sculptures of manipulated images within tangible shapes.
In preparation for an exhibit curated by Franklin Furnace entitled “The Future of the Book/The Book of the Future”, intended to celebrate the Grolier Club’s 100th anniversary in 1984, Conrad Gleber created a series of notes and drafts. His preparatory materials are displayed as part of the exhibition, including meditations on the future of the book and a printing history, and his designs for exhibition materials.
Chicago Sky Line
Conrad Gleber
1977
Forever Yours
Gail Rubini
1978
Sweet Junk
Gail Rubini
1978
Scott Helmes
Scott Helmes’s work, similarly to David Cole and Richard Kostelanetz, is about experimenting with reading. Since 1972, Helmes wrote experimental poetry, produced collages and participated in mail art activities. In his book Visual Rubber Stamp Poems, and the announcement card of the show at STAMPAЯT Gallery, you can see the different techniques and materials in his work: rubberstamps, stencils, typography manipulation, and xerox/collage forms. Helmes’s playful and unconventional forms of poetry expanded the traditional literal form of poems, inviting readers to activate the reading along with his authorship.
Visual Rubber Stamp Poems
1993
Donna Henes
Dressing Our Wounds in Warm Clothes is a journal documenting Donna Henes’ installation/ritual at the Manhattan Psychiatric Center. Widely known as Mama Donna, Henes performed public equinox, solstice celebrations and spiritual counseling over the US, Canada and Europe. A pioneer in ritualistic performance art, Donna worked with chanting, reading, movement, and installation to gather healing energies into her performances. Henes was a member of the art rock punk band DISBAND, along with Ilona Granet, Diane Torr and Martha Wilson. In the autumn of 2024, the season which Mama Donna described as “the time we commemorate the seasonal demise of the light,” Henes passed away on the eve of Autumn Equinox.
For our exhibition, we selected multiple promotional materials from Henes’ rituals, including her trademark “Eggs on End” ceremony. Henes has performed four times for Franklin Furnace, including her “Chants for Peace/ Chance for Peace” series when she invited the public to write messages of peace on orange ribbons which gradually filled the installation. While the performances she led in New York received support and praise, her reception on the West Coast was not the same. The 1981 news clip here describes Henes’ arrest by the Los Angeles police for her ribbon-tying in Pershing Square during the “Chants for Peace/ Chance for Peace” performance.
Dressing our Wounds in Warm Clothes
1982
Richard Kostelanetz
Kostelanetz was crucially involved in the NYC downtown literary and art scene, and his work spans visual poetry, critics, films and sound recordings. Most of his literary work are published in limited editions by small presses, including the unconventional novel In the Beginning, 1971. The artist uses a formalist approach to challenge conceptions of how to “read” books. For more than 20 years, Kostelanetz consistently produced visual poetry in various formats, including numerical poems, audio and video poems and holographic poetry.
Obliterate
1974
Assembling Assembling
1978
Tenth Assembling
David Cole, Scott Helmes & Richard Kostelanetz
1980
Ann Messner
Ann Messner has been prolific in performing in public spaces. The book Mass Transit, shown below, documents her 1979 performance “Balloon,” when inside a packed subway car during rush hour she slowly inflates a large red balloon. Messner has focused her practice on the relationship between private and public spheres since the 1970s. The sites she chose are, to her, “archetypal symbols of our modern times, where technology, mass culture and urban life are predominant.” Slides of Messner’s sculpture in the air above Broadway are displayed here. Messner received her BFA from Pratt Institute in 1973, where she was a professor in the Department of Fine Arts until her retirement in 2022.
Mass Transit
1979
Marcos Kurtycz & Stefan Morawski
Born in Poland, Marcos Kurtycz moved to Mexico when he was 34 and worked there until his death in 1996. Kurtycz combined and intermixed elements and symbols of Polish and Mexican culture in his visual works. Kurtycz artworks often combined performances and graphic design with recurring elements, some of which can be seen in the exhibition. Kurtycz described his art as a “matrix” of ideas, performances, and ephemera driven by political issues.
One his long running “matrices” was “Softwars” – in reference to a symbolic war against art institutions and the globalising art market. The concept for Softwars was developed with Stefan Morawski, a Polish philosopher and close friend. Together, they published a series of artist’s books under the “Softwars matrix”, three of which are displayed in the exhibition and one of which is shown below.
The public actions of Kurtycz, which he defined as “artifacts”, were performances of intervention, provoking engagement with political culture. Kurtycz was a practitioner of body-based performance, especially through his constantly putting his body at risk and pushing it to its limit, thereby provoking strong reactions and connecting with the audience. Kurtycz also carried out mail-art “bombings” –postal deliveries repeated frequently over time – aimed at cultural commercialization. He targeted art galleries in cultural capitals and art magazines like ArtForum’s editorial committees. Kurtycz mailed these works of art not to provoke pleasure but to harass, punish, and point out the art world’s problems.
Software Number Five
Marcos Kurtycz & Stefan Morawski
1988
The Ten Anticommandments
Marcos Kurtycz & Stefan Morawski
1989
Ćmamoth
Marcos Kurtycz
1990
Carlo Pittore
In the 1970s while studying in Rome, Italy, Charley Stanley changed his name to Carlo Pittore because local children had nicknamed him “Carlo Pittore”, (”Charles the Painter”). Pittore and his close friend Bern Porter created mail art under the stamp series “Post Me”, which he published through “Pittore Euforico, New York”. He frequently used ME as a title, to indicate both himself, and the postal abbreviation of his adopted state, Maine. He cast his persona of “Carlo Pittore” in various scenarios, displayed in the exhibition in both book and postcard form. Charles the Painter is recognizable by his classical Italian hat, distinctive glasses and facial hair.
Carlo Pittore was also a prolific painter, as his painterly nickname suggests, and he frequently painted portraits of friends and artists he knew. In his window gallery on East Tenth Street in Manhattan, the “Galleria dell’Occhio” or “Gallery of the Eye”, he displayed international mail art and his latest paintings.
The Adventures of Carlo Pittore
1979
Colleagues
1979
JoAnna Poehlmann
JoAnna Poehlmann’s Book Worms is a fictional extratemporal mythical insect featured in many of his artworks. Poehlmann is a Wisconsin born-and-based artist whose art has always been inspired by nature. She works in many mediums: drawings, etchings, prints, paintings, and of course, artists’ books. Poehlmann collects specimens for inspiration and reference, acquiring birds that have hit windows, or animals already dead, making sure to engage in a humane practice. “I’m on the side of the birds, and please quote me on that,” she said when confronted on the use of feathers in her art. Her works are meticulously detailed and have been compared to a naturalist’s journal, all of it honoring the natural world.
Book Worms
1987
Marilyn R. Rosenberg
The shape poems by Marilyn Rosenberg, one of which is shown below, were created for Tenth Assembling, another mail art anthology, produced by Guglielmo Achille Cavellini and Charles J. Stanley (Carlo Pittore). She frequently created visual poetry, either as stand-alone art or as long distance interactions through mail art, where language and visual marks create a sculptural space and build ideas into form. Her book, Unit of Measure, is a compendium of minimalist visual poetry where words become objects and objects become poems. Since 1977 Rosenberg has amassed a body of work consisting of more than 600 titles that include visual poems, artists’ books, mail art, drawings, unique sculptural bookworks, artists’ stamps, computer collages, and more.
Unit of Measure
1978
Erica Van Horn
Black Dog White Bark
1987
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-in-training born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated with her BA in Art History from Grinnell College in 2020, and is currently studying towards an MLIS at the Pratt Institute. Her research and collecting interests include visual ephemera such as posters and postcards, design history, zines and artist’s books. Through curating this exhibit, she has gained a deeper understanding of the history of book arts, and has become well acquainted with the collection at Franklin Furnace.
Online exhibition designed by Mia Greenberg, FF Fellowship Intern 2024-2025.
Poster designed by Huiyu Yang.
Hidden in the Stacks: Digitizing the Franklin Furnace Archive Artists’ Books Vertical Files, the 10th Annual Live at the Library exhibition, is curated by Fang-Yu Liu and Nicole Rosengurt, with photography by Tsubasa F. Berg, in memory of Michael Katchen, Senior Archivist, Franklin Furnace. LATL X is presented in partnership with The Pine Tree Foundation of New York, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; The New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the Office of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; Pratt Institute Libraries; The Silicon Valley Community Foundation; and the Board of Directors, members, and friends of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.
