The Collaborative Artist's Book

"Offering readers a rare glimpse into collaborations between poets and painters from the 1950s to the present, this book highlights how the artist's book became a critical form for experimental American artists in the 20th and 21st centuries. In addition to providing a broad overview of the artist's book form since 1945 and the many ongoing debates surrounding it, this book thinks through the challenges, from the disciplinary to the institutional, that these forms continue to pose. It then turns to look at five case studies, detailing not only how each individual collaboration came to be but how all five together engage and challenge conventional ideals about art, subjectivity, poetry, and interpersonal relations, as well as complex social questions related to gender and race. Making several of these books, typically consigned to special collections libraries and museum archives, more available to a broad readership, the book aims to brings to light a whole genre of works that has been largely forgotten or neglected in critical scholarship and institutional exhibitions. As this study illustrates, the artist's book has been an especially rich site for both poets and painters to engage with the world around them and with each other since the mid-twentieth century and consequently deserves more scholarly and institutional attention than it has been previously granted"-