Today at the Archive

01/07/2016

Today at the Archive has an upcoming exhibition in Oakland on Jan. 23rd at E.M. Wolfman. You can help make it happen.

We put together this Go Fund Me page to support our current project 'forget how to read' at E.M. Wolfman, a bookstore, gallery and project space in downtown Oakland. We hope to raise $1500 to go towards materials, printing, installation, travel and artist speaker fees. Any individual who donates...

07/17/2015

Today at the archive Ali Padgett looks at Letha Wilson’s Between a Rock (Gottlund Verlag, 2014)

Printed Matter, Inc. an organization dedicated to the dissemination, understanding and appreciation of artists' books released Letha Wilson’s Between a Rock last year, a delightful musing on nature. Her artworks are both photographic and sculptural; just google Colorado Purple, 2012 to see a mix of concrete and c-prints. The book is a healthy exercise for Wilson; a chance to navigate the 2D world of the page, while still engaging with ideas of space and materiality. Most of the images in the book are of the natural world; leaves, plants, and sky. Within these pages playful interventions emerge; a fold, a hole punch, a perceived crumpled page. It is exactly this kind of curious behavior that propels the book from an object to an experience.

05/07/2015

A teaser from an upcoming Today at the Archive poster series. Expect to see these bad boys around CCA in the next two weeks.

Created in collaboration with Ali Padgett, Beth Abrahamson and Amelia Brod.

A teaser from an upcoming Today at the Archive poster series. Expect to see these bad boys around CCA in the next two weeks. Created in collaboration with Ali Padgett, Beth Abrahamson and Amelia Brod

05/05/2015

Today at the Archive we look at 'Mud in My Veins' by Amber Gayle and Stacy Wakefield published in 1998 by Evil Twin Press.

-Mud in My Veins, Grass in My Feet, Blood in the Sky, Cows in the Creek-

Today at the Archive we look at 'Mud in My Veins' by Amber Gayle and Stacy Wakefield published in 1998 by Evil Twin Press.

-Mud in My Veins, Grass in My Feet, Blood in the Sky, Cows in the Creek-

04/30/2015

Today at the archive Tanya Gayer looks at 'Laments' by Jenny Holzer-

I have always viewed Jenny Holzer’s work as an act of persistence; as a female making art in a man’s world and as an artist working with text-based work that was not readily accepted in the art world of the 80’s. Holzer’s Truisms consisted of phrases such as “Protect Me from What I Want” and were featured on ticker tape marquees or projected on buildings. This work has evolved with technological shifts and even maintain versatility as her phrases have been translated into different languages. They can be defly transferred into various locations and ‘exhibited’ to provide yet another brief moment of impact in the public sphere.

Holzer expounds upon this everlasting quality to her work in her series of marble benches and additionally in her book, Laments. The text that is engraved in her benches and the font in Laments recall tombstones and memorials that remain as bodies decay and events are forgotten. The texts are centered in the middle of the page or bench similar to a grave site and rely on a stark contrast between the white of the bench or the white of the page to be easily read. The marble benches are thick blocks and undoubtedly weighty structures that embody a force that would be difficult to destroy. With no other visual cues, these works are quiet and just as the letters sink into the marble or the page, their statements sink into the mind and linger there for some time.

At the time of producing Laments in 1989, Holzer was on the cusp of becoming the first woman who represented the United States at the Venice Biennial. She was also one of the few women at the time who was commissioned by the Dia Foundation. Perhaps Holzer’s idea of the female voice in the art market during this time period were what encouraged the use of mediums that were persistent as to reflect her desires. It was and is a voice that should be visible, powerful, and unavoidable.

04/24/2015

Today at the Archive we look at 'In between' by San Francisco based graphic designer Tom Bonauro. There is little information to be found on this intriguing image based book. If your curious come visit it at the Simpson Library.

04/02/2015

Today at the Archive guest contributor Harriet Horobin-Worley writes-

“Art remains a curious and elitist drink.” General Idea’s cocktails are the medium by which art will be introduced to the masses. The art world is an ongoing “revolutionary party” and this book is both an invitation to it and a dispatch from its midst. The music is loud and the punch bowl is spiked. Ostensibly rooted in a very specific place and time - The Color Bar at General Idea’s 1984 exhibit - this book transcends, as all books and all drunks do, its own temporality. A reader can pick it up today and follow a recipe as fresh as it was twenty years ago, can find a message relevant to their own drinks cupboard. The newlyweds anxious to find out how to impress their dinner guests, the middle-aged couple installing their wet bar in the new shag-carpeted basement, the young students moving into shared living situations and placing ironic prints on the wall - General Idea extends an open invite to everyone and ushers them in with a welcoming smile.

03/31/2015

Huzzah! Today at the Archive is now on Tumblr too.

Click the link bellow to check out our latest post on Printed Matter a New York based non-profit dedicated too the dissemination, understanding and appreciation of artists’ books.

'Today at the Archive', will post weekly selections form the California College of the Arts Artists...

03/24/2015

Today at the archive we look at Bread & Puppet: Utility Book by Peter Schumann.

Schumann writes "Puppet theater is of action rather than dialogue. The action is reduced to the simplest dance-like and specialized gestures. A puppet may be a hand only, or it may be a complicated body of many heads, hands, rods and fabric.We have two types of puppet shows: good ones and bad ones, but all of them are for good and against evil.”

03/12/2015

Today at the archive we look at Blueberry Express by New York-based Japanese artist Misaki Kawai.

Kawai's practice often toys with perspective and scale. For Blueberry Express Kawai created large scale sculptures and installations, which are transformed into miniature worlds on the pages of her book.

Today at the archive we look at Blueberry Express by New York-based Japanese artist Misaki Kawai.

Kawai's practice often toys with perspective and scale. For Blueberry Express Kawai created large scale sculptures and installations, which are transformed into miniature worlds on the pages of her book.

03/10/2015

Today at the Archive curator Rui Tang looks at the artists book and exhibition Chopsticks by artist duo Song D**g and Yin Xiuzhen published in 2003.

Through themes such as “Eating, Drinking, Playing and Happiness,” Song D**g and Yin Xiuzhen turned the publication into a celebration for their relationship and shared memories. Referencing a pair of chopsticks, the book connotes the interdependence between husband and wife, as well as an emotional bond that holds the two together.

03/03/2015

Today at the archive we look at Love Letter by San Francisco based artist Angi Brzycki.

Love Letter was a project from February 2013-February 2014. Brzycki typed a love letter, made 100 copies and inserted them in the SF weekly free newspaper on Wednesday. The content of the letters were appropriated (stolen) from formerly written love letters, poems and lyrics. There is no indication of who wrote the original nor what the copy was intended for.

03/03/2015

Today at the archive Ali Padgett writes on 'The order of nonsense: The first thousand numbers classified in alphabetical order' by Claude Closky.

A small pamphlet sized book containing fourteen pages of the first thousand numbers spelled out, in English, in alphabetical order, and separated by commas, is of course an artist book, residing in the artist’s book section in an art library of an art college located in San Francisco, CA on eleven eleven eighth street. It is there at this very moment on Monday, March third at ten thirty two pm.

A small pamphlet sized book containing fourteen pages of the first thousand numbers spelled out, in English, in alphabetical order, and separated by commas, is of course an artist book, residing in the artist’s book section in an art library of an art college located in San Francisco, CA on eleven eleven eighth street. It is there at this very moment on Monday, March third at ten thirty two pm.

02/21/2015

Today at the Archive we look at Kim Beck's A FIELD GUIDE TO WEEDS. The artists writes that the guide "...masquerades as a 19th century pocket guide, but is a guide in which the weeds themselves have taken over. This project uses the physical form of the book as a metaphor for a crack in the city sidewalk: the dandelion, pigweed, and poison ivy—the very plants we step over, ignore, dig up, or scrupulously avoid—creep out of the gutter, up pages, and overrun the book."

Today at the Archive we look at Kim Beck's A FIELD GUIDE TO WEEDS. The artists writes that the guide "...masquerades as a 19th century pocket guide, but is a guide in which the weeds themselves have taken over. This project uses the physical form of the book as a metaphor for a crack in the city sidewalk: the dandelion, pigweed, and poison ivy—the very plants we step over, ignore, dig up, or scrupulously avoid—creep out of the gutter, up pages, and overrun the book."

02/18/2015

Hello Liberated Library Users-

'Today at the Archive' will post weekly selections from the CCA's Artists Books Collection. All featured publications are available for use at The Meyer or Simpson Library in Oakland and San Francisco.

If you are interested in contributing a review or interview/ are making or know of an artists book that you would like to share don't hesitate to message us.

02/03/2015

Today at the archive we focus on 'Palimpsest' the first artist book by Ann Lovett created in 1990. Lovett writes "Frustrated with the limitations of single images, I decided to create more complex and multi-layered imagery through the pages of a book."