American Academy in Rome presents Artists Making Books: Pages of Refuge, an exhibition looking at the relationship between arts, graphic design, publishers, and books—ultimately exploring their physicality and their power of circulation.

Artists Making Books is based around the books that Ed Ruscha donated to the AAR Library while visiting the Academy in 2001. The exhibition brings together over one hundred books envisioned, conceived, and made by artists from 1905 to the present, from AAR’s Arthur & Janet Ross Library and two major private Italian collections.

Carrying experiences and experiments, the exhibition will explore the intrinsic qualities of books with a particular focus on the experimentation of artists with the medium. From materiality and size, letter presses to pamphlets, three-dimensional constructions, source engines, and classifications, artists who make books conceptualize and redesign the media.

The exhibition presents examples of radical approaches to books. Subverting, inventing, inverting and celebrating letters, words, texts, form and shape; it shows a selected history of how books were created with different creative and graphic solutions.

Looking at the relationship between the historical avant-gardes and the contemporary moment, Artists Making Books wants to prove how the book was, and continues to be, an object of experimentation, a way of resisting commercial constraints and becoming, ultimately, a space of refuge.

The show will display early examples of modernist books by European artists Natalia Goncharova, Tristan Tzara, Fortunato Depero, and Marcel Duchamp; work by artists associated with Pop art such as Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and John Baldassari; and prominent contemporary artists that have been AAR Residents such as Kara Walker, Jenny Holzer, and William Kentridge. Books by Rome Prize and Italian Fellows will be displayed, including those by Ana Mendieta, Sol LeWitt, Tony Cokes, Rochelle Feinstein, Tricia Treacy, Allen Frame, Luca Vitone, and Nico Vascellari.

Focusing mainly on dialogues between Italy and the United States, Artists Making Books will also be a selection of books by contemporary artists available through a special display. We invite the public to explore these and to consult books in the Academy’s Barbara Goldsmith Rare Book Room.

The show is curated by Ilaria Puri Purini, Andrew Heiskell Arts Director, with Sebastian Hierl, Drue Heinz Librarian; Lexi Eberspacher, Program Associate; and Johanne Affricot, Curator-at-Large.

The exhibition is designed by Supervoid, an architecture office based in Rome led by the architects Benjamin Gallegos Gabilondo, Marco Provinciali, and Anna Livia Friel. Supervoid’s work focuses on space as a material and cultural construction. The office has realized projects at various scales in Italy, Chile, France, and the United States. Their work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Royal Institute of British Architects, and the Milan Triennale.