Creativity, Community & Emergence: Book Artists Finding Hope in Isolation—a TBA Exhibit

Triangle Book Arts is excited to partner with the Cleveland County Arts Council in Shelby, NC for our latest group exhibit. The exhibit runs from July 7—August 11, 2022.

An opening reception will be held on July 7 from 5pm—7pm.

Accordion books, button books, collages, printmaking, retablo installation, books in boxes, postcards, and book marks are just some of the forms of art that members of North Carolina’s Triangle Book Arts (TBA) have created to communicate and express hope during the isolation of the pandemic. Accustomed to sharing their work and meeting to share skills, swap supplies, and show their latest work in community workshops, the group sought ways to communicate and share in new and challenging circumstances. In this exhibit, they share work that they showed last summer in a group exhibit at Duke Hospital, which was open only to caregivers, patients, and their families; art they sent to each other in the U.S. Mail (“Mail Art”); and works they have made more recently during this uncertain time of emergence.

Book art embraces a surprising array of skills and approaches from letterpress printing to origami, collage, painting, and photography. TBA members define “book art” widely, from art that uses and plays with forms of the book as a medium of expression to any work that refers to the book as an idea or form of inspiration. This new exhibit includes the work of more than twenty-five artists and as many, if not more, forms of art, from charming and playful to the serious, beautiful, disturbing, and thought provoking.

Photos provided by Sylvia Miller, Barbara Livingston and Cleveland County Arts Council