Iowa Bibliophiles Presents: Artists’ Books: Critical Writing in the Field with Johanna Drucker

Artists’ books continue to be a hard-to-define and multifaceted field of works made at the intersections of conceptual art, the craft of the book, independent publishing, alternative culture and other aesthetic motivations. No simple single lineage is shared by these works, and even tracking them to an origin point (Illuminated manuscripts? The books of William Blake? The 20th century avant-garde?) can be problematic. Artists’ books have remained more marginalized in the mainstream art world than other forms like video or performance art, in part because they are also difficult to exhibit in a way that lets them be read and experienced. The challenges for critical writing in the field are thus logistical as well as aesthetic. For a quarter of a century, JAB: The Journal of Artists’ Books created a vital forum for critical writing. Literally hundreds of writers from dozens of countries contributed under the editorial vision of Brad Freeman. The University of Iowa Press recently issued The JAB Anthology, a selection of works published from the journal.

This talk looks at the contributions of JAB, relates these to other work in the field including my The Century of Artists’ Books (1994, Granary Books), and includes a personal note on the dilemmas of producing one’s own artists’ books for decades. Brief interview clips with Brad Freeman will also be part of the talk.

Johanna Drucker is an artist, writer, and scholar, Emerita Breslauer and Distinguished Professor, UCLA, who has written and published widely on topics related to visual forms of knowledge production, the historiography of the alphabet, experimental visual poetry, art history, and other topics. Her recent titles include Affluvia: The Toxic Off-Gassing of Affluent Culture (Bridge Books, 2025), Inventing the Alphabet (University of Chicago Press, 2022), and Iliazd: Meta-Biography of a Modernist (Hopkins University Press (2020).