San Francisco Center for the Book

Each year the artist in residence program at the San Francisco Center for the Book offers an established Bay Area artist technical and studio support to create an limited edition artist's book. The residency begins in January and ends in the fall with publication of the book through the Imprint of the SFCB, the publishing arm of the Center. The program is made possible through sale of the books, grants and the support of individual sponsors and volunteers in the SFCB community.

The mission of the artist in residence program is to raise the profile of the artist's book as a genre in contemporary art by offering an established artist the opportunity to produce an edition of books. By encouraging talented artists new to this medium, the program hopes to bring fresh perspectives to the field and at the same time to raise awareness of the genre in the wider art community.

Imprint Publications
Publications of the Imprint of the San Francisco Center for the Book are available for purchase. Shipping for each book is $20, and California residents add 9.25% tax. Purchases can be made online through our etsy shop.
Inquiries: (415) 565-0545 / imprint@sfcb.org

Erratum: Brief Interruptions in the Waste Stream
Artists: Amy Franceschini & Michael Swaine
Book to be Released December 2010

The 2010 IMPRINT Artist in Residence focuses on the process, production and finished work created by our 2010 artists in residence, Amy Franceschini and her collaborator Michael Swaine, in the context of related work that spans a broad range of media. Their work takes a visual approach to articulating perceived conflict between humans and nature, and the individual to a community.

Amy Franceschini is an artist with a deep interest in how humans interact and impact the world around them.
An overarching theme in her work is a perceived conflict between humans and nature. She creates websites, installations and public programs that provide platforms to question this divide. She draws inspiration from the improvisation, innovation and collaboration that emerges from the choreographed
activities of farming both big and small. In 2004, she co-founded Free Soil, an international collective of artists, activists, and researchers who work together to propose alternatives to the current social, political and environmental organization of space. Her individual and collaborative work has been exhibited internationally at the Zentrum Kunst Media in Karlsruhe Germany, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New York Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. She has received numerous awards including the SFMOMA Seca Award, Artadia Award, Eureka Fellowship, Creative Capital and is recently the recipient of a Graham Foundation and Art Matters grant. She received her BFA from San Francisco State University and her MFA from Stanford University. Amy is a visiting faculty in the graduate program at the California College of the Arts.

Michael Swaine is an inventor and designer working in many media. Michael has collaborated with Futurefarmers since 1997. He is dedicated to working in the community, his "Mending Library" Generosity Project involves him pushing an old fashioned ice cream style cart on wheels with a treadle-operated sewing machine on it through the streets of San Francisco. He teaches at CCA and is currently working on his MA in Design at UC Berkeley.

Restless Dust (2009)
Gail Wight
Edition of 50
$350 http://www.etsy.com/listing/40585827/restless-dust-by-gail-wight

Artist/author Gail Wight created Restless Dust as a multimedia installation housed in a two-tiered wooden box. The top portion holds a letterpress printed, leather bound artist's book which is separated by Plexiglas from a velvet-lined bottom chamber containing two illuminated paper birds (activated when the box lid is removed). Wight's text invites Charles Darwin's ghost to sail to present day San Francisco and wander with the artist through the diverse Bay Area terrain. The focus of the journey is three-fold: to celebrate Northern California's unique species; to examine Darwin's legacy and its impact in the Bay Area and to acknowledge the fragile and endangered state of local flora and fauna caused by environmental degradation. The artist carved and printed the book's images from linoleum blocks and hand-set the body text entirely in metal type.

Meet Gail Wight, our 2009 artist-in-residence. In her own words:
"In attempts to understand life, I have: made maps of various nervous systems, practiced art while under hypnosis, conducted biochemical experiments on myself and willing others, executed medical illustrations in black velvet, documented dissections of humans, dissected machines and failed to put most of them back together, removed my teeth to model information systems, translated EEGs into music, painted with slime mold, made music with mice, drawings with bones, and have attempted to create models of my own confused state.

The interplay between art and biology, theories of evolution, cognition and the animal state-of-being form the groundwork for my thoughts. In what ways do we resemble worms? Is a machine more or less reliable due to its lack of endorphins, emotions, and opiate addictions? Can an artist collaborate with other species? What does compassion look like at the neuroanatomical level?

My artwork investigates issues in biology and the history of science and technology. It explores the cultural impact of scientific practice, and our ongoing redefinition of self through epistemological constructions. I try to follow the ways in which these ideologies both metaphysical and manifest travel through time, moving from the scientific to the social sphere, the social to the scientific, and so often become the overlooked of the everyday. "

The Artist:
Gail Wight works in experimental media focusing on issues of biology, the history of scientific theory and technology. She is currently Associate Professor at Stanford University Department of Art and Art History and Director of Graduate Studies in Studio Art and Experimental Media Arts.

The Art of Stepping Through Time (2008)
Ala Ebtekar
Edition of 30 (sold out)
$365

Ala Ebtekar describes his works as visual narratives that are a "crossroad where present day events meet history and mythology." He draws on Persian culture, diaspora, and migration to create "synthetic epics" with multiple interpretations and outcomes. The Art of Stepping Through Time is the artist's response to a poem by the renowned Iranian poet and scholar H. E. Sayeh, whose Farsi and English texts read in opposite directions across a 7-panel accordion structure. Three layers of letterpress-printed paper create a continuous loop of overlapping text and imagery in an upright star-shaped display. The book features blind-embossed Persian motif covers drawn by the artist and is housed in a felted, hand-stitched wool pouch.

The Artist
Ala's work has been exhibited widely throughout the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East. As a teenager, he worked with Tim Rollins' seminal group Kids of Survival (K.O.S.) and later studied traditional Persian painting in Tehran. He earned his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA from Stanford University. He is a visiting lecturer at UC Berkeley and Stanford University and is represented by Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco.

The Relative Value of Things (2007)
Nigel Poor
Edition of 120
$365 http://www.etsy.com/listing/16927447/the-relative-value-of-things-by-nigel

The Relative Value of Things consists of three projects that investigate the joys, follies and contradictions of collecting, desire and valorization. The first project is the books' front covers, each uniquely embellished with encapsulated hair or lint donated by a multitude of individuals. The second is the books' contents, comprised of color images and letterpress-printed lists documenting personal possessions discarded by the artist over time. The third project comprises the back covers, featuring meticulously drawn text that addresses the struggle to find reassurance and meaning amidst life's mysteries and uncertainties.

The Artist
Nigel Poor's work has been shown in various national venues and can be found in the collections of the SFMOMA, the M. H. de Young Museum, The San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. She has received several nationally recognized awards, including a SF Arts Council Grant and a Polaroid Artist Support Grant. She received her BA from Bennington College in Vermont and her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. Nigel Poor is represented by Haines Gallery in San Francisco and is an Assistant Professor of Photography at California State University, Sacramento.

De Rekening (2006)
Nora Pauwels and John DeMerritt
Edition of 50
$365 http://www.etsy.com/listing/16929673/de-rekening-by-nora-pauwels-and-john

De Rekening is a work built upon an artist-created system of "fake writing" used to mark the passing of time. Inspired by the anonymous entries in 19th Century ledgers and account books, De Rekening borrows its form and repetitive structure from those utilitarian yet evocative receptacles of time. The ruled lines in the book were mechanically drawn using a pen ruling machine at Golden Business Forms in West Burlington, Iowa, especially for this edition. Pen ruling was widely used in the 19th and early 20th Century in the ledger and account book trade; Golden Business Forms is one of the last purveyors of this technology. Bound in Japanese buckram with stamped title, the book was letterpress printed by the artists at the Center for the Book.

The Artists
John DeMerritt operates a bindery in Emeryville specializing in small editions and boxmaking. His client list includes many well-known artists, photographers and galleries. He has taught at the San Francisco Center for the Book, the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley and currently teaches bookmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute. He is married to printmaker Nora Pauwels, with whom he collaborated on De Rekening.

Nora Pauwels is an internationally recognized printmaker. Originally from Belgium, where she was educated in fine arts and fine art restoration, Pauwels is notable for her exploration of unusual means of creating intaglio prints, such as using the Dremel tool with various plexigravure processes. Pauwels has been actively involved with the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, where she has created several portfolios of prints that have been collected both nationally and internationally.

29 Degrees North (2005)
Michael Bartalos
Edition of 29
$450 (sold out)
Letterpress trade edition, unboxed, 3" x 4": $25 (sold out)

The title of our first publication refers to a degree of latitude shared by six destinations depicted in this artist's travelogue. From west to east, the poem and images progress from Mexico to Morocco, through India on to China, and over to Japan before terminating in Hawaii. Two-color iconic images, printed by Nat Swope at Bloom Screen Printing, Oakland, CA, extend over an accordion-fold structure which can be unfolded in an attractive display. The binding was designed by John DeMerritt in collaboration with the artist and features a deluxe clamshell box covered in Japanese silk with foil-stamped title and illustration.

The Artist
Michael Bartalos attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Pratt Institute. Best known as an illustrator, Bartalos works extensively in the graphic arts in the U.S., Europe and Japan. His fine art work includes limited print editions, artist's books and sculptural assemblages. Bartalos has created limited book editions with New York's Purgatory Pie Press, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where he served as an artist in residence, and the Maryland Institute College of Art. He lives and works in San Francisco.