The Minnesota Book Awards is pleased to announce Harriet Bart and her longtime collaborative partners, printer Philip Gallo and binder Jill Jevne, as the winners of the 2015 Minnesota Book Artist Award for a new piece entitled Ghost Maps.
Part of a longstanding collaborative relationship between artist, printer and binder, Ghost Maps was printed by Philip Gallo at The Hermetic Press in Minneapolis and binding was designed and executed by Jill Jevne of Jacobsen, Minnesota. Since 2000, Bart, Gallo and Jevne have collaborated to produce ten artist books, two of which have been honored with Minnesota Book Awards in the Fine Press category.
The images in Ghost Maps were created by Bart during a 2010 residency at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts where the paint-splattered floor of her assigned studio became the focus of a new project. Inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Bart began to view the encrusted floor of Studio VA5 as an archive of the creative process. Attending to color and repetition, she marked off sections of the floor with tape, scrubbed spaces between them and took aerial photographs. The result is a stunning, site-specific piece documenting the presence and absence of the forty-six artists who preceded Bart in Studio VA5.
2015 Book Artist Exhibit and Reception
An exhibit celebrating Bart’s work in collaboration with Gallo and Jevne will be on display December 12 – January 25 in the Cowles Literary Commons, on the second floor of the Open Book building (1011 Washington Avenue South, Minneapolis), with a reception taking place Thursday, January 15 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.
Bart, Gallo and Jevne received special recognition and an award at the 27th annual Minnesota Book Awards Gala on Saturday, April 18, 2015, at the Saint Paul Union Depot.