BILL ANTHONY: THE LINEAGE OF A
MASTER
Iowa
Artisans Gallery hosts Bill Anthony: Lineage of
a Master , with hand bound books by protégés
of master bookbinder and conservator William Anthony, July
21 – August 23. This special exhibition is being
held in conjunction with the University of Iowa's conference, The
Changing Book: Transitions in Design, Production and Preservation, July
22-25 (http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/
book2005/index.htm).
As a complementary exhibition, photographer Randy Richmond will
show digitally-altered, photographic images in a show entitled New
Work . Richmond's works tie into the narrative quality
suggested by handbound books. An opening reception will
be held 4:30-6pm Friday, July 22 and is free and open to
the public.
Click here for
an excerpt from the Lineage catalog as well as list of
exhibitors in this show.
William Anthony inspired and instructed many professional
artists and craftsmen in the world of hand bookbinding. Anthony's
works are currently on display at the University of Iowa
Art Museum. This one time, special exhibition at Iowa Artisans
Gallery includes work by Anthony's apprentices: William Minter,
Lawrence Yerkes, David Brock, Sally Key, Ralph Weber, Annie
Tremmel Wilcox, and Mark Esser, plus approximately 20 of
their students.
Anthony began his early apprenticeship
in hand bookbinding as a 16 year old in Ireland. His knowledge
was supplemented by studies at art academies and by contacts
with other artists and handbinders.
His distinguished career in Europe and the US included restoring
projects such as the ancient texts damaged in the devastating floods
in Florence, Italy in 1966, as well as Northwestern
University's rare, intact copy of John James Audubon's four-volume Birds
of America. In 1984, Bill came to Iowa to establish
the Conservation Department in the UI Libraries. While
conserving books for the UI Libraries' Special Collections,
he had greater opportunity to reflect on and experiment with
the ideas and techniques that had shaped book conservation
since the floods of Florence. 
He and his apprentice
Mark Esser began to make models of historical book structures,
seeing these models as educational tools for the general
public and as aides in teaching students and apprentice conservators. The
models became well known as a result of being exhibited in
the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1986 and through the visits
of binders from the U.S. and Europe to the University's Conservation
Department. Today Bill and Mark's models are the nucleus
of a collection that the current University of Iowa Conservator,
Gary Frost, has much enlarged. Some models crafted
by Bill's apprentices or their students are also included
in this exhibit.
Toward the end of his life, Bill began to take an interest
in yet another form of binding, the artist's book. Book
artists typically use nontraditional structural principles
and/or materials to create a three-dimensional work of art
that expresses an intellectual or artistic statement. This
is an area that students who had studied privately with Bill
in Chicago practiced and excelled in, and an area that Bill
himself might have practiced had he lived longer. Bill Anthony
innovated and crossed bridges from the book craft industry
and its conventions to the wider fields of the sciences of
preservation and the prospects for artists' books. Now his
students need to convey fine traditional bookwork in an environment
of screen based reading and digital libraries. These are
exciting challenges that Bill prepared us to enjoy.
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ABOUT
THE WORKS OF RANDY RICHMOND:
For some of the images in this show, Richmond combines imagery
of display cases from the University of Iowa's Natural History
Museum and sets them in environmental contexts, creating
a type of conservation riddle.
Richmond comments, "as a photographic and
digital artist, I strive to make digital art natural and
organic. To do so, I use actual objects which I scan and
then separate from their backgrounds. I sometimes combine
these objects with photographic images that I have created
during my first 20 years as a photographer. I now see the
work of those twenty years as visual note taking and sketching.
More recently, I've added the use of a digital camera in
the creation of my work. Little did I know that I was merely
waiting for the proper tools. Some have referred to my work
as "Magical
Realism." This term accurately captures, for me, the
process and final form of my art."
Richmond is a resident of Muscatine, Iowa
who has recently shown in the Netherlands as well as in solo
exhibitions in Wisconsin and Iowa.
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