MCBA/Jerome Foundation Book Arts Mentorship Series VII

With generous funding from the Jerome Foundation, guidance from their selected mentors, workshops, and critical support from MCBA, the Mentorship recipients spent one year developing skills in book arts through contemporary and traditional techniques. This exhibition features new work from the following artists:

Rebekah Crisanta de Ybarra a.k.a. Lady Xok (enrolled Maya-Lenca Nation) is an interdisciplinary artist, musician, and culture bearer. Rooted in Maya-Lenca cosmovision and Indigenous Futurisms, her experimental social practice pulls across disciplines of archaeology, epigraphy, ethnoastronomy, theology, and public art. During her mentorship, Rebekah has created an artistic and ethno-astronomy cultural revitalization project of Mayan epigraphy, astrology, and star maps using book binding and a variety of printing techniques. Inspired by vintage star maps, Rebekah has created work based on the constellation research of Maya Daykeeper and mentor Gina Kan Balam in the first publication of its kind for constellations obscured for the last 500 years.

Daniel McCarthy Clifford works across disciplines to explore the dynamics, materials, and histories of disciplinary structures; prisons and schools become entry points to a broader conversation about power, race, class, and sexuality.  Daniel has recently collaborated with the University of Minnesota to address the U of M student populations’ knowledge gap about mass incarceration and prison labor in the United States. For his mentorship, Daniel has been working with mentor Sam Gould, artist and editor of Beyond Repair, to produce and circulate comics and printed matter to inform the public about criminal justice issues.

Chaun Webster is a poet and sound artist whose work uses a materialist temporality through a textual critic of linearity, while also interrogating memory, the afterlives of slavery, and black spatiality. Webster’s debut book, GeNtry!fication: or the scene of the crime, was published by Noemi Press in April 2018 and won a Minnesota Book Award. For his mentorship, Webster has been working with mentor Drew Peterson, artist and founder of Entity Editions, to create a series of woodblock relief prints and letterpress prints that engage in a series of redactions from an account in a slave ship ledger titled, An Act of the Mortality of the Slaves Abroad.  Webster’s work confronts hierarchical structures within historic disciplines and archival accounts, and how privileged source materials have the ability to dictate who and what stories have been credibly documented.

Since 1985, the Jerome Foundation has helped emerging artists push the boundaries of contemporary book arts by supporting the creation of new work. Through these fellowship and mentorship opportunities, Minnesota artists of diverse disciplines have created book arts projects that challenge and redefine conventional notions of book form and content.

Mon – Sat 9:30am - 6:30pm
Tue (open late) 9:30am - 9pm
Sun noon - 4pm

OPENING RECEPTION: Thu, Nov 7th 6pm - 9pm

Free & Open to the public

1st floor, Open Book
Minnesota Center for Book Arts
1011 Washington Avenue S., Suite 100

Minneapolis, MN