Arion Press Announces Edition of Patti Smith’s Woolgathering

San Francisco — The Arion Press, one of the nation’s foremost producers of fine press artist books, announces the publication of Woolgathering, a very special collaboration between two contemporary creative masters. Patti Smith is an icon of punk rock, renowned singer-songwriter and author whose first published prose work, written thirty years ago, is an incantatory memoir of the creative process. Christian Marclay, an internationally renowned visual and sound artist best known for his monumental video work “The Clock,” has created a suite of original color photograms in response to this intimate, impressionistic work. We are thrilled that both Arion’s Fine Press edition and Marclay’s original photograms for the book were featured at the Fraenkel Gallery booth at Art Basel in Switzerland.

Woolgathering is the first title in Arion’s 2022 offering of artist books, and helps inaugurate an exciting new chapter at the Press focused on celebrating the art of the book and the power of art and literature to effect social change. In addition to publishing three fine press editions a year, Arion will present four art exhibitions annually through its non-profit arm The Grabhorn Institute, and convene leading contemporary artists and writers in a new evening series called the Arion Artist Talks sponsored by Agnes Gund.

For Woolgathering, Marclay created a stunning suite of photograms while on lockdown in London. Exposing layers of various sound and organic ephemera onto light-sensitive paper, he made a series of exuberant images whose crystalline formations reflect and refract the rhythms and songs of Smith’s tales. The quarto volume includes a new introduction and porch song by Patti Smith and is available in both a traditional Fine Press binding and a Deluxe binding encased in tinted plexiglass engraved with a botanical motif. The Deluxe edition is limited to only 50 copies for sale and is accompanied by a gravure of an original manuscript poem by Smith, “The New World,” signed by the poet; a letterpress edition of the same poem is available for separate sale. Read the prospectus here.