Helen Frederick
Professor of Art
George Mason University
Fairfax, Virginia, USA
and Director of Pyramid Atlantic
820 Georgia Ave.
Silver Springs, Maryland 20910 USA
phone: 301-608-1901
hfrederick@pyramid-atlantic.org
http://www.pyramidatlanticartcenter.org/
http://www.avt.gmu.edu/Frederick.htm
Panel Session #3 “Kontakt with the Book”
Helen C. Frederick, Session Chair, Tuesday September 6, 2005
Helen Frederick, (Chair) George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, and Pyramid Atlantic, Silver Spring, Maryland, USA
Joanna Hoffman, Academy of Fine Arts, Poznañ, Poland
"The book - A Mute Object? Sound in Artists' Books"
Arunas Gelunas,Vilnius Academy of Fine Art, Vilnius, Lithuania
“Artists Book at the Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts”
Jana Harper, Washington University, Saint Louis, Missouri, USA
“Urban Books”
Session Statement:
The panel will look at both theory and practice in the production of artist books. Panelists will explore the shared boundaries between traditional and new art media. They will recognize those individuals who are taking their place in the art world as practicing artists, teachers, and leaders who are discovering new territories and making significant contributions in the field of publication arts. The book as architecture, as verbal and visual exploration and as conceptual space will be discussed.
Gropius announced in the first Bauhaus exhibition ”Art, technology, a new unity.” With the new qualities of bookmaking feeding into and from video, animation and sculpture, an open-ended field of visual possibilities exists that would delight the father of modernity. Frederick will moderate the panel in terms of its early 20th century explorers and contemporary players and the ways that they are accustomed to using images for qualities of flexibility and multiplicity. At a time when the computer can produce three dimensional rendering, Frederick will lead the panel in demonstrating the technical prowess of hand formed elements and the basic technical and aesthetic demands and challenges that fascinate artists working with the elements of book structures as contemporary art.
There is an emerging population of artists whose work questions the relationship between accepted languages of interrelated media (painting, printmaking, photography, video, and the digital media) and the experiences of cultural differences within a contemporary book arts and conceptual art context. The panel will explore many artists’ work and discuss what attributes of publication arts have captured their imagination for editions, installations and personal dimensional works, among other applications. Drawing on examples of artists who employ narrative navigation in bookmaking, presenters will explore how visual technology is altering the terrain of modern thought and contemporary art.
HELEN C. FREDERICK founded Pyramid Atlantic in 1981 and has played an essential role in its development as an international arts center ever since. Frederick has won international acclaim as a paper, print, and mixed media artist, and received the 2000 Governor's Award in the State of Maryland for excellence in the arts. Her work has been exhibited around the world and is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, The Fogg Museum, and the National Museum in Stockholm, Sweden, among others. In addition to her role at Pyramid, Frederick is Associate Professor of Art at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. She earned her BFA and MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI.