Exhibition ✨ Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle's Kentifrications at Ringling College of Art and Design
VIS / BIB
On view January 25 to April 30, 2021
Brizdle-Schoenberg Special Collections Center
2nd floor, Alfred R. Goldstein Library Ringling College of Art and Design
This exhibition theorizes and recognizes experimental subject bibliography—projects that explore artifactual, intellectual, spatial, and design possibilities simultaneously—as an artistic and poetic practice. It hones in on a niche territory that has blossomed in recent history, reviewing fifteen compelling visio-biblio-centric projects undertaken by artists, writers, designers, and other cultural workers.
Researching and selecting works to include in a bibliography is an act of model-making, of knowledge production. Partial knowledges come together in a bibliography to form an evolving body of knowledge, to make a new model.
We are undoubtedly at a critical juncture in our collective narrative. Destabilizing arrangements of resources challenge canonical norms and counter algorithmic recommendation loops. The visual bibliographic model, like other theoretical models, has an important role to play as “a co-producer of reality” to use a phrase of Olafur Eliasson.
From artists’ books and online media to stack interventions and reading room installations, the makers gathered here are imagining and enacting new realities.
This exhibition is a small part of an ongoing research project and forthcoming monograph Bibliographic Performances & Surrogate Readings (The Everyday Press, UK) that is expressly dedicated to surveying artistic and poetic practices in bibliography, defining a new art historical genre, and learning from a host of diverse voices.
The Center also releases B-SSCC #08-#10 in the Exhibition Takeaways series: the kitchen is now open, Your Day & Your World, and The Artistic World of Colette. Available as digital downloads and Riso-printed booklets (coming soon!).