Praeterita

I just finished making a new artist's book. It's a project book to accompany the two-person exhibition  I did with Patty last year, based on her missionary-grandfather's letters and photos from the early 1900s. It's 4 inches high x 11 inches wide, covered in brown book cloth, Japanese stab binding with beaded side tail: The pages inside contain images of the source material, plus the prints that I made out of that material: I've been making more of these artist's books in the last few months, and I might post images of a few more.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

I just created a new design for the public art/community memoir project for the Carroll County Historical Society in northwest Illinois. I'll be presenting this to the CCHS board on Tuesday morning: Images and text supplied by the community will be printed on plexiglass panels, which will be illuminated at night in the manner of a luminary. The building shown above is the HQ of the CCHS, in a nineteenth century Italianate house that is on the National Historic Register (I believe).

One of my projects for 2010 is a public art-community history project in a small town in northwest Illinois called Mount Carroll, where my wife Patty and I own a house that we use for weekend/summer getaways. The project is a collaboration between me and Patty, who is a writer. We just received news that the Carroll County Historical Society will be our not-for-profit sponsoring organization, which means we can now proceed to apply for state grants, etc. The art part of it will consist of large lightbox columns, with photos of people's faces and quotations from their writing workshop material printed on the sides. Here is a Photoshop photo of what the columns might look like at night: The shape might change, but the basic idea will look something like this. Keep checking in for further news on the project, including links to a forthcoming Facebook page.

A two-person sound/print installation with Patricia Ann McNair, based on letters and photographs of her grandfather, who was a Methodist missionary in Korea from 1911-1926.