While I'm not posting on here for now, you can follow me at @matt.runkle over at Instagram!

20/20 Vision

The San Francisco Center for the Book celebrates its first 20 years by looking ahead. 20/20 Vision introduces 20 emerging book artists from around the country, representing a diverse generation that will help define, and redefine, the artist's book in decades to come.

Opening Reception: July 30, 2016 from 6–8 pm
375 Rhode Island Street, San Francisco

Framed by Thumbs

I have an article in the latest issue of Openings: Studies in Book Art, which is now open access and available to read here. Titled 'Framed by Thumbs: Reading Raymond Pettibon', the article looks at drawings from the artist's early zines and places them in their original sequential context. Aspects of the book form continue to haunt Pettibon's work, even as they appear in a variety of settings.

Openings is the journal of the College Book Art Association, and this issue is edited by Inge Bruggeman and features articles by Caren Florance, Emily Larned, and Sharon Helgason Gallagher.

Transcend|Constrain

Transcend|Constrain: Collective Book Dimensions

An artist talk as part of Mesocosm

Saturday, June 11 at 2 pm

Adobe Books Backroom Gallery

3130 24th Street in San Francisco 

New review: The Story of How All Animals Are Equal

Just came across a thoughtful review of The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales in The Pleiades Book Review. Jared Wolfe writes, ‘Runkle proves to be a fearless proponent of imaginative power and willingness to push boundaries.’ Buy the book from Brooklyn Arts Press!

Prince among the angels

Like the rest of the world, I've had Prince on the brain, so thought I'd revisit this intensely magical experience of seeing him in San Jose in 2011, from the introduction to RUNX TALES #3. Even then, he existed among the angels, those lucky bastards ...

Artist talk at USF

I'm preparing to give an artist talk tomorrow as a guest lecturer in a Publication Design class at the University of San Francisco, where I'll discuss my body of work and how my love of narrative, sequence, and collage draw me toward the book as an art form. I'll also give students some tips on attaching covers to an accordion structure for their final projects. I had a lot of fun a couple weeks ago giving a workshop on creating a perfect binding in a case for two other sections of the class.

Plans

I have new fiction featured in The Collagist! The story, 'Plans', relates yet another wedding disaster excerpted from The Hitch: An Agamist Manifesto, my ongoing material novel (you can learn more about it here!). 

Turning scraps into stories ...

 



Story Box: Creating Narrative with Relief Collage is happening at San Francisco Center for the Book next Saturday, April 16! We'll be making story boxes, shallow boxes with partitions that tell three-panel stories using 3-D collage (think Joseph Cornell!). Whether or not you're new to the book arts, if you're interested in boxmaking, visual narrative, sequential art, or collage, this workshop will be a lot of fun! Click HERE to register.

Build a Story Box at SFCB this April 16

This April 16, I'll be teaching Story Box: Creating Narrative with Relief Collage, a daylong workshop at San Francisco Center for the Book. In this workshop, we'll use bookboard to build a shallow box with three collaged compartments. Participants will receive instruction in 3D collage, layout, and sequence, and will leave with the fundamentals of building, covering, and dimensionally decorating a compartmented box. This will be a a lot of fun—learn more HERE!

The Tyrant Bride

'The Tyrant Bride' is a letterpress printed pamphlet that is now available at Big Cartel. It's one book of ten in an ongoing wedding-themed material novel called The Hitch: An Agamist Manifesto. While the ten books are thematically and often narratively related, each contains its own visual and textural theme, and the prose shifts in genre, from fiction to experimental memoir to lifestyle magazine feature to dramatic script.

'The Tyrant Bride', subtitled 'As droplets hover above her like spots', is a theatrical short story in which a bridezilla-type figure recounts various nightmarish weddings that have haunted her. Her visions are told through text printed from metal type. The text is interspersed with a shifting configuration of spheres printed from photopolymer plates. To learn more about The Hitch, visit matt-runkle.com/thehitch.

'Artifice and authenticity ...'

'Artifice and authenticity are central themes tying together Matt Runkle's eclectic debut short story collection,' writes Pedro Ponce in a great writeup of The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales in the LA Review. 'While artifice is everywhere in these stories,' he continues, 'it is not a source of cynicism or despair; rather, artifice is elemental—a material both resistant and pliable, with which characters map and navigate reality.' Order a copy HERE!

Printing The Hitch at Kala

I'm beginning a three-month residency at Kala Art Institute to print one of the ten chapbooks that will eventually make up The Hitch—an ongoing wedding-themed material novel. The installment I'm printing at Kala, titled 'The Victim', will be letterpress printed from a combination of metal type, photopolymer plates, monoprints from a PVA-painted collograph, and a reduction linocut. 'The Victim' takes a more distanced point of view than the rest of the chapbooks, using a mythic tone as it looks at the shadow side of the bridezilla. There's more info about The Hitch here.

'... animals out of humans ...'

Zachary Kocanda at the Mid-American Review wrote a really thoughtful and thorough review of The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales. He says the book '... makes animals out of humans, showing them at both their best and worst. It strips what makes us all one confused, messy yet beautiful species.' Get the book from Small Press Distribution!

How Many Muses?

Here's the title slide for an artist talk I'm giving this weekend at the biennial College Book Art Association conference in Nashville. It looks at the production methods of medieval European manuscripts and twentieth-century mainstream American comics, and talks about how they inspired my artist's book, Catholics.

Writing the Visual at Southwestern College

Catholics featured in 23 Sandy exhibition

Seven Deadly Prints

I just finished a 4-flap enclosure to house this suite of prints I made as a companion to Catholics. Each of the seven images is centered around a communion wafer/solar cross, which was printed with heavy impression from photopolymer plates. Surrounding this central image is a Bruce Rogers–inspired frame printed from metal typographic ornaments that alchemically shifts from print to print. The wafers/solar crosses animate a sequence that comments on narrative threads included in the artist's book, while also operating as an independent group. The suite was printed in an edition of ten, and is available either individually or paired with the book in a deluxe edition.

DPC @ VA/BF

The Drift Plain Collective is representing once again this weekend, as they bring a bunch of chapbooks, zines, broadsides, and prints to the 2015 Vancouver Art/Book Fair. They'll have copies of RUNX TALES and Catholics on hand, as well as some spectacular books and ephemera by Elizabeth Boyne, Karen Carcia, Cody Gieselman, Kimberly Maher, Elizabeth Munger, Kalmia Strong, and more. A culmination of Vancouver's Artists' Book Week, the Vancouver Art/Book Fair is hosted October 17–18 by Project Space, and is free and open to the public.

October shows featuring Catholics

Catholics is included in two artist's book exhibitions this month: the Sheffield International Artist's Book Exhibition in the UK and words|matter in Chicago. words|matter, an artist's book library, is hosted by Arts on Elston through October 29 and is dedicated to facilitating hands on interactions with books by over 70 artists. And the Sheffield International Artist's Book Exhibition takes place at Bank Street Arts through October 30 and features over 200 books. To find out more about Catholics, a limited-edition memoir told through text + image, click here.