Caxton Club Grant Presentation

Photo by Susan Hanes

Members of the Caxton Club visited the UI Center for the Book last month. I presented to the group, along with fellow Caxton Club grant recipient Candida Pagan, and I talked about the project they helped fund—an artist's book called Catholics. I'm currently binding the edition of 25 and working on designing a letterpress-printed dust jacket. Here's a draft of the jacket's blurb:

Catholics is an artist’s book, a limited-edition memoir that makes use of comics, collage, and letterpress printed typography to explore the psychic cathedral built by its author’s Catholic traditionalist upbringing. Beginning with an anti-clerical quip by Tallulah Bankhead, the book takes on a range of subjects including Catholic-Masonic tensions, the fervency of converts, the legacy of the Legion of Decency, and the spiritual significance of revelatory shrouds. In Catholics, the sacred and profane, the humorous and tragic, the zine and literary fine-press all end up as strange bedfellows in desperate need of confession.

Check back for more pics of Catholics!

Three saints for the Caxton Club

The Caxton Club is celebrating their 120th anniversary this Wednesday, Feb 18 at the Newberry Library in Chicago. The celebration will be accompanied by a pop-up exhibit featuring artists funded by the organization. Last year the Caxton Club awarded me a grant for my artist's book-in-progress, Catholics, and the exhibit will include three drawings of saints (played by Joan Crawford and Tallulah Bankhead) I made for the project. In order from top to bottom, it's Joan of Arc, Saint Veronica, and Therese of Lisieux: