Aging as an Artform empowers and gives  purpose and community to a group of 6-10 author/artists.  They embraced and celebrated their lived experiences both in the past and as they look toward the future.

Exhibit presented by Art to Change the World.

This exhibit in visual art and words is my journey of living for over half a century with epilepsy. It is a lifelong companion, an uninvited guest that shaped my identity, disrupted dreams, and demanded resilience.

Come walk with me into my world of uncertainty.

– Barbara “Babs” Larson

This installation centers on the enduring practice of Indigenous placemaking. Native people have always forged spaces of belonging, even under conditions not of their choosing. This constructed environment occupies the threshold between ancestral knowledge and modern experience. I wanted to carve out a space where the stories of my people can be shared and I could dwell. I’m using material tradition and contemporary art forms to create a living archive of place. I incorporate themes of kinship, language and land to act as carriers of memory and my teachings. These elements do not just describe what a Native space can be, they help create it. 

– Delia Touché

Join us at OPEN BOOK for the Fifth Annual Book Arts Show curated by esteemed book artist Erin Maurelli and curator Heather Friedli!

Curated by Twin Cities book artist Erin Maurelli and artist Heather Friedli, this year’s exhibition brings together a diverse group of contemporary artists working across fine press, zines, sculptural books, and experimental print. The show explores the book as both object and narrative, pushing beyond traditional formats into immersive, tactile works.

With a strong mix of emerging and established artists, the exhibition offers a compelling look at the growing book arts movement in the Twin Cities and its expanding audience.

Eternal Cycle (Residue) by Florence Lanxuan Liu explores the transformation and discipline of identity, memory, and the collective body within social structures.

Crossing the Line: The Passport Re-Imagined is a traveling exhibition featuring a collection of works inspired by passports and other travel documents. The series of artists’ books reflects on themes of immigration, power, limitation, and belonging through creative depictions of what the passport reimagined looks like to each artist.

Jennifer Bastian:

The community in our physical vicinity is the community we have to rely on to keep each other safe, to make change, and lean on in a crisis. How do we connect to them more at a time when we are increasingly isolated from each other?

Please join us to celebrate 30 years of Rain Taxi with a stunning exhibit that will take you behind the covers!

(EXTENDED through early December)

Studiomates: Creating in Shared Space features new works from MCBA’s Artist Collective members and staff, ranging from emerging to established artists. Explore the world of book arts from letterpress prints to hand-bound books created by local artists.

An exhibition by artist Meher Khan that explores the sari as both a garment and an art object. In New Heirloom, Khan explores themes of gender, family, societal expectations, and history. The Outlook Gallery installation will include saris, each adorned with designs of plants, and will hang 18 feet long and 5 feet high.

An interactive art installation inviting you to sit and explore the rich terrain of dreams.

Karen Wirth has a longstanding—over 40-year— relationship to books within her practice and an equally long relationship with MCBA—as an artist, teacher, and now as a 2024 McKnight Book Artist Fellow. In the gallery, Wirth’s architectural book-related works will read as poetic stanzas truly displaying what architectural storytelling is. 

Sensing Wonder celebrates the life and work of Cathy Ryan, a longtime MCBA artist, Artist Collective member, former Board Chair, major champion, and dear friend.

Each year, Minnesota Center for Book Arts partners with the McKnight Foundation to offer two transformative fellowships to mid-career book artists living and working in Minnesota.

Celebrate the newest exhibition of the MCBA/Jerome Foundation Book Arts Residency Series! Experience the exciting new work of our most recent recipients: photographer Christopher Selleck; papermaker Jelani Ellis; and artist and printmaker Louise Fisher.

Tall Paths is a site-specific installation featuring three geometric patterned scrolls inspired by storage facility doors in fields of rural Minnesota.

The MCBA Prize honors excellence in new work from across the dynamic spectrum of book art. The international competition will culminate in an exhibition in MCBA’s Main Gallery of 20–30 selected semi-finalists and a live virtual event revealing the winner.

The Reality You Were Always a Part of Wasn’t the Reality You Knew explores transitional states and their relationship to failure and potential through the lens of sustained and broken connections to an ancestral homeland. This installation reflects my experience as a first generation Japanese-American seeking family history across the Pacific and confronting the silence of previous generations.

Minnesota Center for Book Arts is pleased to present For/Word: New Work by MCBA’s Artist Collective, an exhibition in our Main Gallery featuring work by 20 members of our Artist Collective. Books, paper and prints by the members will be on view from June 14–August 3, 2024. The exhibition will be open to the public during our operating hours (The MCBA gallery is closed on Sundays and Monday). An opening reception will take place on June 14 from 6–8pm.

“{L}inking Letters” Exhibition Dates: April 1 – May 24, 2024

Location: Open Book 2nd floor Gallery, 1011 Washington Avenue S, Minneapolis

“(L)inking Letters” offers a window into the history and ongoing practice of Hebrew-character printing and Jewish book art, through a display of materials relating to Hebrew printing alongside the work of over a dozen contemporary artists and printers working with hand-set Hebrew type across the world. Representing a wide range of styles, and showcasing artists at all stages of their careers, this show brings together a fascinating selection of artists’ books, posters, broadsheets, cards, and other works that highlight the vitality of Jewish printing today.

MCBA Main Gallery on the Main Level of Open Book. Open Tuesday-Saturday 10 am to 5 pm (until 7 pm on Thursdays).

Free to visit

Reception: Friday, September 22, 6–8pm

Curated by Megan N. Liberty and organized by Center for Book Arts, this exhibition reconnects artists’ books to craft by creating a meaningful link between conceptual art and craft, historically placed at odds.

Paper Is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures, co-curated by Tia Blassingame and Stephanie Sauer, offers a new definition of paper­ within a global and decolonial framework. Featuring works by local, national, and international artists, this exhibition explores the vital role substrates play in human communities and how meaning is made from what we might call paper and papermaking.

On view in the main level gallery at Open Book, the gallery is open 10 am to 5 pm, Tuesday through Saturday, until 7 pm on Thursdays. Free admission.

On view in the Open Book atrium on the second floor is Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, a collection of letterpress-printed broadsides, artists’ books, and prints created by a coalition of international artists and writers expressing solidarity with Iraqi booksellers, writers, and readers following the car bomb attack on Al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad in 2007, promoting awareness of the power of the written word and arts in support of the free expression of ideas and the preservation of cultural spaces.

On view during Open Book building hours. Free to visit.