Join us for the December Book Art Series Presentation!
Thursday, December 18 at 7:00 pm CT
Zoom link: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/iOfSdNwURsS-sNKppRSQ_g
Title: Cut! Rip! Poke!
Speaker: Savannah Bustillo
Moderator: Anika Schneider
How can the book object be leveraged to prompt individual action?
For this presentation, artist Savannah Bustillo (she/her) will discuss the ways she creates book objects that require active participation from viewers. These actions — to cut, rip, and poke — invariably change the book object permanently. Each book object becomes a palimpsest — recording an aggregate of responses, allowing participants to also see all that came before them. Bustillo draws on the rich history of happenings and Fluxus — spaces where impromptu communal actions obscured a single auteur or form of mark-making. However, these critical ideas rejected the pleasure and emotions that form between people and object, and discount the object as a legitimate space to hold criticality. Instead, Bustillo puts forward the idea that interactive book objects can do both — embrace communal action and showcase handmade objects that critically hold emotion. Often, these actions require the use of common tools within the world of book arts — awls, seam rippers, and pencils. Bustillo is interested in the history of these tools as creators of knowledge, titans that allowed the production of books and the spread of information. She believes that using these tools in unconventional ways via small repeatable actions provide greater insight into the history of labor and it’s intersection with the history of knowledge production. In the repeated tearing of a page and the buildup of the shaggy edge, we can see labor being both done and undone, as book object is changed forever.
Bio
Savannah Bustillo (she/her) is a queer, second generation, Colombian-American printmaker, bookmaker, and papermaker from Albuquerque, New Mexico. She combines making and anthropological investigation to explore spaces in the margins – where identities not easily reconciled are placed. She received a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis, and is completing her MA/MFA at the University of Iowa in printmaking. Her work has been shown throughout the US, including the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, The Morgan Conservatory, Women’s Studio Workshop, and the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, where she has been both a semifinalist and finalist for the MCBA Prize. Bustillo was awarded the Jerome Emerging Printmaker Fellowship in 2021 at Highpoint Center for Printmaking and the SGCI Emerging Artist Award in 2024. Her work is held in over 40 collections throughout the US, including Harvard University, Yale University, UCLA, and the Walker Art Center.
