Artists' Books from 1960 to 2000

This site contains a digitized selection of books from the Artists’ Books Collection in the Clarence Ward Art Library, Oberlin College. The collection comprises over one thousand titles, a fraction of which is presented on this site which focuses on how artists working after 1965 used the inexpensive, reproducible format of the book––and in some cases the magazine page––as an integral component of their art. A large number of books selected for digitization were made in the late 1960s and 1970s when artists were using new media forms to circulate and display their sculptures, performances, conceptual projects, or happenings. Other books were made by feminist artists to lodge a political critique against established art institutions. Still others are the result of contemporary artists finding new ways to disseminate their photographs, some in a participatory way.

Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the Five Colleges of Ohio (Next Steps in the Next Generation Library: Integrating Digital Collections into the Liberal Arts Curriculum, 2010)