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Amy Wilson

Amy Wilson is an artist who has shown her drawings and paintings with Bellwether, PS1, The Drawing Center, The Warhol Museum, the Grolier Club, Josee Bienvenue Gallery, PPOW, and many other spaces. Her work has been reviewed in the NY Times, Art in America, Time Out NY, the Village Voice, as well as other publications. Amy represented by Bravin Lee in NYC. She received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts (1995) and her MFA from Yale (1997). She teaches in the Art History, Fine Arts, and Visual and Critical Studies departments at SVA. amy-wilson.com

More articles from this author:

• Ask a simple question…
• Interview with Amy Wilson
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It’s funny for me to think that there was a time several years ago when I absolutely swore I would never make artist’s books, because I really felt that the whole medium had become this ghetto that women artists for whatever reason gravitated to, only to have relatively few people/institutions collect them… and in that way it was a sort of self-perpetuating ghetto. Why would I ever choose to put myself in a category that is so routinely ignored and overlooked? Why would I basically go out of my way to make my life and my work so much harder than it is already? But I’ve done an about-face on that as I have with crafts and sewing – it’s not so much that I don’t care about that ghetto (I think it definitely exists and is very real) but more like I want to exploit it, to examine it in some sort of way, and maybe… I don’t know… report back? Do something interesting with it?

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I’m not sure. But this is the conversation I’ve had in my head over and over today as I bound and re-bound a book, trying to get it just right. It took 12 hours… of course not continuous work, but setting it up, waiting for glue to dry, tweaking it, cutting this or that, waiting for more glue to dry, and so forth. Frustrating as hell. And yet I’m leaving the situation wanting to make more books and thinking that craft-based projects and books may be what I spend the rest of the year doing.

This is a book that I started at least a year ago (may have been longer, I’m not sure) and only completely finished just now. It’s strange for a project of mine to take that long, but this one went through so many different changes as I learned more about book-making and pop up books. There is a real ceiling when you’re making things where your abilities and your ideas sort of clash; for me, that ceiling of ability kept constantly changing (I’d learn something new and it would go soaring up or I’d totally screw up another project and it would scare me enough to basically have it clamp down). And I am really, really trying to find a way to combine this idea of the pop-up, which I absolutely love, with my work so that it’s not just gimmicky or cute but instead refers to this interior space which is infinite.

Anyway. At very long last, here is the book.

The cover: