Current Exhibitions

February 1 - March 8, 2019
Hours: 8 a.m.-9 p.m. Mon.-Thurs.; 8 a.m.-6 p.m. Fri.; 12-5 p.m. Sat.; 2-9 p.m. Sun.

Hawn Gallery/ Hamon Arts Library
FREE; for more information call 214.768.3813.

The contemporary artist's book is a cultural phenomenon that has changed the landscape of artistic production. It has now replaced the livre d'artiste — a luxury item combining images with poetry or fiction — with works that are inexpensive, formally innovative, modest in scale, and frequently self-made by artists.

Contemporary artists who explore the book format have challenged the form of the book as an information package, extended the idea of the book as object, and introduced a new medium of artistic expression. The tremendous explosion of titles of artist book works and zines has made the artist's bookwork an accessible and affordable work of art, introducing key contemporary artists to an alternate audience. The resulting dialog between the artist, the page, and the reader is consistently up for grabs, expanded and transformed through unexpected formats and novel, timely, and often controversial, content.

Drawing upon SMU Libraries’ collections, publishers, and collectors of artist's books, this exhibition surveys the recent history of one of the most important cultural trends in contemporary art.

August 2017- August 2019
Hamon Arts Library Second Floor

The metalwork, photographs, prints, and sculpture selected for this exhibition are from the holdings of Bywaters Special Collections, located in the Jake and Nancy Hamon Arts Library. Each woman represented in the exhibition had early art training, most of it professional, yet career paths diverged as they became curators, educators, gallery directors, metalsmiths, printmakers, and sculptors. The first artist represented is Louise Heuser Wueste (Wüste), a “pioneer” since she is the first known professionally-trained woman artist to arrive in Texas in the mid-nineteenth century. Many other women artists followed in her footsteps, and their legacy is still felt today in works of art they created and organizations they established. In view of the fragile nature of the works of art shown in this exhibition, reproductions of the originals are exhibited. Photographs not from Bywaters Special Collections are noted in credit information.