Graphic design by IN-FO.CO, 2025
The MAK Center for Art and Architecture invites you to a conversation with Johanna Drucker and Brad Freeman, contributors to the exhibition Reading Room. This talk explores the relations between artists’ books and architecture through thematic depictions, formal properties, and analogies at a conceptual level reflecting the statement by the late Mexican book artist and critic, Ulises Carrión that “a book is a sequence of spaces.” Drawing on books in their collections, Drucker and Freeman present a selection of works that embody these connections.
Drucker and Freeman will give a tour of their selection of artists’ books on view and augment the materials on display with a presentation of additional books from their collection. These objects will form the focus of a discussion, with audience participants invited to handle the books and engage with the speakers in thinking about the similarities and differences in experiencing the spaces of books, rooms, surfaces, openings, frames and other features that link physical and conceptual structures.
This event is free and open to the public. Please RSVP here.
JOHANNA DRUCKER
Johanna Drucker is Breslauer and Distinguished Professor Emerita, Department of Information Studies, UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in the history of writing, experimental typography, visual poetry, and artists’ books as well as information visualization and digital humanities. Her own limited edition artist’s books are widely represented in special collections in libraries and universities in North America. Her most recent publications include Inventing the Alphabet (University of Chicago, 2022), Iliazd: Metabiography of a Modernist (Hopkins University, 2023) and Affluvia: The toxic off-gassing of affluent culture (Bridge Publications, 2025). She had a retrospective exhibit of her visual art, Graphic Animism, in Los Angeles in 2025.
BRAD FREEMAN
Brad Freeman is a photographer, offset printer, and book maker who has been making artist books since 1980. His book Wrong Size Fits All was a finalist for the MCBA Prize in 2011. He founded JAB – Journal of Artists’ Books in 1994 to provide a forum for critical inquiry into artists’ books. JAB was published until 2020 with a total of forty-eight issues. The JAB Archive was acquired by the Kohler Art Library of the University of Wisconsin in 2024. In 2023 the University of Iowa Press published The JAB Anthology: Selections from the Journal of Artists’ Books, 1994-2020. www.journalofartistsbooks.net
Related Exhibition
June 5, 2025 — September 14, 2025
The exhibition is supported in part by an arts grant from the City of West Hollywood.
Printing support generously provided by Typecraft.
Furniture for Reading courtesy of Karma.
