$ 29.95
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Art / Painting / Mixed Media
Hardcover
9.75 x 11.25 inches
120 pages
$29.95 | $35.00 CAD
A fantastic, strange, and mysterious world, real and imagined, is featured in Awake in the Dream World, a mid-career retrospective of artist and bestselling author Audrey Niffenegger. Book art, works on paper, and paintings reflect her captivating narrative talent and her confrontations with life, mortality, and magic. Niffenegger’s artist’s books are presented in depth-including aquatints, lithographs, and letterpress prints that illustrate surreal characters in murky and romantic settings. Her self-portraits reveal self-assurance and whimsy alongside anxiety and loneliness. Another motif in Niffenegger’s work probes darker corners of the human heart and mind-dreams, fantasies, and the hopeless struggle with what Shakespeare called “this bloody tyrant, Time.” Essays by Audrey Niffenegger, National Museum of Women in the Arts Curator of Book Arts Krystyna Wasserman, and Art Institute of Chicago Curator and School of the Art Institute Professor Mark Pascale explore the artist’s influences and work.
Published in conjunction with the June 21-November 10, 2013 exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Audrey Niffenegger is a visual artist and writer who lives mostly in Chicago and occasionally in London. She has published six books, including the novels The Time Traveler’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry. She helped to found the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts. Her art has been exhibited by Printworks Gallery in Chicago since 1986. She is a Professor in the Fiction Department of Columbia College. Her current projects include her third novel, The Chinchilla Girl in Exile, and a ballet, Raven Girl, in collaboration with Wayne McGregor for the Royal Opera House Ballet.
Krystyna Wasserman is currently Curator of Book Arts at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) in Washington, D.C. She established NMWA’s Library and Research Center, serving as its director from 1987 through 2002. She now oversees the museum’s collection of more than 1,000 artists’ books. She has curated more than thirty exhibitions of artists’ books, sketchbooks, and illustrations, including The Book as Art: Twenty Years of Artists’ Books from the National Museum of Women in the Arts (2006). Wasserman is a member of NMWA’s Library Fellows, a program she developed to support the creation of artists’ books.
Mark Pascale is a lithographer who has been active in the Chicago art world for more than 30 years, as a curator, researcher, and teacher. He is Curator in the Department of Prints and Drawings at The Art Institute of Chicago, and concurrently Adjunct Professor of Art in Print Media, at School of the Art Institute. His numerous exhibitions and publications include Contemporary Drawings from the Irving Stenn Jr. Collection, and Jasper Johns: Gray published by The Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently working on a retrospective exhibition of the prints and drawings of Martin Puryear.
