Philadelphia Center for the Book, workshops!

For a short time over the summer, Philadelphia Center for the Book has its own gallery and work space on a busy section of  Phillie’s popular South Street corridor. The arrangement is part of a program whereby artists groups get currently unrented commercial spaces for free in exchange for doing cleaning, painting, minor repairs, and paying utilities.

Several workshops have been scheduled into the space along with a small book arts exhibition. This past weekend I gave a one-day class on paper engineering. Next week Erin Sweeney will present a workshop on sample books, and Esther Smith gave another on toy books. Everyone’s excited that PCBA has this chance for a physical presence in the city!

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ABC Teacher Institute In DC

Last week I did a pop-up and landscape book workshop as part of  the teacher institute sponsored by The National Museum of Women in the Arts here in Washington, D.C. The institute is part of the museum’s ongoing program called Art, Books and Creativity that explores how teachers can integrate book arts and museum activities into standard classroom curricula. As part of my session, teachers learned a series of simple pop-up structures along with how to use those in lessons on natural history, architecture and history. We also made layered books called “landscape books” with foreground, middle ground, and background images connected on each side with accordion strips and illustrating a range of subjects from celestial bodies to underwater vistas, to city streets. Everyone appeared to be having a lot of fun, and many didn’t want to stop for lunch!

To learn more about the ABC program, go to http://www.artbookscreativity.org/partners.html