Project Gutenberg Project?
Jeff Rathermal, Executive Director of Minnesota Center for Book Arts, stopped by the other day to show me how his exhibition, The Project Gutenberg Project, was coming along. He has been hard at work in his studio, working with the detritus from the Gutenberg Project. The Gutenberg Project disassembles old books, of varying value and states of repair, and digitizes them for posterity. You can actually download some from the internet. The gathering of the information is laudable, but the destruction of the books is sad. He has been examining the scraps, working with them to make beautiful objects that also comment on the irony of destroying to preserve.
Textile Art by Susan Hensel
Discover the transformative textile art by Susan Hensel. Susan Hensel is a multidisciplinary artist, with a 50+ year career. She combines a mixed media practice with embroidery across digital and manual platforms. She also makes sculptures and wall art using the colors and techniques of commercial embroidery.
These artworks are designed in the computer and stitched out on the computer-aided embroidery machine. The goal is to create an experience for the viewer that overwhelms them with color. And yet transcends the quotidian, encouraging one, for even a few seconds, to step outside the narrative of the ego into a place of pure sensation.
Find Susan’s Fine Art
Hensel’s artwork is known and collected all over the world. It is displayed in collecting libraries and museums. As disparate as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and The Getty Research Institute. There are major holdings at Minnesota Center for Book Arts, University of Washington, Baylor University. This also includes the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Archives pertaining to her artist’s books are available for study. At the University of Washington Libraries in Seattle. Hensel’s curatorial work began in 2000 in East Lansing, Michigan. With the Art Apartment and deepened with ownership of the Susan Hensel Gallery. Hensel has curated over seventy exhibitions of emerging and mid-career artists from all over the United States and Canada.
In recent years, Hensel has been awarded multiple grants and residencies through the Jerome Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Ragdale Foundation. Fiber and mixed media objects of overwhelming color transcend the quotidian, creating experiences that step into pure sensation.
