Barbara Page book signing and lecture

One Thing Leads to Another

Sunday, 3/5 4:00-5:30 p.m

Author Barbara Page will be giving a talk about her book Book Marks: An Artist’s Card Catalog and her process. Her presentation will illustrate how her long term art projects ended up in a very different form than she initially imagined. Copies of Barbara’s book will also be available for purchase. All proceeds from this event will benefit the Conservatory. Refreshments will be served. This free event kicks off our Women’s History Month celebration. 

Book Marks is an ongoing project consisting of hundreds of compact artworks filed in a two-drawer library case. In 2008 I began illustrating obsolete library checkout cards as a colorful system for remembering the books they represented. Upon finishing a book, I would transform a three-by-five-inch card into miniature collages or drawings recording my impressions, with the book’s title and name of the author at the top. The images are intentionally eclectic since every manuscript dictates its unique personality through style, content, period, and setting. I soon started making these artworks for stories read long ago, eventually recreating seven decades of my reading history.

In 2021 Book Marks: An Artist’s Card Catalog was published by Bauer & Dean. It is a blend of both art book and autobiography, showing us how significant books can leave indelible impressions on our lives. It contains plates of over 430 of the library cards, interwoven with personal accounts of my childhood, the mid-blowing Berkeley years, adventures as a pilot and world traveler, as well as life after death, which together illuminate how our memories of books are anchored not only to the story itself, but also to events and images beyond the book’s cover.

Barbara Page is an artist, former triathlete, and avid reader. She received her MFA from Cornell University. Her work ranges from multi-media paintings to large museum installations, including a 140” long pedestrian bridge at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Natural Sciences and the expansive Rock of Ages, Sands of Time mural at the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca, NY. Page is a fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and was artist-in-residence at the Golden Foundation. Her love affair with printed matter led to the Book Marks project, first exhibited at The Center for Book Arts in New York City. Her card catalog, along with Book Marks, won Best of Show in the Art of the Book, an international juried exhibit at the Rochester Central Library in 2022.