All Grants | Cycle 4 –
Megan Liberty is the Art Books section editor at The Brooklyn Rail. Her research focus is on artists’ books and publishing. Over the years, she has profiled numerous organizations in this field, such as the Center for Book Arts, Printed Matter, Franklin Furnace and Siglio Press. She has interviewed artists across the spectrum of publishing and art book practices, including Chitra Ganesh, Tammy Nguyen, Leslie Hewitt and Sabra Moore. Liberty has written general interest catalogue essays on the field, and more specialized looks at trends in artists’ publishing, such as the rise in published sketchbook facsimiles and the importance of collaboration and resource sharing. In 2023, she curated a traveling exhibition of historical artists’ books, Craft & Conceptual Art: Reshaping the Legacy of Artists’ Books, organized with the Center for Book Arts.
Links
Profile / Research Links
Megan’s Website
Publication Links
Craft & Conceptual Art (Center for Book Arts, 2023).
Art, Craft & Community (Ludion, 2023).
“The Hybrid Space of the Art Book” in Recto/Verso: Art Publishing in Practice, New York (Hauser & Wirth Publishers, 2018).
“SMALLER PLEASURES: on the shrinking size of photobooks,” Aperture 257 (Winter 2024).
“Mythological Books, Medicinal Rituals, and the Revival of the African Codex: Reginald Walker’s Artists’ Books,” Visual AIDS, Feb 28, 2024.
“The Copy Machine Queen: The bookmaking legacy of Louise Odes Neaderland,” Fine Books & Collections (Winter 2024).
Book Reviews for The Brooklyn Rail.
Summary of Research Proposal Supported by 10×10 Photobooks Grant:
Women’s Radical Self-Publishing of their Bodies, Xerox in the 1960s-1980s: Barbara T. Smith and Joan Lyons
My research will examine the advent of xerography and its application by women as an act of radical self-publishing. During the 1960s, when xerography began to reach the hands of artists, women were still frequently excluded from traditional photography, print, and publishing workshops. With xerography available, women photographers could produce and publish their own photographs as xerox prints and photobooks. And what did many women turn to as their subject matters? Their own bodies. In an act of radical reclamation of their politically debated and objectified bodies, many of these women placed themselves physically on these machines in an act that asserts their self-hood. I will look specifically at the work of Barbara T. Smith (b. 1931) and Joan Lyons (b. 1937).
Smith is one of the earliest women to produce photobooks of her body using xerography. She began making these in the mid-1960s, after being turned away from publishing with Gemini in Los Angeles. She rented a Xerox 914 machine and placed it in her living room. Her most prominent series of xerox photobooks, the Coffin Series, features a mix of body-self-portraits showing her face, breasts, and even genitalia pushed up against the screen. Mixed in with these images are photographs of her children and household objects placed on the scanning bed and then layered with previous prints made of her. This work documents a stage in her life, during which she struggled with the sexism of the art world, the end of her marriage, and her seemingly opposite roles as an artist and mother. Though in recent years, Smith has finally received recognition for her work as a performance artist, with the support of this grant, I will give her work as a book artist its due recognition as well. Her archive of xerox books is located at the Getty, where I will spend time deeply researching the collection. Smith is also still living in Southern California, where I have previously been able to meet with her. If she is able, I hope to meet with her again and record some of her comments on this body of work.
Lyons began experimenting, using a Haloid Xerox machine to make self-portraits for photobooks and prints as early as 1972. Similar to Smith, the childcare and care-taking duties were left to her, while her husband, Nathan Lyons, also an artist, held seminars and hosted his art students at their home. In 1969, Nathan Lyons founded the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY, a space dedicated to photographic exploration. Two years later, Joan Lyons founded the accompanying press and began to work with artists on publishing photobooks. In 1972 she produced her influential xerography book, *Self Impressions*, featuring images of herself—face, hands, arms, and torso—pushed against the machine. She made work about her experience as a woman and a mother, using what was available to her and transforming it through xerography. Her work as a photographer remains hugely undervalued still, and I look forward to drawing attention to it. With the support of this grant, I will travel to Rochester to the Visual Studies Workshop archive and spend time viewing and researching her books. Lyons lives in Rochester still, and I hope to interview her about this work and record her comments. During this period of cultural upheaval, many women—and other artists—turned to the possibilities of self-publishing provided by xerography. I will focus on the work of Barbara T. Smith and Joan Lyons because both found themselves struggling with the cultural limitations placed on women, specifically mothers. Smith and Lyons had very different trajectories in their lives as mothers—Smith eventually lost custody of her children in her divorce, in part because of the sexual nature of many of her performances, while Lyons remained married and raised her three children. Today, expectations of motherhood continue to impact women’s selfhood, both for those who choose motherhood and for the increasing number of women who are no longer given that choice. The intensely personal nature of these bodies of work recalls the feminist political slogan of the time, “the personal is political.”