Workshop: Ulises x BB Workshop, Gerrit Rietveld Academie/Sandberg Instituut

Join Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG) and Ulises for a workshop “B2B, Books displaying Books” with BB Workshop, Gerrit Rietveld Academie/Sandberg Instituut in conjunction with the exhibition Ulises: Assembly engaging the labor of bookworkers. BB Workshop will convene a workshop engaging discarded materials in guided bookbinding techniques (gluing, stitching, drilling, cutting, pressing, folding, and stapling). Following the production, BB Workshop will facilitate dialogues for book interventions for designated areas, exploring the relationships between books and the spaces they occupy (exhibitions, shelves, libraries).  

BB (est. 2008, Amsterdam) is also known as The Bookbinding Workshop at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Instituut (Miquel Hervás Gómez, Ott Metusala, Gersande Schellinx). It is a workspace that affords the production of books and publications in small editions and specific manipulations of paper and cardboard. Next to being a technical workshop, BB also functions as a cross-departmental point in their institutions. They believe publishing is an emancipatory process. 

Ulises is a bookshop and project space dedicated to artists’ books and independent art publications that explores the relationship between publics and publications. They provide an inventory of titles not widely distributed in the United States on contemporary art, graphic design, art theory, architecture, criticism, curatorial practice, and adjacent fields. They support people who make books and expand the boundaries of what art publishing can be. Hosting projects, exhibitions, and residencies, Ulises’s open-ended programming explores publishing as an incubator for new forms of artistic, editorial, curatorial, and pedagogical practice. Ulises sees the democratic potential of publishing as a vehicle for activism, education, assembly, and exchange. The name Ulises is a tribute to the work and legacy of Ulises Carrión, a Mexican-born poet, conceptualist, and avant-garde artist who was an early pioneer and theorist of the artist’s book, and the founder of the Amsterdam-based bookshop Other Books and So (1975–78). 

Ulises is the collective labor of Nerissa Cooney, Lauren Downing, Kayla Romberger, Gee Wesley, and Ricky Yanas. It was founded in 2016 by Cooney, Downing, Romberger, Wesley, Yanas, and Joel Evey, with additional contributions from Tim Belknap, Jody Harrington, and Nabil Kashyap.

This program is supported as part of the Dutch Culture USA program by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York.

Image: Photographs by Otto Kaan. Courtesy of Gerrit Rietveld Academie/Sandberg Instituut.

Generous support for TUAG programming is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.