get it, or: why art is also for you
Get It, or: Why Art is Also for You was a project I created for my BFA exhibition at Cornish College of the Arts that grew and lived on past my time in school. The Cornish campus is situated in downtown Seattle among headquarters and offices for Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and endless other software companies. This interaction between massive code-based commerce and contemporary art can be a unique mix, and as someone who also didn't come from a contemporary arts background but sort of accidentally ended up in a contemporary arts program, I wanted to create a lighthearted book with the goal of demystifying what seems to me like an often deliberately mystifying space.
I initially created Get It for my BFA exhibition in the spring of 2019. Since I had a heavy focus on printmaking, I chose to hand-bind an edition of 15 books with screen printed covers. I wrote the copy, made the illustrations, laid out the interior pages using InDesign, printed them at school, cut and collated them, then used a simple saddle stitch to bind them into the screen printed chip board covers. They were enough of a hit that they sold out and people began to request more copies.
Since the initial hand-made form of the book was such a time-consuming approach, I chose to go a more commercial route for the reprint. After researching options and settling on Blurb.com, I updated the design, layout, and cover of the book to work within their parameters and my budget while retaining the feel of the initial run. The result is this perfect bound trade book that is also available for digital download
as an e-book.
