In collaboration with The CODEX Foundation, Kala Gallery is excited to co-present Bookness, an exhibition exploring the book as a dynamic medium for artistic and cultural inquiry.

“The book has taken countless forms across the globe and throughout history—from papyrus scrolls and medieval parchment manuscripts to palm-leaf bindings, accordions, slat books, and other Asian-style stab bindings. It evolves alongside the cultures it witnesses, continuing to metamorphose as a reflection of the world around it. For centuries, artists’ books have played a critical yet often overlooked role in artistic movements, offering a space where the literary and visual arts intersect. The future of the book is now the art of the book.”
~ Inge Bruggeman, The CODEX Foundation

Bookness features works by Iván Acebo-Choy, Islam Aly, Gale Antokal, Javier Barrera, Tony Bellaver, Anthea Black, Israel Campos, DeMerritt Pauwels Editions (Nora Pauwels & John DeMerritt), Thorsten Dennerline, Kota Ezawa, Li Jiang, Lisa Kokin, Mary V. Marsh, Nasim Moghadam, Emily Payne, Steph Rue, and Robbin Ami Silverberg. These artists expand the book beyond its traditional form, transforming it into a living space for material, conceptual, and cultural exploration. Working across bookmaking, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, and textiles,  each artist investigates the materiality and the conceptual space of the book in their own unique way.

Iván Acebo-Choy and Islam Aly approach the book as a space for cultural inquiry: Acebo-Choy stitches text into cloth as acts of embodied language, while Aly merges historical bindings with digital processes to reflect on heritage and justice. Anthea Black, Lisa Kokin, and Steph Rue use the book to navigate intimacy, grief, identity, and spirituality, drawing on textile, collage, and papermaking traditions to question what can be seen, felt, or read. Gale Antokal and Emily Payne explore fragility and transformation through material traces—dust, shadow, and the disassembled page, while Israel Campos and Nasim Moghadam reframe cultural histories and personal identities through print, narrative, and icons. From Kota Ezawa’s cinematic pop-up histories to Mary V. Marsh’s Semaphore crafted from a retired Rainbow Flag, the works in Bookness consider how books record and transmit collective experiences.

Many more explorations are on view in the exhibition. Together, the artists in Bookness reaffirm the book’s enduring vitality—as archive, artifact, and ever-evolving artistic expressions.

At the opening reception on Saturday, November 22, 12-4pm, visitors can participate in a hands-on screen printing event in the community classroom, as part of Fall of Freedom, a nationwide wave of creative resistance. Participants can screen print an image of Mary V. Marsh’s artwork with the quote:
 “Read the message, hold the knowledge, create the story, send the message on—long may we wave.”
 Prints can be taken home by attendees.