Current Exhibition & Artist Talk: Buzz Spector

Buzz Spector has an exhibition now on at Bruno David Gallery located in Saint Louis, Missouri. This show features New Work by Buzz Spector, including his new video work "Selected Poems".

This exhibition will run through October 11th. On Saturday, September 27th at 3pm, Buzz Spector will give an artist talk regarding his new work. Bruno David Gallery is also exhibiting a group show "Untitled", organized by Keri Lappas, which will run concurrently with Spector's exhibition.

David Bruno Gallery

Current Exhibitions

Sep 05, 2014 - Oct 11, 2014

SAVE THE DATE: Gallery Talk by Buzz Spector at Bruno David Gallery. 

Saturday, September 27 at 3 pm.

Buzz Spector' s excavations of books and reconstructions of libraries are well-known, but his work with found and altered volumes has always been accompanied by works on paper made out of elements from their dust jackets. As Spector has written, " books are formal presentations of text. They have titles, after all, and come jacketed, with paragraphs of introduction slipped between their covers and their pages." This new work features collages made from dust jacket elements in the front gallery, while in the main gallery are larger collages and drawings, a series of wall-mounted sculptures incorporating details of photographs of authors, plus a reinstallation of Frieze, the 60-foot long arrangement of photos of authors Spector showed at the Huntington Museum of Art last fall. Spector 's ongoing meditation on reading and the culture of the book extends here to reflections on how- and when -writers become authors, how work of the imagination is performed via posing, and how the specialized, but also highly conventional, language of dust jacket blurbs can itself be excavated in search of new narrative meanings.

Front Room
BUZZ SPECTOR: New Work

Main Gallery
BUZZ SPECTOR: New Work

New Media Room
BUZZ SPECTOR: New Work

Project Room
UNTITLED

Buzz Spector in collaboration with students from the Myers School of Art

This exhibition is a collaboration between the University Libraries, The Center for the History of Psychology, Akron Printmaking Enthusiasts, the Synapse Art and Science series, and students in intermediate drawing at the Myers School of Art.

The subject of the exhibition, at the Bierce Library Lobby, University Libraries, is the relationship between books, memory, and perception.  Books are repositories of knowledge, opinions, culture, and memory.  Students in the exhibition were asked to respond to the content and alter books donated from The Center for the History of Psychology.  In their process students responded to the collection of testing devices for a wide variety of memory and perceptual experiments, some are on display in the exhibition, and are also from The Center for the History of Psychology.

Buzz Spector is an internationally recognized artist and critical writer.  Spector works in a wide range of mediums including sculpture, photography, printmaking, book arts, and installation.  His work makes frequent use of the book, both as a subject and as object, and concerns the relationships among public history, individual memory, and perception.  Spector’s installation is exhibited in conjunction with the student projects.

The recipient of several awards and fellowships, Spector was honored with a College Art Association Distinguished Teaching of Art Award (2013), an Artist's Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts (2005), a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1991), a Visual Artist's Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council (1988) and three fellowship awards from the National Endowment for the Arts (1991, 1985 and 1982).

Exhibition

Buzz Spector in collaboration with students from the Myers School of Art

March 12 – April 18, 2014

Bierce Library Lobby

University Libraries

302 Buchtel Common

University of Akron

Akron, Ohio 44325

Buzz Spector: Off the Shelf at the Grunwald Gallery of Art, Indiana University

"The Grunwald Gallery of Art is pleased to announce Buzz Spector: Off the Shelf. This exhibition will open to the public with a lecture and reception, Friday, October 19, and be on view through Saturday, November 16, 2012. The exhibition is part of a broader discussion of the relevance and role of books and libraries in the arts and humanities. A panel discussion on October 24th "Books, Text and Information" will broach such topics as the future of the book, the importance of stacks and browsing, and forms of scholarly production and authorship. Panel members include Ron Day, Professor of Library and Information Science, Ian Meares, Visiting Assistant Professor of Ceramics, and Dawna Schuld, Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art, and moderator Emilee Mathews, Interim Director of the Fine Arts Library. Receptions in the Fine Arts Library and the Grunwald Gallery will follow. 

Spector is an eminent figure in the artists' book and book arts communities and an internationally known artist and writer. He has published numerous artists' books as well as editing the critical volume The Book Maker's Desire: Writings on the Art of the Book. Spector has lent his critical voice to numerous publications, including American Craft, Artforum, Art Issues, Art on Paper, Exposure and New Art Examiner. He is also a co-founder of the magazine WhiteWalls. Among his many awards, Spector received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 2005. He also received Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowships in 1991, 1982, and 1985, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Award in 1991. He is currently the dean of the College and Graduate School of Art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. 

Buzz Spector: Off the Shelf features Spector's large, sculptural installations of books and his Polaroid works. The installations, including The Library of Babel, comprised of 4,500 books, and a piece featuring books by Indiana University authors, all borrowed from Indiana University's libraries. These installations invite commentary on the logic and poetry of the arrangement of books, and ask us to consider the function of the book object. His oversized Polaroid prints further investigate the themes of meaning and form, authorship and ownership, and the physical experience of reading.

He will be signing his recent book "Buzzwords: Interviews with Buzz Spector." This selection of six interviews spanning nearly thirty years showcases Spector's ideas about art, books, libraries and his own history of reading. Spector describes and elucidates his installations, book objects and photographs within an intellectually rich context, provoking stimulating conversation and thought. Spector has designed new page art especially for this publication, including a section that he has individually hand-torn for each book. 

This program is sponsored by the College Arts and Humanities Institute, Indiana University Libraries, the Fine Arts Library, and the Ruth Lilly Auxiliary Library Facility."

To learn more about this event visit Grunwald Gallery's website here.