America, bound differently
The Smithsonian’s new “American Stories” exhibition opens October 8 with artists’ books that turn paper, binding, collage, pop-up engineering and memory into a many-voiced portrait of the country.
On Thursday, October 8, a gallery inside the National Museum of American History will ask a deceptively simple question: what happens when a book stops behaving like a book? In “American Stories: Artists’ Books from Smithsonian Libraries and Archives,” the answer arrives in folds, fibers, collages, sculpted pages, unusual bindings and objects that borrow the familiar grammar of covers and pages only to push far beyond ordinary reading.
The Smithsonian says the exhibition brings together more than 50 artists’ books and works by dozens of American artists, including established figures such as Sol LeWitt, Adrian Piper and Ed Ruscha as well as recent acquisitions by contemporary makers. The organizing themes are identity, community and history. That sounds broad because it is broad: the show’s premise is that the American experience is not one continuous story but a shelf of sharply different forms, materials and points of view.
The timing gives that premise extra weight. The National Museum of American History is already immersed in the United States’ 250th-anniversary year, with large-scale presentations about life, liberty, national symbols and the country’s founding era. “American Stories” approaches national identity from another direction. Instead of beginning with a monumental artifact, it begins with the intimate scale of a page and the choices an artist makes about what can be folded, cut, woven, opened or withheld.
A book can be a container. An artist’s book can make the container the point.
The genre sits between publishing, sculpture, printmaking, photography, poetry and design.
Smithsonian Libraries and Archives defines an artist’s book as a medium of artistic expression that uses the structure or function of the book as inspiration. That definition matters because the category is easy to misunderstand. An artist’s book is not simply a conventional book that reproduces artwork, and it is not limited to a beautifully illustrated volume. The material decisions themselves—paper, ink, sequence, typography, binding, cutouts, boxes, folds, scale, even the way an object asks to be opened—can carry as much meaning as any written sentence.
The Smithsonian’s collection history shows why the form is so difficult to pin down. Its artists’ books span the early 20th century to the present and move across multiple library branches. The American Art and Portrait Gallery Library has emphasized works that help tell an American story. Cooper Hewitt’s library has collected examples notable for paper engineering, movable parts and graphic construction. The Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology holds works that engage science and technology. A single institutional label therefore covers objects that may look like a photo sequence, a sculptural box, a handmade paper structure or an experimental narrative.
That flexibility has historical roots. Smithsonian background material traces the modern artist’s book to 20th-century experimentation, including European artists who altered bindings, page shapes and printing conventions, and American artists who used inexpensive printed books as a portable alternative to gallery-bound art. Ed Ruscha’s deadpan photo books are central to that U.S. history: their ordinary commercial format was part of the conceptual move. The book could circulate, repeat and refuse the aura of a singular framed object even while becoming an artwork in its own right.
The exhibition’s highlights show how many directions one “book” can travel
The museum’s preview material names works that move from national identity to language, migration, bodily history, ecology and artistic lineage.
Among the works highlighted by the National Museum of American History is Babette Katz’s My Flag from 1995. The Smithsonian describes Katz’s illustrations as moving through the difficulty and possibility of people working together to weave a national story, with human figures eventually transforming into stars on the American flag. In an exhibition concerned with how identity gets made, the image is pointed: a familiar national symbol is presented not as a fixed emblem but as the product of accumulated people.
Aimee Lee’s Vocabulary Lessons (2023) takes a different route. The museum says Lee plays with English and Korean words while reflecting on learning a new language. Pages from old sketchbooks were transformed into paper threads and woven into a foundation for new words. The material process and the linguistic process mirror one another: older fragments are not discarded; they are reworked into a surface on which another vocabulary can be built.
Evelyn Patricia Terry’s America, Guests Who Came to Dinner (and Stayed) (2021) also makes accumulation central. Smithsonian exhibition text says Terry constructed collaged books from her own prints, paint and hair to describe the many ways people have come to the United States—through birth, by boat, by force and by necessity. The work’s title may sound conversational, but the listed routes complicate any easy metaphor of voluntary arrival. Migration in the American story includes welcome and displacement, choice and coercion.
Colette Fu’s Golden Lotus (2022) uses pop-up engineering to examine the historical practice of foot binding in China, now outlawed. According to the museum, Fu built a lotus flower the size of an idealized bound foot and combined X-rays of bound feet with photographs of her own foot. The result points to one of the artist’s book’s particular strengths: it can use scale and mechanics to make historical distance suddenly bodily.
Form can carry the argument
A fold that rises from a page is not merely decoration. It controls when an image appears, how large it becomes and how the viewer’s body relates to the object.
Material can become subject
Fibers, texture and edge can signal fragility, labor, place or reuse before a reader has encountered a single line of prose.
Contradictions can share a surface
Images and materials from different sources can sit together without being smoothed into one authoritative voice.
Turning a page becomes editing
The artist decides what the viewer knows first, what remains hidden and what only makes sense after an earlier image has been left behind.
Amy Richard’s The Mollusk (2018) pushes the book toward natural form. The Smithsonian says Richard, interested in mollusks and their ecological role, created a shell-shaped object from handmade paper as a reminder to care for the natural world. Holly Trostle Brigham’s Mother Monument (2018) turns in another direction, toward art history itself. The museum says Brigham honors women artists who inspired her by replacing their faces with her own and pairing the images with poems inside an obelisk-like structure. A monument becomes portable, personal and deliberately revisionist.
Why artists’ books are well suited to stories that do not fit a clean national timeline
They can carry contradiction, intimacy and evidence in the same object.
The exhibition’s broader preview describes still more material: a commemoration of Native Hawaiian culture, a Louisiana community’s rituals as a hurricane approaches, and an artist’s celebration of heritage through African and American fabrics. Those examples share an important quality. They are stories of identity that depend on texture, community practice, place and memory—not only on a date that can be placed along a straight chronological line.
That makes the artists’ book a particularly useful form for a national-history museum. Conventional history galleries often depend on the authority of the surviving object: this desk belonged to someone, this flag flew somewhere, this machine changed an industry. An artist’s book can work more subjectively. It can represent how a history was remembered, inherited, contested or reconstructed later. The difference is not between fact and fantasy; it is between the documentary object and an artist’s deliberate interpretation of experience.
There is also a democratic tension built into the form. Some artist’s books are unique or made in tiny editions; others deliberately resemble mass-produced publications. Smithsonian background material notes that artists have used books because they can be portable and, at least in some cases, easier to circulate beyond the traditional gallery system. Yet rare examples now sit in special collections where they require careful cataloging and supervised access. The form can move between everyday familiarity and institutional rarity.
That cataloging challenge is not trivial. Artists’ books may have no conventional title page, may involve several creators, or may be difficult to describe with the categories designed for standard publications. Smithsonian librarians have written about the problem directly: the object must be described well enough to be discovered without reducing it to the same assumptions that the artist may have intentionally broken. Preservation, cataloging and exhibition are therefore part of the story of how this art reaches a public.
Ruscha, LeWitt and Piper connect the new exhibition to a larger American art history
The Smithsonian pairs familiar names with newer acquisitions rather than treating the artist’s book as a niche craft category.
By placing Sol LeWitt, Adrian Piper and Ed Ruscha alongside emerging and contemporary artists, the Smithsonian signals that the artist’s book belongs inside the central story of modern and contemporary American art. Ruscha is especially useful for understanding the genre’s reach. His early photo books adopted a deliberately plain format and repeated ordinary subjects, helping establish the book itself as a conceptual artwork rather than a catalog that documented something more important elsewhere.
LeWitt’s presence points toward another strand: instructions, systems, repetition and the possibility that an idea can be distributed across formats. Piper’s work brings the book into a history of conceptual practice deeply concerned with identity, perception and the social conditions in which viewers read images and language. The exhibition does not need every visitor to arrive knowing those art-historical lineages. Its value may be the reverse: an accessible object—a book—can become an entry point into conceptual art without requiring the viewer to begin with theory.
Different Smithsonian libraries collect different kinds of books
American art, design, science and African art collections have built their artist’s-book holdings for different institutional reasons, which helps explain the collection’s range.
Some works exist nowhere else
The Smithsonian says a number of items in its artists’ books holdings are unique or limited editions, giving an exhibition a role that an online image gallery cannot fully replace.
Cataloging is part of access
When a book has unusual construction, several creators or no standard title page, librarians must describe the object in ways that make it searchable without flattening what makes it unusual.
The exhibition also reveals the quiet infrastructure that keeps experimental books visible
Libraries are not merely storage sites for this art; they are part of its afterlife.
This institutional layer matters because artist’s books are often hard to experience through reproduction. A photograph can show an open spread, but not the pace of unfolding an accordion, the resistance of thick paper, the scale of a pop-up structure or the way translucent sheets stack into a new image. The museum gallery cannot duplicate private handling either, but it can restore dimensionality: visitors see that these objects occupy space.
That is one reason the new show is more than a survey of clever bookmaking. It makes visible a collection that normally serves researchers across multiple Smithsonian libraries and reframes it for a general museum audience on the National Mall. The curatorial move is small in physical scale and large in implication. If a national story can be carried by a flag, a ship or a presidential desk, it can also be carried by stitched paper, recycled sketchbooks, hair, fabric and a pop-up fold.
Do not only read the pages. Watch how the books ask to be read.
A useful gallery strategy is to look for the physical decision behind each work.
For visitors who do not already follow book arts, the most rewarding question may be simple: what could this artist do with a book that would be harder to do with a painting on a wall? Sometimes the answer is sequence. Sometimes it is portability. Sometimes it is intimacy, or the ability to conceal part of the work until another page is turned. In a pop-up, the answer may be movement. In a woven or sculpted structure, the answer may be that the page itself becomes a body.
Then look for the opposite question: why keep the idea of a book at all? Artists could make free-standing sculptures, prints or films. The persistence of the book form brings expectations with it—front and back, beginning and end, inside and outside, private reading and public publication. Artists can obey those expectations, bend them or use the viewer’s familiarity with them as material.
The Smithsonian’s highlighted works make that approach concrete. Lee’s woven paper asks how an old page can become the foundation for new language. Fu’s pop-up uses depth and scale to make a historical practice physically legible. Richard’s shell form lets ecology determine the outline of the book. Terry’s collages accumulate multiple routes into the United States rather than compressing them into a single migration narrative. Brigham’s obelisk borrows the architecture of public memory and shrinks it into a personal artistic lineage.
None of those strategies requires a visitor to settle on one definition of the artist’s book. In fact, the exhibition is strongest if the definition remains slightly unstable. The category survives because artists keep testing its edges.
“American Stories” opens Thursday on the National Mall
The practical details are unusually simple for a major Washington museum stop.
The Smithsonian held a media preview on October 5 with head curator Anne Evenhaugen, who is also head librarian of the Smithsonian’s American Art and Portrait Gallery Library. Public programming tied to the exhibition is expected to extend beyond opening day; earlier Smithsonian planning materials said workshops and other programs would be announced later. Visitors planning around a specific event should check the institution’s current calendar rather than assume a program date.
For a broader museum day, the same building is also presenting major 250th-anniversary material, including “In Pursuit of Life, Liberty & Happiness,” while conservation work on the Revolutionary War gunboat Philadelphia is visible through viewing windows. That creates a useful contrast. One floor can contain national icons and military history; another gallery can ask how a small handmade object carries equally serious questions about belonging, language and memory.
Reporting sources
- Smithsonian Libraries and Archives: “American Stories: Artists’ Books from Smithsonian Libraries and Archives”, exhibition overview and visitor information.
- National Museum of American History: “American Stories”, featured works and exhibition descriptions.
- Smithsonian Institution: 2026 programming announcement, exhibition scope and thematic examples.
- National Museum of American History: October 2026 calendar, opening date, current exhibition count and programming context.
- Smithsonian Libraries Artists’ Books collection and collection overview, definitions, examples and collecting areas.
- Smithsonian Libraries: “What is an artist’s book?”, background on the medium and its history.
- Smithsonian Libraries: Art and Design Collections at the Smithsonian, research-guide scale and collection context.
- Smithsonian press preview notice, curator and media-preview details.
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