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Artists Book House Founder Audrey Niffenegger and Board President Ken Gerleve were recently featured in the Chicago Sun-Times!
We have also just been notified that we will receive a grant of $5,400 from the organization Pitch Your Peers Chicago.
We are pleased to announce that Artists Book House has been selected to receive a Community Development Grant from the City of Chicago in the amount of $249,032.03 for the renovation of the roof, facade, and back wall of our building.
Artists Book House Founder Audrey Niffenegger was invited on WGN Spotlight Chicago to talk all things book arts.
Artists Book House was recently featured in an article on Redfin on the Chicago Art Scene - read the entire article here.
Many of us here at ABH draw great inspiration from the weird, wonderful work of Edward Gorey, born here in Chicago on Feb. 22, 1925.
Edward Gorey was a prolific writer, illustrator, set designer, and playwright, who is most known for the animated opening titles to the PBS Mystery! series, and creating dozens of small illustrated picture books – many decidedly not for children – including the Gashlycrumb Tinies.
I sometimes wish that Artists Book House was small and cuddly, with silky warm fur, twitching whiskers, and beseeching eyes, because if ABH was a cute little mammal we probably would have found a nice home for it much sooner. Since ABH happens to be a book and paper center, it took us a while to find a suitable location. After a couple false starts, we eventually Goldilocksed our way to something that is just right: 4207 West Irving Park Road, in Chicago.
I am delighted to report that Artists Book House has a new home: 4207 West Irving Park Road, in Chicago. This is a single-story, double storefront in the charming Old Irving Park neighborhood. It is near the Irving Park stops on the Blue Line and the Union Pacific Northwest Metra line. It’s just west of 90/94. It should be easy to visit us!
Welcome to our new website. Due to platform and support changes with our website provider, Squarespace, the need to create a new website that takes advantage of their new features and ongoing development has become a necessity. We are working diligently to migrate all of the content from our old website to our new online home, so some sections will not be immediately available. We hope to complete the migration by Monday, August 26th. If you have questions in the meantime, please email us at info@artistsbookhouse.org.
Take a little walk to the edge of town, and go across the tracks to where the Schnappviecher looms like a… well, like a Schnappviecher, and you’ll find cartoonist Marie Enger binding that prickling shiver up the back of your neck into the shape of ink on paper.
Join instructor Melissa Jay Craig in this 6 hour workshop in which you will learn to experiment with Kozo fiber. The techniques learned in this class require minimal equipment and students will be able to replicate what they learn at home.
In this class, students will take what they learned in Papercuts, and learn how to layer panels to create Tunnel Books. First they will learn a few variations on tunnel book structures using premade kits (one with double stick tape, one sewn by hand, etc.), and will then create one of their own.
In Articulated Paper Dolls, students will learn how to design and construct their own jointed paper dolls that can move and emote. While these dolls are great for play, their full range of motion also makes them perfect for stop motion animation, puppetry, and book arts.
Like tunnel books, carousel books create tiny worlds in miniature, but the structure allows for multiple vignettes to be viewed, either linearly or in the round. In this class, students will learn two carousel book structures: a single segment structure which can be combined with others to form a completed carousel book, and a multi-segment book, where the segments are created together from strips of paper and then sewn into the final structure.
This class introduces students to the building blocks of paper engineering: pop-up shapes, pull tabs, pockets, and more. Students will learn how paper engineering can serve as "animated illustrations" for narratives, in the simplest of greetings cards or the most complicated of artist books.
In this class, students will expand on the Tunnel Book to create a larger and fully collapsible toy theatre with paper dolls. We’ll make panels like a traditional stage set backdrop, and also make some translucent screens for shadow puppet play.
