Message From The Founder

Dear Friends,

Deborah Siegel-Acevedo, ABH’s first Executive Director, will be shifting roles at the end of March, leaving her staff position to take a seat on ABH's Advisory Board. We are grateful for Deborah’s many innovations, for helping ABH to become more professional and for connecting us with so many wonderful opportunities and friends. Deborah’s warmth and humour and her patience with ABH’s growing pains have made this very challenging year much easier to navigate. Deborah worked with the Board, her staff, and volunteers on a year’s worth of ABH panels, parties, workshops, and grant applications. She brought in Advisors and worked to improve our systems; she successfully applied for assistance from the Business Volunteers for the Arts, who are helping us create a Strategic Plan for ABH. After we complete our strategic planning process, we expect ABH leadership to focus on major fundraising after this year of organizational capacity building. We will miss working with Deborah. We are glad to continue to count her as a member of our organization and a cherished Advisor.

We have been traveling, recently, to visit other book arts organizations and friends. In November, I went with Ken Gerleve, Eileen Madden, Deborah, and Killian Fowler to visit the Minnesota Center for Book Arts in Minneapolis. MCBA has been an inpiration to us since the early 90s, when the Columbia College Center for Book and Paper Arts was founded. We were delighted to receive a generous welcome from Executive Director Elysa Voshell and her staff as well as several board members, who all spent the day talking with us in terrific detail about how they keep MCBA operating. It was a real education in teamwork and resourcefulness, and we left feeling deep admiration for those who keep MCBA going.

I’ve wanted to attend CODEX for many years, and this time I finally did. Ken Gerleve and I traveled to the Bay Area together, and fellow board member Tom Greensfelder was there, too. CODEX is one of the premier book arts events in the world. It was a delight to meet so many artists I have long admired, and to see old friends, many of them Columbia College Books Arts MFA alumni. It was a reminder of why we’ve been working so long to create a new book arts center for Chicago: almost everyone we spoke to had heard of our efforts, wished us well, offered to help in any way they could. It was heartening—thank you to everyone for being such a warm and giving community.

Yours,

Audrey Niffenegger, ABH Founder and Board Member