Fish Skins, Coveralls, and Tomatoes

 November 10, 2023

For many years the KBAC has partnered with the Western Michigan University’s Visiting Scholars and Artists Program to cohost artists. This month, we welcomed Minneapolis/St. Paul-based book and paper artist Erica Spitzer Rasmussen and are presenting her exhibition Books Abound in the KBAC gallery and the Zheng Legacy Collections Center.

Erica's work is intended to ignite imagination, focusing on the sculptural qualities of book forms. She began her university studies with painting and drawing but soon discovered she could relate her ideas more clearly in sculpture and shifted to 3D art using paper. A year-long residency at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts sealed the relationship for her between book forms and sculpture. Erica began pushing the definition of a "book" using unconventional shapes (seed pods, shoe soles, tomatoes, and garments.) She loves telling stories and embedding remnants of artifacts into the very materials of her sculptures. This includes using tomatoes, elm seed pods, fish scales and skin, medical examination table paper, bits of hair, and even her mother's ashes embedded in handmade paper. She says, “I like to use materials that tell my stories." Thoughts about Pots is a series celebrating the life and memory of her late stepfather, Warren MacKenzie, a ceramicist, and emeritus Professor at the University of Minnesota. She printed a collection of statements by Warren on paper she made by cutting up his well-worn, clay-covered coveralls, then transformed these pages into sculptural book forms that are precisely modeled after some of Warren's clay vessels. 

On her first day in Kalamazoo, Erica met with WMU students at the Zhang Center for a presentation of artist’s books in the collection and a hands-on bookbinding activity. In the evening she gave an engaging talk about her work at the Richmond Center for Visual Arts. Then on Friday, she worked in our studio with nearly sixty 2nd graders (in shifts!) from El Sol Elementary School. The kids were fully engaged and inspired, listening to her stories, and discovering exciting new ways to think about making books. They were awed by the idea of books made from fish skins, seed pods, and old coveralls. The students made several different book forms including rubber-band books and accordion books, then decorated them with stamps, stickers, and drawings. One little girl was so interested in the idea of books made with tomatoes that she decided to draw pictures of her favorite foods in her accordion. The kids left the studio beaming with pride for the bag full of books they made by hand!

It was a real pleasure having Erica here and we already miss her! But you can still see her show!

Books Abound is on view in our gallery M-F, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. through January 12. We will also be open for the December 3 Art Hop from 5-8 p.m. Please stop in to see this imaginative work!

Jeff, Katie, and Cathy