Librarian Rosemary Furtak: On Artist Books

Rosemary Furtak was the librarian at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis for more than 25 year. She was co-curator of  ‘Text Messages’, an exhibit on artist’s books shown in 2009 at the Center. We talk here about her early championing of the artist book genre -  her definition being: "a book that refuses to behave like a book ("like the 35,000 books that sit in the stacks"), the line between books and art, and words and art, and librarians and curators…and how to go about collecting artist books. We talk too about the challenges of cataloguing artist Ed Ruscha’s 26 Gasoline Stations, about the prolific and surprising Dieter Roth, inexpensive materials and Richard Tuttle, and Lawrence Weiner's Statements, and his art making process. The works of these four were highlighted in the exhibition.