The BYU Museum of Art
Last week I made a long overdue trip to the local university art museum to see an exhibition before it closed. Happy for me, the timing of my visit happened to coincide with the opening of another exhibition called The Matter of Words: Adam Bateman, Harrell Fletcher, and John Fraser, which features artwork referencing the medium of the written word. In other words, many of the sculptures were created using books. As you can imagine, I was thrilled to be able to see book art in person for the first time since I started featuring it on my blog.
The focus of the exhibition – and my favorite piece – was the giant book sculpture in the center of the gallery. Giant being key. 14 feet tall and 83,000 pounds, “The Fourth Thousand Words” by Adam Bateman consists of hundreds of thousands of books stacked on each other, held only by gravity. It took the artist and several museum assistants 600 hours to build and required that the gallery floor be reinforced to support its weight. A few photos I and my MIL Aiti happened to take:
Side view
Me being a nerd
Close-up
Corner view
Another side view
Who could not beam at your first glance of that towering pillar of books? I sure did. While “The Fourth Thousand Words” was by far the most impressive work of the exhibition, there were a few others that stood out to me. The rubbing of a portion of the stack:
(*grin* I want to make a rubbing of my bookshelf.) And the collages created by the end pages and detached spines of books by John Fraser:
This would look lovely hanging in my house. 
Overall, the exhibition was an amazing experience. Hopefully it won’t be my last.
Held only by gravity? Oh my, that’s amazing! Good thing they allowed you to take pictures inside. I think it’s great that you were able to see book art in person since it’s something that you feature in your blog.
I know! The artist said it took a lot of trial and error, not to mention patience. I would’ve loved to be one of the
museum assistants.
Hmmm. I like the concept, but not too sure. It makes me worried about the books being destroyed by all that weight. I always wanted to do some kind of collage of book covers of my favorite books. But I’d have to print out pictures of them, not use actual covers. My sister would kill me. LOL. She freaks out if she finds out I dog eared my own books.
I know. I’m curious to see how smashed the books on the bottom will be when it’s dismantled. I love the book cover collage idea-maybe I will steal it.
I need more art for my walls.
Whoa, super cool. I want that big cube to be a house. Add a door and I’ll go live in there!
I also love the rubbing. How did they keep that piece of paper in place to do it? Painter’s tape? It seems like something that could be a pain.
Lovely idea! We should tell the artist to make a house next.
Perhaps painters tape or something stronger? I wish I could ask. It does seem hard to replicate now that I think about it.
I saw this too and just about dropped my jaw. Love the exhibit, wish I had enough room to make a giant book cube
Wow. What a great exhibit for the MOA to host. Thanks for the fun pics, I’m glad you got to go.