Join us in the Classroom for a Workshop with Brooke Frank.
Handmade books don’t have to be treated so preciously. When you know how to make them, the number of handmade books you can scribble in is limited only by your willingness to whip together another one. Any idea can be worthy of the blank page and the time it takes you to jot it down.
In this workshop, we’ll each arrive with one of our dumbest recent drawings as a prompt, generate a series of pages exploring the drawing in greater depth, and then we will each bind our drawings into a unique book. The completed one-of-one set of books generated in this workshop will be kept in the Permanent Collection at Stoveworks with the South East portion of The Sketchbook Project, originally started by the Brooklyn Art Library.
We will use the drum leaf binding to bind our books. Drum leaf books look and feel like “a real book” despite being a fairly low-tech and simple binding technique. This binding lends itself well to improvisation. It’s well-suited to book projects that have a clear and detailed plan for the content and to books for which there is no plan at all. Its versatility and ease make it a great binding to have in your skill set for all kinds of books you haven’t planned yet.
Brooke Frank is an artist based in Miami, Florida. Her practice is grounded in painting, book and printmaking. Her studio practice is an open and flexible methodology for the gathering, parsing, and interpretation of information used to pry open ideas about fact and fiction. The collision of text and images on the surfaces of her paintings play with the humor and power of uncertainty.
Recent exhibitions include “Two Lies and a Truth” (2023) at Ground Floor Contemporary in Birmingham, Alabama; “BluePrnt” (2023) at Bridge Red Studios in Miami, Florida, and “ZOONOTIC HEX” (2022) at Field Projects, New York City, New York. She has been an artist-in-residence at IS Projects (now known as the Miami Paper & Printing Museum, 2016) in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Art Farm (2016) in Marquette, Nebraska, and the Jaffe Center for Book Arts (2016) in Boca Raton, Florida. Her work has been acquired by the Girls’ Club Collection, the Jaffe Center for Book Arts, and the Miami Paper & Printing Museum. Frank received an MFA from The University of Texas at Austin in Studio Art in 2019.