BILL
By Bill Berkson and Colter Jacobsen
Book Signing and Release, Thursday, June 19th, 6-8PM
Live Music with Coconut
Gallery 16 Editions is pleased to announce the release of our latest publication, BILL, a collaboration between poet Bill Berkson and artist Colter Jacobsen.
Berkson writes; “The words and title for BILL popped out of a juvenile detective novel Tom Veitch gave me around 1980. Instantly, just flipping through this little illustrated book occasioned an emergency. The editorial imagination went to work. Soon, having typed a series of short sentences, paragraphs and stray phrases towards the bottom edge of unusually thin 8 1/2” by 11” sheets... I set aside the twenty-or-so pages and forgot about them.”
Once completed, the story was shelved in a manila folder where it remained for 25 years. It wasn’t until 2006 that Berkson re-visited the story and decided the blank pages needed artwork. With the help of Mac McGinnes, it was decided that artist Colter Jacobsen, and his beautifully rendered drawings, would be perfect for the job. Jacobsen found inspiration for the project in a collection of postcards, some dating back as early as the 1900’s, and up to the 1980’s. With a slow and deliberate attentiveness, Jacobsen began a series of drawings. “I felt I was responding to another time, nearer to when I was born, a time thirty years before I was born, and recontextualizing these times into images for today.”
Within a year, the new BILL emerged, “a fresh creation, in its present splendor.” Gallery 16 Editions will host a book signing & release with the artists on Thursday, June 19th from 6-8 pm. We hope you can join us in celebrating this wonderful project.
Bill Berkson is a poet, art critic, editor, curator and professor at the San Francisco Art Institute. He was born in NewYork City in 1939 and entered the worlds of poetry and art and in his early twenties. He is the author of eighteen books of poetry including, most recently, Gloria with etchings by Alex Katz, and Our Friends Will Pass Among You Silently. His reviews have been featured in Aperture, Art News, Modern Painters and Artforum. He is a contributing editor for Art in America. His books of criticism include The Sweet Singer of Modernism and Sudden Address: Selected Lectures.
Colter Jacobsen was born in 1975 in Ramona, California. He graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2001. His work has been exhibited at Jack Hanley Gallery, Adobe Books, San Francisco Arts Commission and New Langton Arts in San Francisco, White Columns, New York, and Corvi-Mora, London. Colter currently lives and works in San Francisco.
The original words-and-drawings sheets for BILL were first shown at the Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco, CA, June 2007.
GALLERY 16
501 Third Street, San Francisco, CA 94107 | 415.626.7495 | www.gallery16.com
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