2020 MCBA Prize / Semi-Finalist
Rhiannon Alpers
Minnesota Center for Book Arts Book Prize 2020
LOCATION: Minnesota Center for Book Art, Minneapolis, MN
EXHIBITION DATES: September 18, 2020 - January 11, 2021 will be held online
The MCBA Prize, presented by Minnesota Center for Book Arts, promotes excellence in new work from across the expressive spectrum of book art. Established in 2009, this biennial award is meant to represent the diversity of approaches to book art, honoring one winner and four finalists for their unity of form, material, and content. Book art, broadly defined, includes work that embodies narrative, instruction, reference, mapping, guides, documentation, and more. It is work that engages the viewer and propels the experience forward through narrative, sequencing, spatial elements, visual or verbal language, temporal, mechanical, aural, typographic, symbolic or material means.
The virtual exhibition will feature the semi-finalists and finalists artwork images, artist statements and each work will be included as a contender for the People’s Book Art Award. The People’s Book Art Award is an opportunity in which folks from all over the world can vote on their favorite artwork from September 18, 2020 - January 11, 2021. The winner, announced in January, will receive a $500 award.
The virtual opening reception will be held on October 23, 2020 at 7PM (CST) and will reveal the MCBA Prize winner among the finalists. The Prize winner will hold a conversation about their winning artwork with curator Betty Bright. We hope that you will attend!
The 2020 competition coincides with MCBA’s 35th anniversary and will be celebrated with finalist awards and an exhibition of artwork by 20-30 selected semi-finalists this fall.
The MCBA Prize is curated by Betty Bright, a writer, curator and historian who specializes in the contemporary art of the book. She helped to start Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA) in 1985, and authored No Longer Innocent: Book Art in America 1960-1980 in 2005. Past involvements include speaking at CODEX (2017), the international biannual book arts fair and symposium; her talk was titled, “Lines of Force: The Hand, The Book, & the Body Electric,” and was later published in the monograph series, CODE(X) + 1.