MAY 24, 2006
Exhibition: BEAUTY CHAOS
BEAUTY.CHAOS, a unique artist’s book by Susan Davidoff and Rachelle Thiewes of El Paso and Beverly Penn of Austin, will be featured in “The Book as Art: Twenty Years of Artist’s Books from the National Museum of Women in the Arts” at the NMWA in Washington, DC. The show is the premier exhibition in the museum’s 20th anniversary year and is scheduled for October 27, 2006 – February 4, 2007.
The exhibition catalog will be published by Princeton Architectural Press and will include essays by Johanna Drucker, the foremost scholar on artist’s books and Krystyna Wasserman, Curator of Book Arts at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
BEAUTY.CHAOS was created in 1999 by Davidoff, Thiewes and Penn. It explores the artists’ shared interest in the desert, the land and the way people interact with their environments. In this group of eight unique books, the artists present collections of drawn images, metal and slate objects and text which are a visual reflection of their many conversations and hikes in the Chihuahuan Desert over the previous year.
The acquisition of BEAUTY.CHAOS was made possible by a generous gift from the Texas Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. After the museum exhibited the artists’ book in an exhibition in 2004, the book appeared on the museum’s “wish list” of artworks it hoped to add to its permanent collection. When El Pasoan Roasario Holguin, a longtime member of the Texas Committee, saw that work by El Paso artists was on the Wish List of the museum, she worked for two years with the Texas committee to acquire BEAUTY.CHAOS and donate it to the permanent collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Both Susan Davidoff and Rachelle Thiewes are represented in El Paso by Adair Margo Gallery.
