Babette Katz Creator of Artists' Books.

New York artist Babette Katz is a printmaker. Her prints have been featured in solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the United States. She began creating artists' books about fifteen years ago, and has published six limited edition works of art in book form. In a recent conversation with the editor of SchoolArts, she explained the nature of her work.

SA What exactly are "artists' books?"

BK Well, an artist's book is any book made by an artist. This means that artists' books can be made in any medium. Painters make them, sculptors make them, printmakers make them, and photographers make them. All that's needed is some use of, or reference to, the book format. My books are offset printed from linoleum cuts.

SA How did you come to make artists' books?

BK An artist uses the book format when it provides the best formal solution to whatever problem the artist has posed for herself. I began creating artists' books with the intent of illustrating a thumbnail history of the world.

I had a habit of keeping a journal of thoughts or ideas that were significant to me. In the journal I recorded statements that were interesting or valuable in their content and beautiful or arresting in their means of expression. They were most often brief and concise. It was important to me to save these thoughts. This impulse was probably central to my wanting to make artist's books. I saw the books as capable of conserving and transmitting feeling, thought, and experience.

Besides, I had always loved children's books--handling them, turning pages, and being caught up in the imagined world held between the covers of a book.

If I'd been a writer, I probably would have written children's books and filled the spaces between the covers with words. Being a relief printmaker, I filled the spaces with visual stories made from linoleum cuts. They were keepsakes of ideas that were important to me.

SA How are your books different from children's book?

BK Most of my books are wordless and the subject matter is not what you would usually find in children's books. My Flag, for example, is a serious fantasy about the formation of the American flag. It is every immigrant group's story of coming to this country as strangers and staying on to eventually become Americans. The story is told completely without words. Its vocabulary is made up of stars, stripes, and figures in red, white, blue and black.

Despite this uncustomary manner of story-telling, children and adults are responsive to the books. Perhaps that's because I stay very close to the format of children's picture books. I retain the simplicity and economy in which basic or fundamental ideas are expressed. Strong in narrative content, the books are intended to be a sustained exercise in economical visual narration because of their sequential format.

SA Where do you get the ideas for your books?

BK More often than not, the ideas for the books begin as feelings and subsequently, I start to look around for a corresponding visual frame of reference. As such, these feelings are pre-verbal and although words could be found to express them, wordless visual narrative has its own special properties. The absence of words and the use of sequenced images allows some of the emotion, as well as the mystery, of the original idea to stay with the story. These feeling and thoughts become the point of departure for a metaphoric tale that constructs an imaginary world while commenting on our immediate world.

SA Where can art teachers see your books?

BK My limited-edition, soft-cover books are in the library collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, the New York Public Library, and others. Some are available for sale by contacting me.

Babette Katz is an artist residing in Mamaroneck, New York.