Marshall Weber, b. 1960, Syosset, New York, now, Crown Heights, Brooklyn, NY
Weber has significant bodies of work in artists’ books, collage, drawing, printing, video, and public endurance performances. With Kurt Allerslev and Christopher Wilde he is a co-founder of the enigmatic
Organik Art
Group. He has collaborated with virtually every major progressive figure in the world of artists' books, including Veronika Schäpers, Stephen Dupont, Cuba, Brian D. Tripp, Ganzeer, Ulrike Stoltz, Ken Campbell, Robbin Ami Silverberg, Dana Smith, and Xu Bing. His artists' books, collages, and prints have been exhibited by and are held in hundreds of public and private collections globally. Weber has curated 100's of major exhibitions around the world since the 1980s, written and edited seminal and influential texts about artists' books. He is also known for his outspoken advocacy and curatorial support for activist artists, social justice organizations, and cultural diversity. Weber was the recipient of the
2019 Herzog August Bibliothek Artists’ Book Prize Fellow.
He is currently focused on making unique artists' books that illuminate the collisions between public memorials and the decolonizing of collective memory.
Weber is represented by Booklyn, Inc. His artwork and poetry explore concepts of audience, the expansion of public space, and the decolonization of history and travel. His frequent traveling has sparked major bodies of ink painting, performance, photography, rubbing, and writing.Weber received his MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1981 and went on to co-found Artists Television Access, one of the longest (still) running alternative media art centers in the US. Weber was an Interdisciplinary Arts Fellow of both the New York Foundation for the Arts and the McKnight Foundation. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Art Matters, and others.
1999 he was co-founder and is now Directing Curator of the Booklyn, Inc. where he has recently organized several innovative funding and publishing projects for activist arts and social justice organizations, including co-producing a screen-print portfolio to benefit the Occuprint Project of the Occupy Wall Street movement and working on arts projects with Bulletspace, EZLN (Zapatistas), Food Not Bombs, IVAW (Iraq Veterans Against the War, now renamed About Face), Justseeds, World War Three Illustrated, Voces de la Frontera and other organizations. He directs Booklyn's international archive program which helps underrepresented artists and organizations catalog and place their archives in appropriate educational institutions.In 2012 he and Xu Bing curated the acclaimed Diamond Leaves exhibit which was the first major museum exhibition of artists' books in China. It has since become a Triennial event. In 2017 Weber was the keynote speaker at the Codex Foundation Symposium and Book Fair presenting a lecture/performance titled "Reflections on Diamond Leaves". He was the co-editor of the comprehensive catalog for that exhibition as well as the sole editor of the seminal anthology "Freedom of the Presses", Booklyn, 2018, which explores and expands artists' book practice in the 21st Century.
Since the 1980's Weber has produced a large body of literary related performance work often outside of conventional venues. In 1994 he started the "Ulysses Cycle" a decade-long series of marathon recitals of literature in public spaces and on the streets since "with a 33 hour long reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The "Cycle" ended with a 23-hour long recital of Homer's Odyssey on the Staten Island Ferry during the 2004 Republican convention and included a 72-hour long recital of the Old and New Testament at the Angel Orensanz Art Center (also in Loisaida). Recent performances include a 48-hour recitation of appropriated literature as part of Printed Matter's "Helpless" exhibit and a 72-hour recitation of Beat poetry on the streets of San Francisco as part of the 2012 Streetopia Festival. On February 5, 2014, in honor of William S. Burroughs 100th birthday anniversary, Weber did a 24-hour long recital from Burrough’s The Nova Trilogy at Munch Gallery in Manhattan.
Weber creates these endurance pieces to challenge both his physical and mental limitations as well as the mounting constraints on the use of public space. The hallucinatory trance state attained while under the effect of sleep deprivation and fatigue blurs the lines between sleep and wakefulness, consciousness and unconsciousness, literature and reality, private and public, language and thought, and rational and mystical experience. Weber is projecting his existence into fictional space and vice-versa, inviting the audience to accompany him within those projections.
His performance work continues now in parallel with his artists' bookmaking often focusing the use of his body as the matrix for gestural and incantational mark-making.
Press Name: Booklyn
Location: Brooklyn, New York
Website
Instagram
In Collection:
Dartmouth College, Rauner Library
Jack Ginsberg Centre for Book Arts, Wits Art Museum (WAM), The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
University of Pittsburgh
Wellesley College, Davis Museum and Cultural Center
Victoria & Albert Museum
Athenaeum Music & Arts Library
Emory University
University of California at San Diego (UCSD)
University of Southern California (USC)
Florida Atlantic University (FAU), The Jaffe Book Arts Collection
The Poetry Library
Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD)
Columbia University, Butler Library
Bibliotheque nationale de Luxembourg
Smith College, Mortimer Rare Book Room
Harvard University Art Museums
The University of New Mexico (UNM)
University of Kentucky
Boston Public Library
Swarthmore College
Claremont Colleges Library, Honnold/Mudd Special Collections
University of Washington
Cornell University
University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA)
University of Central Florida (UCF)
Wesleyan University
Library of Congress (LoC)
Sacramento Public Library
The University of Iowa (UIowa)
University of Connecticut (UCONN)
San Diego State University (SDSU)
Dartmouth College, Hood Museum
College of Saint Benedict; St. John's University
Stiftung Lyrik Kabinett
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF)
University of California at Berkeley, The Bancroft Library
Ringling School of Art and Design
Brooklyn Museum of Art
Australian War Memorial
University of Utah
Franklin and Marshall College
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek
University of Nevada, Reno
University of California at Irvine (UCI)
University of Minnesota
Klingspor Museum
Long Island University
Boston Athenaeum
Robert E. Kennedy Library, California Polytechnic State University (CalPoly)
University of Vermont (UVM)
Yale University; Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library
Wellesley College
Stanford University
University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee
Winchester School of Art
Kandinsky Library
Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute
Chapman University
Scripps College, Denison Library
Temple University
Rhode Island School of Design (RISD)
University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB)
Lafayette College
Bucknell University
University of Miami
Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
University of Delaware Library
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Kunstbibliothek
Occidental College
Harvard University, Widener Library
Wesleyan University, Olin Library
