Marshall Weber, b. 1960, Syosset, New York, now, Crown Heights, Brooklyn, NY
View Weber's
archive of out-of-print books and artwork.
Weber has significant bodies of work in artists’ books, collage, drawing, printing, video, and public endurance performances. 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
With Kurt Allerslev and Christopher Wilde he is also co-founder of the enigmatic
Organik Art Group.
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 art 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 on the use of his body as the matrix for gestural and incantational mark-making.
