Big Bad Beautiful Brown is a collaborative art project which will stretch over several years. I have made 200 books: 100 in paper, 100 in cloth. I’ve painted, dyed, stenciled, rubbed, written, stamped, and drawn on the pages. The book you get has these textured pages as background so you can begin without starting with the dreaded blank page. Each book has at least 20 pages, making 40 surfaces to work on. There is no special criteria for who gets one, though I started by asking friends if they wanted one. I will give out books to whoever asks until they are gone. How you encounter/alter/add to these pages is what this project is about.

You are the artist now, using what I’ve made to continue the journey. Your prompt is “Big Bad Beautiful Brown.” I began this project thinking about issues of race and colorism, and I’ve written more about my thinking in other places on this website. But how you think about the beauty of brown is how you think about it. We all start from different places. I hope we are all evolving. If you are like me, you will find your thinking about browns, both on skin and everywhere else, changes as you work. This is true of all good art: our work leads us to places we didn’t know we could or would go.

You have full permission to use what I’ve made as a starting point for any piece you want to create. You are free to cut the stitching apart, add or subtract pages, alter them in any way. Or cut the binding and stitch the pages into a scroll; put them up as a quilt and keep adding to them; sew or embroider them, roll or fold them, add glitter or googly eyes. I will include process photos on this website so you can see what other people are doing.

The work you make is yours to keep. I know there will be opportunities to share and exhibit these creations and I hope you will join as much as is comfortable for you.

What happens to these books/pieces, and the project as a whole, will emerge.

I am as curious as you where this might go. This website will be the place to find out what is happening in the future.

For folks who aren’t as familiar with the form of the book - and its suggestion of sequence and other conventions - I’ve put up some resources about book arts. Even the briefest search of “book arts” or “artists’ books” on Pinterest or Google-images will show the astonishing variety of book forms people make. I’ve been a book artist for fifty years and the field has grown and morphed beyond anything I ever imagined. With this project we are adding to the world of books - of all kinds - as vehicles of transformation.