Frank Boles
On October 15, CMU professors Anne Hiebert Alton and Gretchen
Papazian spoke on a webcast about their roles as co-curators of the Clarke’s
exhibit, “The Surprise and Wonder of Pop-up Books.” To begin the presentation,
they shared a brief history of pop-up books and offered a virtual tour of the
exhibit itself. But most of their time was spent sharing how they curated the
almost 1,000 pop-up books available to them and selected the ninety books in
the exhibit.
The answer: it was a deeply collaborative process that
involved selecting books that best illustrated fundamental themes they wished
to explore, balanced by the Library staff expertise in planning and
implementing exhibitions. A few books they had high hopes for underwhelmed
them. A few authors became favorites as the depth and breadth of their work
became obvious. For everyone there was a substantial commitment of time, spent
first looking at books and then thoughtfully discussing which books would make
the best examples to illustrate a particular point or genre of pop-up books.
There was also a need to represent the work of paper engineers,
both through time and in the audiences to which they appeal. How many old books
versus how many new books? How many examples of the Jolly Jump-Up Family, who
seems to have spent most of the 1950s popping up in their comfortable middle
class life, or Disney-inspired Mickey and Minnie Mouse books, which should be balanced
against examples of contemporary and almost abstract art books created by people
such as David Carter and Philippe UG? Similarly, what to do with Courtney
Watson McCarthy’s brilliant reinterpretation of Japanese artist Hokusai’s
(1760-1849) nineteenth-century masterpiece, “The Great Wave off Kanagawa”?
Pop-up books are not just for children, but how best to work these varying
themes into a single exhibit was a constant question.
Perhaps what was the most illuminating point made during the
presentation was that, there was never a “final plan” to be executed. Rather
the exhibit evolved each day up until opening day through ongoing discussion of
what was available to display, what was possible to exhibit (a six-inch-tall
pop-up does not, sadly, fit into a four-inch-tall exhibit case), how problems
could be solved (a six-inch-tall pop-up does fit into a vitrine modified with a
custom built seven-inch-tall plexiglass cover), and how one element of the
exhibit interacted with another element. A harmonious balance of individual pop-up
books artists’ sometimes conflicting styles and purposes was the outcome of
this iterative process.