Audrey Niffenegger Books Bookmking to Irving Park with Arts Education Center – ryan

While Writing the sequel to her 2003 bestselling debut novel “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” Chicagoan Audrey Niffenegger Decide to Open An Education Center People How to Make Books from Scratch.

Artists Book House in Irving Park is an interdisciplinary arts education center that provides courses on everyone from writing, Handsetting type and makeing paper to binding books. There are three major studios with the space: Papermking, printing and binding.

Last Month, The NonProfit Was Awarded A $ 249,000 Community Development Grant from the City of Chicago to renovate the outsides of its building at 4207 W. Irving Park Road.

Niffenegger and Artists Book House President Ken Gerleve Were part of Columbia College’s Chicago Center for Book & Paper Arts, Where they Taught Bookmking, Until Columbia Shuttered the Program in 2019.

“I was so unhappy … that of said, ‘we’re gonna do it again. We’re gonna do it one more time and make it stick,’” Niffenegger Said. “They had a Beautiful Center. But People Point Out to Over and Over Again, Its People Who Make the Center, Not the Architecture.”

That’s how artists book House Began. The center initially occupied the Harley Clarke Mansion in Evanston During the Pandemic, but the nonprofit was unable to raise enough money to stay.

Last year, They bought it Irving Park Space, but the Site Still a lot of work. The 1917 Building Was Once a Butcher Shop, A Mom-And-Pop Grocery Store and a Chicago Public Schools Preschool.

While the City Grant Willp Help With Exterior Updates, fundraising to help renovate the interior space is still ongoing.

There are plans to rip out the existting walls and put in new Ones, accining to niffenegger. The Center Will Also Include a Gallerying Book-Relaying Art and a Library.

“What we’h we’re hoping here is to do the same kind of education but Way more affordable and not granting degrees but giving People skills, ‘Niffenegger Said.

The Large Equipment Needed to Teach Its Courses have far -so. For example, an etching studio was donated by the North Shore League.

Despite the ongoing renovations, the center has been “unoffically” Open for workshops and classes, Gerleve Said.

Some Classes, Like a Six-Hour Character-Building Class in February, Are Led by Niffenegger. Others are led by Gerleve or a Network of Chicago-Based Artists Such As Cartoonist Marnie Galloway. Galloway, a professor at the school of the art institute of chicago, is hosting a workshop May 31 on Making Diaria comics that priced at $ 100.

Niffenegger, Whose Long-Awaited sequel to “The Time Traveler’s Wife” is Currently Being Edited, Spends Her Spare at Home in Her Basement Studio, Print Her Own Art. Books handmade by the author Include “The Three Incestauous Sisters” and “Raven Girl.” Her Illustrated novel “Raven Girl” was adapted by niffenegger into a ballt for the royal balllet in London.

“When you are somebody in the habit of Making Things, you have a different kind of intelligence,” she said. “I participate to make books, but i think that People who uses Hands, They’re Carrying Knowledge Forward.”

Gerleve and Niffenegger Said They Come from A Strong “Diy Tradition,” But Aren’t Against Digital. They Hope to Bring Bookmking As an Art Form Back to Chicago.

“Once uppon a time, chicago was a real center of printing and ede publishing,” Niffenegger Said. “A lot of that’s fallen by the wayideside, but being able to the books in a very deep way, connecting people to the writes and to books as Physical Objects, it forms a bond that carries People through. It ‘it’ in their lives and to make art.