Three years in the making, City of Artists is the first full-length book from BmoreArt, and it is unlike any project we have ever done before. However, over the last two years, we have forged a new publishing initiative to include small edition artist books and we see this as an exciting future direction, to continue to publish our own books and also in collaboration with others.
Once designer Raquel Castedo joined the BmoreArt team in 2022, we began to experiment with book design, producing three in 2023, in addition to our biannual print journals. The artist books were all markedly different and created in conjunction with the exhibits at BmoreArt’s Connect+Collect gallery.
Although we originally had planned exhibition catalogs, we quickly realized the power of a book to function as an art object in itself. Instead, we decided to create unique publications that reinforced the concept and style of the artists we were showing, each with its own graphic identity, and to make them available to collectors who may not be able to afford to buy individual works of art at that time.
During this period of experimentation, we had already commissioned the text for City of Artists, inviting sixteen globally recognized writers–novelists, journalists, and art historians, all based in Baltimore–to write short essays about a specific place in Baltimore that held special meaning for them. Our goal was to commission essays that would allow writers of esteem to turn their focus on the city that sustains them creatively, to discern how Baltimore acts as a source of inspiration, but to do so through personal stories that often embedded historic research into their place-based subject matter.
