The Gallery at Penn College
2024 Exhibit Dates
Reception
2–5 PM
Closed July 3 – 7
The Gallery at Penn College is pleased the host Books Undone 2: the art of altered books. This group exhibition features 64 works by 41 artists from 20 states.
Visual art and books have much in common: They express and evoke emotions, educate, share new ideas, tell a story, and more. Such shared virtues make the book, as an art medium, powerful and complex. Thanks to Scott McCarney’s thoughtful selections, we present Books Undone 2: a diverse and compelling juried art exhibition that captures our cultural time and place. Discover themes such as social injustice, climate change, the human experience, and more through beautiful book-based forms. From full-sized dresses that scrutinize domestic violence to book installations that examine wrongful convictions in our country, from erased books that bring awareness to the loss of natural ecosystems to sculptures that probe the loss of history, from digital-based works that explore identity issues to intricately twisted book pages that investigate motherhood, the work is varied in form and concept.
Scott McCarney, Juror
Scott McCarney is an artist, designer, and educator living in Rochester, New York. He received formal design training at Virginia Commonwealth University in the 1970s, and earned an advanced degree in photography from the University at Buffalo/Visual Studies Workshop in the 1980s. His primary art practice has been in book form since 1980 and spans many media: from offset and digital printing to sculptural and site-specific installation. His works are widely distributed and can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, Victoria & Albert Museum, and Yale University Art Gallery, among others. His teaching and lecturing itinerary is varied: in person (New Zealand, Korea, Mexico, and South America) and online. He retired in 2020 after 16 years of teaching in the College of Art and Design at Rochester Institute of Technology.