Page from “Orchid Thief Re-Imagined” by Jane Kent and Susan Orlean Credit: Courtesy

Artist’s books are often presented under a glass vitrine, open to a single page with the rest of the story left a mystery. But at BCA Center in Burlington, printmaker Jane Kent’s solo show of such works — cheekily titled “Between the Covers” — contains only one project in the form of a book. The rest are on loose pages hung on the walls.

Kent, who lives in Burlington and New York City and has taught at the University of Vermont for the past 20 years, chose the format deliberately. As she noted in a recent BCA discussion with poet Major Jackson, artist’s books are “not reasonable. They’re hard to see, hard to sell, hard to show.” Her works “were made to be on the wall for that very reason,” she said.

Words participate in a deeply considered dance between printed language and visual art to create something new.

That makes viewing “Between the Covers” particularly gratifying. Kent’s artist’s books are collaborations with major American authors — Jackson as well as Richard Ford, Susan Orlean, Joyce Carol Oates and the lesser-known Dorothea Grossman — whose writing is itself a draw. For instance, viewers can read Ford’s 1996 short story “Privacy” in its entirety in Kent’s work of the same title.

Yet in Kent’s books those words participate in a deeply considered dance between printed language and visual art to create something new. Kent doesn’t illustrate, as she often points out; she creates prints in which word and image figure equally.

In 1994, Kent set herself the task of completing 10 word-and-image projects, using a variety of print methods, in collaboration with alternating male and female authors. The BCA show includes the six she has so far created (most printed in editions of 35), along with an array of working drawings and individual prints. The copies on display are from UVM’s Special Collections Library; other editions are held by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the New York Public Library, and Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

Twenty-four years elapsed between the completion of Kent’s first artist’s book, “Privacy,” and the latest, Oates’ poem “Little Albert, 1920.” Kent considers, rereads and experiments with each text for years before arriving at the right marriage between her contributions and the author’s.

“Privacy,” for instance, took five years. Ford, whom Kent got to know while they both taught at Princeton University, handed her the still-unpublished manuscript in 1994. Likewise, the artist has spent three years mulling her current work in progress, a collaboration with former UVM colleague Jackson featuring his poem “Why I Write Poetry,” recently published in Razzle Dazzle: New and Selected Poems 2002-2022.

“Skating” by Jane Kent and Richard Ford Credit: Courtesy

The show, curated by Heather Ferrell, includes two working drawings for that project, in gouache on mezzotint. One drawing depicts a fire extinguisher outlined in black on a patterned red, orange, white and cream background; the other is a purely abstract hatch of red brushstrokes on black.

The two pieces give a hint of Kent’s approach, which is to begin with an object that the text brings to mind — a “join,” as she calls it — and rework it until it slowly becomes something else that captures the essence of the text. (All text is printed in letterpress at Kent’s longtime fine art publisher, the Grenfell Press in New York.)

In “Privacy,” the join was scenic viewfinders, those binocular-like contraptions mounted at touristy summits. In Ford’s story, a man recalls watching a woman in a nearby apartment undress every night for a week while his new wife sleeps. Kent reworked the viewfinders so that they evoke a shadowy gray face here, a pair of breasts and a belly in red swirls there.

On other pages, she transforms the viewfinder’s circular lenses into pairs of eyes, or olives — black circles accented with red or yellow dots. The solid blue circles on the last page evolve into free-floating wheels, reflecting the narrator’s final realization that his life was entering a “cycle of necessity.”

“Orchid Thief Re-Imagined” (2003) uses 11 excerpts from Orlean’s novel The Orchid Thief. Its eight pages present as a coherent composition, with black-and-white shapes and lines — all suggestive of orchids — spanning the pages rather than being defined by them.

“Orchid” is a work of rich pink, brown, coral and green backgrounds. While Kent made “Privacy” on her etching press, “Orchid” was silk-screened at the Rhode Island School of Design by master printmakers from New York City. “The color is beautiful because of the input of others,” she told Seven Days. Kent often collaborates with specialists in a variety of printmaking methods.

Drypoint, engraving, mezzotint and silk screen all shape Kent’s third artist’s book, “Skating,” from 2011. Ford proposed a second collaboration after seeing “Orchid” and sent Kent seven works before the artist chose a brief unpublished text — a catalog of 45 arguments between two people having an affair, beginning with “They argued about love. Specifically whether he or she was in love, or merely loved him, or her.”

Kent arranges the text as a meandering path of 11 differently sized pages that take up the majority of one wall. It’s as if the couple are hashing out arguments while wandering from place to place. Images evoke a flattened box — perhaps suggesting a move that will never happen — and an ice skater’s repetitive turns etched into a furious, circular pattern.

Boxes reappear in a black-and-white broadsheet that Kent created for her fourth project, “Untitled” (2015), printed offset in an edition of 1,000 and free to visitors, if any copies are left. In search of a female author this time, she discovered Grossman (1937-2012), an epigrammatic poet who lived in Los Angeles and associated with the Beat poets.

“The Flâneur Tends a Well-Liked Summer Cocktail” by Jane Kent and Major Jackson Credit: Courtesy

Grossman’s untitled 15-word poem fills one side of the broadsheet in large print: “The man who is / more like a suitcase / than a man / folds into himself / soft-sidedly.” The other side shows Kent’s cut-paper construction, a collage of folded and layered parts of envelopes, boxes and patterned paper. The work enacts its text: It comes folded in half three times and, when refolded, is reduced to the words “The man.”

Jackson, who has authored five books of poetry and now teaches at Vanderbilt University, sent Kent everything he’d written for her fifth project. She chose “The Flâneur Tends a Well-Liked Summer Cocktail,” a series of observations of city life. In her single-sheet work from 2019, the artist renders the title in alternating blue and red letters clockwise around the paper’s edge in lithograph and uses a hand-drawn polymer text plate for the poem. The dense mass of hand-lettered verses overlays what appear to be moon phases and flows around a full-moon shape that could also evoke the “blossoming mouth of an infant” spotted by the flâneur.

“Her work is elemental, savage, curious,” Jackson said during the BCA talk. “I see a restless, churning interpretation of my work. It feels very improvisatory.”

Kent chose to contain Oates’ 2019 poem “Little Albert, 1920” in traditional artist’s-book format. The poem tells the horrifying story of a real 11-month-old baby who was the subject of a “scientific” experiment on how fear could be taught. Kent’s “Little Albert” (2023) places the text, printed on vintage translucent paper, atop prints of framed mirrors — a join that addresses ideas of reflection and observation.

Kent said the text, even more chilling for being written in Little Albert’s voice, got the “page by page” treatment “because of the gravity of it, the interiority of it.”

In a sense, each of Kent’s works seeks to excavate and embody the ways of seeing that their texts explore. The process may be slow, and artist’s books themselves are, in Kent’s words, “a stubborn enterprise.” But, she added, “I guess that appeals to me.”

The original print version of this article was headlined “Page Turner | In “Between the Covers,” printmaker Jane Kent reimagines words with visuals”

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This article appears in The Reading Issue 2024.

Amy Lilly has written about the arts for Seven Days, Spruce Life in Stowe and Art New England in Boston. Originally from upstate New York, she has lived in Burlington since 2001 and has become a regular Vermonter who runs, rock climbs, and skis downhill,...