A look back at Culture Wars which never cooled and neither did global warming (Artist's Book Series XXIII)

Artist's books often tackle social and controversial political issues. I'm highlight just two of the books in the collection that have an element of social or political commentary from three different topical areas: war, environment and artistic freedom.

Sharon Gilbert's Green the Fragile addresses the topic of global warming (a topic that for some reason is still being debated nearly a quarter of a century later!); and Karen Wirth's remarkably well-made and complex little work, Nude Youths: Parental Advisory is an artifact of the cultural wars of the 1980s-90s taking on the controversies surrounding the funding of edgy art exhibitions by the National Endowment for the Arts.

---

Sharon Gilbert
Green the Fragile (1989)
New York, Self-Published
Xerographic collage/text encouraging Green thinking and saving the trees. Signed: 76/300
Cost: $2.00 | x04442 | Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection

---

Karen Wirth
Nude Youths: Parental Advisory (1991)
n.p., Self-Published
According fold copy of Sistine Chapel nudes with text from NEA (?) guidelines about nudity and sexual depictions
Cost: $2.50 | x41238 | More information