Zea Morvitz


This installation of 15 volumes of an encyclopedia, entitled Red Encyclopedia by Zea Morvitz takes text and imagery away to make an abstract composition of edges, open pages and an entirely new composition of information.

Zea Morvitz has been interested in books as an expression in art early on and in 1978 was in an exhibition entitled Artwords and Bookworks at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, among many others. She has been faithful to the book as a means of expression ever since. Her work is in collections in Bahrain, Japan and the United States.

Artist Statement

Multiple pages are opportunities for serial imagery, replacing the usual narrative. Open books reveal, exposing what might be hidden within closed covers. Small notebooks can be held in the hand and experienced individually, then passed to other hands. The large grid pieces evolved from my years of being a painter with an interest in -- and a habit of thinking about -- large wall pieces. I want to examine the form of books in series—my starting point might be an encyclopedia, and then work with and against a theme through multiple spread open books. In the grids I want the freedom to show everything at once.