Lynn Book (b. 1957, Texarkana, TX, US) is a transmedia artist whose critically recognized work springs from inventive research and experimental practices that center on questions and issues of bodies, otherness, social structures and public imagination. While always exploratory in form and approach, she is best known as a performance maker and vocal artist within contemporary art and experimental music spheres. Book also produces writing, visual, media and installation work within gallery and online settings and is known as a teacher and program director at the leading edge of interdisciplinary creativity and somatic inquiry.^[1]

Book has performed her hybrid works in concert and contemporary art spaces in the US extensively in Chicago and New York City, as well as in the Cleveland International Performance Art Festival^[2], and elsewhere. Internationally, she has performed in Berlin, Naples, Budapest, Vienna and Eastern Europe and her video works from the “Unreading for Future Bodies” project have been screened in the UK at the London Biennale and Manilla Pollination (2016), Hong Kong and the UK with the “Translations III: Bodies in Transit” (2016-17)^[3] and online. “Derangements - a monster study” was an official selection for the Women Cinemakers Biennale (Berlin, 2018), and in 2022, she was invited to be the US artist in residence for the opening of Art Stays International Festival of Contemporary Art, Ptuj, Slovenia where she developed “Instructions for Deranging”, a gallery exhibition of photographs, installation, video and performance.^[4]

Lynn Book is notably the first woman to perform the Dada piece de resistance, “Ursonate” (1922) by Kurt Schwitters. A recording of Book’s solo tour de force, performed in 2013, is archived on the Lynn Book Projects Archive (Wake Forest University), and on PennSound (University of Pennsylvania)^[5]; a 1996 performance can be found online in the Roulette Intermedium (NYC) archive^[6], as well as other concerts she has performed there.

Book has received grants for her work from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Franklin Furnace Fund; Illinois Arts Council, Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, MacArthur Foundation for a project residency to create “Gorgeous Fever; the radio drama”; Mellon Foundation for the development of the online searchable database, Lynn Book Projects Archive; among others.

In 2005, Book relocated from New York City to Winston-Salem North Carolina to develop innovative interdisciplinary creativity curricula and programming at Wake Forest University. She became the Director of the Center for Creativity and Innovation^[7], organizing and leading multiple initiatives, many of them interfacing with her original artworks, such as “RE:garding Next”, a large-scale collaborative culture project on the subject of utopias at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (2007) and “Dada 100”, an immersive celebration and investigation of the legacy of Dada (2016).^[8]

Artwork

Lynn Book’s performance projects, concerts, media and online works delve into questions and experiences of bodies in relation to power, vulnerability, and agency in complex, co-creating worlds that include social, cultural, political, hybrid and planetary forces. She historically crosses and expands disciplines and cultural spheres to discover transformative potential in artistic process and public encounter. Her artworks occur in city sites and galleries, in clubs, fields, online and in concert halls with a range of collaborators including musicians, theorists, filmmakers, architects, students, a whole village and an opera company.

Book has been a forerunner in performance art, multimedia work, including video art and installation since the late 70s in Memphis, TN. In Chicago from the early 80s and New York City in the 90s and early 2000s, she became well known as a vocal artist and performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Kitchen and Roulette, as well as several legendary alternative art spaces including Randolph Street Gallery, MoMing Dance and Arts Center, Dixon Place, CBGB’s and the Knitting Factory.

Select Projects

“Instructions for Deranging” (2022), a gallery exhibition of photographs, installation, video, and performance. This body of work proposes derangement as survival tactic in a challenging world and threatened planet by way of ‘becoming Chimaera’. She was the US artist in residence for the 20th annual Art Stays International Festival of Contemporary Art, Ptuj, Slovenia.

“Tracking Chimaera - a peripatetic guide” (2020), performed as a lifestream solo concert that imagined livable futures for “The Quarantine Concerts”, Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago, US.

“Plot” (2016-17), was a concert performance with longtime collaborator Katharina Klement (Vienna) for “Sexing Sound”, an international festival on sound and gender, Chicago, US and “PLOT v.2” for “Artacts”, an international festival of jazz and improvised music, St. Johann, Austria.

“Unwording Chimaera” (2016), is an artwork for publication online and in print for “Abrigo Portatil”, Brazil, and included a text-score translated into Portuguese and a live performance in Brooklyn, NY.

“Escapes” (2012-13), is a video artwork that emerged from a series of performance projects interrogating opera, Greek tragedy, and narrative voice for a special issue of Anglistica, University of Naples, IT.

“FROTH or Future Archeologies of Love and Power” (2010) was an original transmedia counter-performance in response to an 18th C French Baroque opera, for extended voice, electronics, multilingual text and video, in collaboration with Underworld Productions, Sinfonia New York and filmmaker Robin Starbuck at Symphony Space, NY, US.

“SongSpot”(2010), a multimedia performance and installation project was developed through “voicing bodies” - public, private, forgotten, silent and ready as a selected artist in residence at Art Stays International Festival of Contemporary Art, Ptuj, Slovenia.

“notes on desire” (2003-06), was a concert performance of related compositions that were part delirium and part meditation, premiered as a duo with drummer and composer Kevin Norton at Roulette, NY, US and in later concerts as a solo at Bowery Poetry Club, NY, US, and a trio at the Ring Theater at Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, US.

Other Collaborations: “Os”, experimental music duo with bassist David Menestres, and as trio with clarinetist, electronics, composer Michael Thomas Jackson, Durham, Richmond, Winston-Salem, 2023-24

Multiple projects, concerts, multimedia performances, CDs with Viennese musician, composer, Katharina Klement, New York, Pittsburgh, Vienna, St. Johann, 2007-2017

Performance lectures with architect, poet Madeline Gins, New York, Pittsburgh, 1999 - 2010

“The Dice Project”, CD compilations of adventurous women composers, contributor and co-producer with filmmaker, vocalist, Elise Kermani, Chicago, New York, 1993-96

“Mercuria”, multimedia performance with vocalist, composer, Theo Bleckmann, Chicago, New York, 1995-98

“Bouquet”, 16mm film with experimental filmmaker, Sharon Couzin, Museum of Modern Art, New York 1988.

Media Works

Select Video from the “Unreading for Future Bodies” project

• “Derangements - a monster study”, Women Cinemaker Biennale Official Selection, Berlin, 2018

•“Unwording Chimaera”, Abrigo Portatil, 2016 “DErangements - a study for UnReading”, Synthesis Journal, University of Athens, GR, 2014

•Ibid, ELSE, a journal of creative research, Transart, 2014

•“Escapes”, Anglistica Journal, University of Naples, IT, 2013

•"Two Heads", 1982, Lynn Book Projects Archive, 1982

Select Audio

“Mustered”, with David Menestres, CD compilation, 2023

“voicing bodies”, CD compilation of concert and performance compositions, 2009

“t(w)o wanderers”, CD with Katharina Klement, 2008

“Dice - she says”, CD compilation of contemporary women composers, co-produced by Book with Elise Kermani, 1996

“Strange Familiar”, with Tatsu Aoki, CD, 1996

Print Works

Book has created experimental texts and scores for publication that include: Whitewalls - a journal of writings by artists (Chicago, 1988), P-Form (Chicago, 1992), Abrigo Portatil (Brazil, 2016), and in a curated collection of manifestos in a short run risograph (Trondheim, Norway, 2018).

Lynn Book Projects Archive

The Lynn Book Projects Archive is an online portal emerging from a 5-year initiative dedicated to digitizing and preserving Lynn Book’s creative works. It is a distinctive record of the artist as catalyst and collaborator. The artist’s body of interdisciplinary, transmedia work, produced over four decades in a range of cities, institutions and public spaces, has left imprints where she has lived and worked from the 1970s to the 2020s – Memphis, Chicago, New York City, Winston-Salem in the US and summers in Berlin and Vienna. Book’s projects have also circulated internationally via performance events, audio recordings, video art, exhibition and curatorial programs.

Book has historically cultivated humanistic and/or interpretive modes and critiques concerning body, image, language, knowledge, power and action. An array of research and adventurous approaches have grounded and propelled her development of multimodal projects at the threshold of practice, theory, experiment. Her evolution as an artist who has invested in the performative has paralleled the emergence of performance art and other urgent and adventurous forms of responding to and shaping this millennium-spanning era. Her work also spans the period in which technology began transitioning from a corporate industry media to a more ‘democratic’, user access media, making this an uncommon study in broad-spectrum self and societal transformation.

Teaching and Education

Lynn Book’s life-long involvement with teaching and learning arenas, both within and outside of institutional spaces, demonstrates her commitment to creative process. The decidedly experimental focus for Book as both an artist and an artist who teaches is on modes of discovery that lead to transformation – destabilizing, exhilarating, change felt in far-reaching, bodily ways. That said, the helical nature of these practices activates sustaining methods and approaches that confers grounding agency - for artist and student. Book’s investigations into body, imagination, voice and public action guide teaching engagements that may by turns involve writing and voice experimentation, physical encounters with environments and activation of architectural and urban lives and histories towards communal futuring of people, place and potential.

Academic Teaching

From 2005 - 2022, Book taught interdisciplinary creativity to undergraduates in the liberal arts college at Wake Forest University in North Carolina (US). As former Director for the Program for Creativity and Innovation there, she developed innovative curricula, hybrid events and international symposia including “Creativity: Worlds in the Making”, “Women, Entrepreneurship, Food and Place”, and “Inventing Futures (IF) Labs”, a maker festival. She edited (with David P. Phillips) “Creativity and Entrepreneurship: Changing Currents in Education and Public Life” (Elgar, 2013) derived from her practice-led research in ‘critical creativity’ and investment in radically challenging and enlivening liberal arts education.

Book is a core faculty associate with Transart Institute for Creative Research, accredited by John Moores Liverpool University (UK). Since inception in 2004, she has been involved as a graduate and doctoral advisor, and with residencies in Berlin and Austria that include workshops, online publications and festivals. She serves on the Advisory Board.

Extended Teaching

Lynn Book has been an artist in residence and workshop leader in a range of educational settings and organizations including, Hong Kong Institute for Education in 2015, Artstays, an international contemporary art festival in Ptuj, Slovenia in 2010-11, Sarah Lawrence College (NY, US) in 2010 and 2013, The Kitchen Summer Institute (NY, US) from 1999-2005, Movement Research (NY, US), late 90s, Experimental Sound Studio (Chicago, US), 90s, and summer residencies with Transart Institute, 2004-16 (Berlin and Austria, EU). Book founded Voicelab, an educational and cultural center in New York in 1999 through which she produced emerging and established artists developing innovative approaches to voice in original performance works. She also taught and coached individuals in private practice through Voicelab until 2005 and continues to teach her ‘voicing bodies’’ pedagogy in various settings around the world.

She has given lectures and workshops at universities and museums that include Harvard University, Museum of Modern Art, Northwestern University, Weatherspoon Museum of Art, York University, UK, Pennsylvania State University, University of North Carolina Greensboro, University of Wisconsin, Queensland College of Art, Australia, among others.

Education

M.F.A., School of the Art Institute of Chicago, performance, media, Chicago, IL, 1985

B.F.A., Memphis College of Art, sculpture, performance, Memphis, TN, 1982

New School University, NY, creative arts therapies Master’s program, 1997-98

University of Memphis, TN, philosophy, modern dance, 1976-78

University of North Texas, TX, general studies, modern dance, 1975-76

Special Studies include Balinese singing with I Wayan Jara, Hindustani Raga singing with Hema Shende, Bulgarian Singing with Ethel Raim, and numerous physical performance workshops that include Grotowski Primary Actions, Qi Kung and Delicious Movement with Eiko and Koma

Personal Life

Lynn Book lives in Winston-Salem, NC. She retired from Wake Forest University in 2022 and continues to develop transmedia works through Lynn Book Projects in a studio on a small acreage where she and her husband live. They are devoted to wilding areas with native plants in this quasi-rural setting bounded by woodlands with wild turkeys, foxes, hawks and other creatures. They also tend a cultivated garden with family heritage flowers, as well as vegetable and annual flower plots, and fruit trees.

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