Witness
By: Miriam Schaer
Contributors: Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Artists' Books Collection (Columbia University. Rare Book and Manuscript Library); Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition
Publisher: [publisher not identified]
Published: 2012
Place of publication: New York City, New York]
Language: eng
Subjects: Violence; Pictorial works; Booksellers and bookselling; Bombings; Iraq War, 2003-2011; Protest movements; Books and reading in art; Intellectual life; Social conditions; Censorship; Terrorism in art; In art; War and civilization; Vehicle bombs; Visual literature; Specimens; Cultural property; Destruction and pillage; Historic districts; Hand in art; Artists' books
Description: This collection supports and promotes awareness to the important mission and framework of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition's focus on the lasting power of the written word and the arts in support of the free expression of ideas, the preservation of shared cultural spaces, and the importance of responding to attacks, both overt and subtle, on artists, writers, and academics working under oppressive regimes or in zones of conflict, despite the destruction of that literary/cultural content.

"I developed Witness from a New York Times article that described the bombing of Baghdad's historic street of booksellers during the American occupation of Iraq in 2007. I started by running the text of the original article through every language available on Google Translate, then printed out the new and transformed pages. Albanian, Esperanto, Georgian, Malay and Serbian descriptions of the massacre now lived side by side with pages in French, Italian and Thai. Next, I hand-cut each page into the shape of my own hand, sewed on hand-twisted book cords, then charred, dirtied and dyed the pages to emulate the books that survived the bombing. In our age of constant, instant news and global distribution, we are all witnesses; and, accepting the maxim that there are no innocent witnesses, all morally complicit to the extent we choose to look away or fail to act"--The Book Arts at the Centre for Fine Print Research, UK website.
Notes: Medium: charred, dirtied and dyed newspaper clippings; hand-twisted book cords.

On March 5th, 2007, a car bomb exploded on al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad. Al-Mutanabbi Street is located in a mixed Shia-Sunni area. More than 30 people were killed and more than 100 wounded. Al-Mutanabbi Street, the historic center of Baghdad bookselling, holds bookstores and outdoor bookstalls, cafes, stationery shops, and even tea and tobacco shops. It has been the longstanding heart and soul of the Baghdad literary and intellectual community for centuries. In response to the attack, a San Francisco poet and bookseller, Beau Beausoleil, rallied a community of international artists and writers to produce a collection of letterpress-printed broadsides (poster-like works on paper), artists' books (unique works of art in book form), and an anthology of writing, all focused on expressing solidarity with Iraqi booksellers, writers and readers. The coalition of contributing artists calls itself Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition.

Gift; Beau Beausoleil; 2019-2020.

"Miriam Schaer is a Brooklyn-based multimedia book artist who uses garments to explore feminine, social, and spiritual issues. She is represented in numerous collections, including the Alan Chasanoff Book Arts Collection at the Yale Museum, the Arts of the Book Collection at Yale's Sterling Library, the Mata & Arthur Jaffe Collection: Book as Aesthetic Object at Florida Atlantic University, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Harvard University, and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History & Culture at Duke University. Her work has earned a NYFA Artists Fellowship, inclusion in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for the Feminist Art Base at the Brooklyn Museum, and representation at the Cheongju International Craft Biennale in South Korea. In 2007, she was an artist in residence for the Imagining the Book Biennale at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt"--The artist's website (viewed July 16, 2015).