Create/destroy
By: Martha Hayden
Contributors: Qabbānī, Nizār; Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition; Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Artists' Books Collection (Columbia University. Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
Publisher: [M. Hayden]
Published: 2013
Place of publication: [New York]
Language: eng
Subjects: Artists' books; Pictorial works; Violence; Intellectual life; Booksellers and bookselling; Bombings; Iraq War, 2003-2011; Protest movements; Books and reading in art; Social conditions; Censorship; Terrorism in art; In art; War and civilization; Vehicle bombs; Visual literature; Specimens; Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition
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.
Notes: Cover title.

Edition of 15 copies.

"The poem by Nizar Kabbani (1923-1998) as translated by Bassam K. Frangieh and Clementina R. Brown, is excerpted from One hundred love letters, Arabian love poems, p. 145, Lynne Rienner Publishers, Boulder, CO, 1999"--Colophon.

"Create/destroy is a 16-page accordion fold book, with pop ups, archival ink jet printed on archival banana paper, made from recycled agricultural waste. It honours the memory and the future of al-Mutanabbi Street with a series of drawings and etchings made during or about the war, interspersed with pop up books which might have been sold or read on the street"--Artist's website, viewed June 17, 2014.

Originally created for the Inventory of Al-Mutanabbi Street project.

Gift; Beau Beausoleil; 2019-2020.

Title and text in English and Arabic.