Gloomy Monday
By: Allison Bianco, Lara Henderson
Contributors: Mutanabbī, Abū al-Ṭayyib Aḥmad ibn al-Ḥusayn, 915 or 916-965; Henderson, Lara, artist, printer; Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition; AS220 Printshop; Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Artists' Books Collection (Columbia University. Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
Publisher: AS220 Community Printshop
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Providence, Rhode Island
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; Artists' books; 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.

"Gloomy Monday was conceived to revisit tragic consequences of evil doing and forecast an ideal future. Named after the infamous Hungarian suicide song, Gloomy Sunday, the book imparts nostalgia for the booksellers' Al-Mutanabbi street while fostering a strange repositioning of memory. Through the familiar symbols, such as city streets, consumer products, and architecture, we can tend to 'forget' the past and recall memories that are only partly true. This phenomenon happens naturally with time as well as through changes due to industry, economic systems or, in this case, disaster. The book features billowing clouds among which flurries of text indicate certain destruction. Gloom, doom, boom, and plume are literally layered on top of one another adding a sense of ultimate confusion and disillusionment. This upheaval in the lives of the tiny, unwitting characters creates an eagerness to replace the unpleasant memory with a more palatable one. As the pages unfold, the smoke clears, the sky glows and the street quietly resumes its original state"--Artist's statement from the Book Arts at the Centre for Fine Print Research, UK website.

Allison Bianco is an artist and printmaker from Rhode Island. She earned an MFA in Printmaking (2010) from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and a BA in Studio Art (2001) from Mount Holyoke College, MA. Bianco has held artist residencies at the Honolulu Academy of Arts (2000) and recently at the Pyramid Atlantic Printshop in Silver Spring, MD (2012). Her work has been shown nationally and internationally and has been purchased for the collections of Fidelity Investments, RI; Truth Box, Inc., RI; Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, HI; and HonBlue, Inc., HI.
Notes: Published in an edition of 20.

Gloomy Monday was letterpress and screen-printed by Allison Bianco and Lara Henderson at the AS220 Community Printshop in Providence, Rhode Island.

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.