Pages for al-Mutanabbi Street
By: Gallery Route One
Contributors: Mutanabbī, Abū al-Ṭayyib Aḥmad ibn al-Ḥusayn, 915 or 916-965, poet; Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition; Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Artists' Books Collection (Columbia University. Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
Publisher: [Gallery Route One]
Published: 2013
Place of publication: Point Reyes Station, California]
Language: eng
Number of pages: 25
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; Gallery Route One; 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: Printed in an edition of 3, plus one facsimile.

"Visual art and poetry by 17 artists and 5 writers."

Medium: mixed media on paper, handbound.

"When Gallery Route One in Point Reyes Station, California exhibited 35 books and 35 broadsides from the Inventory of Al-Mutanabbi Street, February 8 - March 10, 2013, I invited (at Beau's suggestion) gallery visitors, local artists and poets to create a single page each to be included in a compendium of responses. This book is the result. Some artists contributed pages that are completely abstract, some wrote poems into their artwork, one artist found a poem by Czeslaw Milosz to include with her art. We held a poetry reading and 3 of the local poets contributed a poem each along with an audience member who wrote: 'When I learned of the bombing of al-Mutanabbi Street, I wept.' I was given some unique pages which I distributed among the 3 editions and made printed facsimiles as close to the originals as possible, so the 3 books would have the same contents, though they cannot be exactly identical. The entire community around Gallery Route One and nearby Sometimes Books (a gallery for artist books and book objects) was deeply moved by the Al-Mutanabbi Street Project, and I was thanked many times for bringing the exhibition to our rural location North of San Francisco. The general response, by all of us, is best expressed in the title of Albert Flynn DeSilver's poem, 'To the people of al-Mutanabbi Street, in solidarity, grief and hope'"--The Book Arts at the Centre for Fine Print Research, UK website.

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.