Title: Gloomy Monday
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.
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
Places: Iraq, Baghdad, Rhode Island, Providence
People: Allison Bianco, Lara Henderson
Time periods: 21st century