Ulises Carrión: Bookworks and Beyond,
Princeton University Library, Princeton, 2024. (Ed. by Sal Hamerman – Javier Rivero Ramos).
Photos by Yoshi Hill
Ulises Carrión: Bookworks and Beyond was presented at the Ellen and Leonard Milberg Gallery in Firestone Library, Princeton University Library, from 21 February to 13 June 2024. Curated by Sal Hamerman and Javier Rivero Ramos, it surveyed Carrión's work across artists' books, publishing, exhibition-making, archives, communication systems and Mail Art. Princeton characterized the exhibition as the largest United States retrospective of his work to date. It was drawn primarily from Princeton's extensive holdings, supplemented by loans from the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) in New York and LIMA in Amsterdam.
The exhibition was organized around several interconnected aspects of Carrión's practice: the book understood as a time-space sequence; Other Books and So and the archive as a cultural strategy; Mail Art and participatory postal networks; and the relationship between artistic communication and bureaucracy. Princeton's digital exhibition emphasizes that Carrión's Mail Art practice treated the postal network not merely as a means of delivery but as a structure through which questions of authorship, participation, distribution and institutional power could be tested.
The documentation is particularly important for Artpool because the Princeton exhibition brought together several projects already embedded in Artpool's own Mail Art history. Artpool documents Carrión's From Bookworks to Mailworks, presented at Other Books and So and at the Young Artists' Club (FMK), Budapest, 8–14 December 1978; the periodical Ephemera, edited by Carrión, Aart van Barneveld and Salvador Flores; and Artists' Postage Stamps and Cancellation Stamps Exhibition, for which Carrión assembled contributions from approximately 150 artists originating in some twenty-five countries. Artpool's chronology of Hungarian correspondence art also records the December 1978 Budapest presentation and the Hungarian issue of Ephemera.
Photographic documentation: Yoshi Hill
Artpool gratefully thanks Yoshi Hill for generously making his photographs of the Princeton exhibition available for this documentation.
This contribution has a further direct connection to the exhibition's history. The catalog acknowledgments specifically thank bookseller Yoshi Hill for helping Princeton develop its significant Carrión collection and for generously allowing the catalog's authors to examine material from his personal collection.
Timothy Yoshiro "Yoshi" Hill joined the New York antiquarian firm Jonathan A. Hill, Bookseller, Inc., founded by his father Jonathan A. Hill, in 2016. His own project artbooks nyc is described as a New York-based dealer in contemporary artists' publications and art ephemera managed by Yoshi Hill; its published catalogues include material on Ulises Carrión. His 2023 publication Ulises Carrión II: Including Selections from the Collection of Guy Schraenen (1941–2018) is cataloged with Yoshi Hill as author and Jonathan A. Hill, Inc. as publisher.
