James Walsh was born in Brooklyn, NY, studied literature at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY and Oxford University, England, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn. He has been making visual work in a variety of media since 1986, and has shown throughout the United States and Europe. In addition to numerous editioned and one-of-a-kind artists' books, he is the author of three books with small presses. His limited-edition artists' book The Arctic Plants of New York City was published by Granary Books in 2016. His work is in major public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York Public Library, the Beinecke Library, the Getty Research Institute, the Library of Congress, and New York Botanical Garden. Awards and residencies include a Fulbright Fellowship to Turkey, an apexart Outbound Residency in Bangkok, and residencies at MacDowell Colony, The Edward Albee Foundation, Art Omi, Wave Hill, The Center for Book Arts, and Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

About the Work

  I have a broad range of interests in natural history, literature, and the arts, and I bring them together in projects that respond to architecture and the natural world. I've mostly been making artist's books in recent years, but I also work in video, photography, drawing, and installation, as well as various combinations of these media. The book form is endlessly adaptable and I use it in most of my projects, no matter what media I'm working with. I often make a video and an artist's book together, from the same set of materials, and I also use video itself as a book, as a way to organize and contain all that I've seen, heard, thought, read, and researched. My installations explore another aspect of the book form by treating the gallery space as a book, creating for the viewer the sense of being able to move about freely inside the space of a book or a long scroll.

James Walsh