Congratulations Bill Berkson!!!

from Gallery 16 Press Release..

Gallery 16 is pleased to announce the SF Bay Guardian Goldie award to art and literary legend Bill Berkson. Bill's contributions to the literary and contemporary arts community cannot be underestimated.

We have been privileged to work with Bill and Colter Jacobsen on the acclaimed Gallery 16 Editions book "Bill".

In the back of BILL, Bill Berkson writes, “The words and title for BILL popped out of a juvenile detective novel Tom Veitch gave me around 1980. Instantly, just flipping through this little illustrated book occasioned an emergency. The editorial imagination went to work. Soon, having typed a series of short sentences, paragraphs and stray phrases towards the bottom edge of unusually thin 8 1/2” by 11” sheets... I set aside the twenty-or-so pages and forgot about them.”

The story was then shelved in a manila folder for 25 years. Berkson revisited the story in 2006 and decided the blank pages needed artwork. It was decided that artist Colter Jacobsen would be a perfect fit. Jacobsen found inspiration for the project in a collection of postcards dating from early the 1900s through the 1980s. With a slow and deliberate attentiveness he began a series of drawings. “I felt I was responding to another time, nearer to when I was born, a time thirty years before I was born, and recontextualizing these times into images for today.” Within a year, the new "BILL" emerged, “a fresh creation, in its present splendor.”

you can order your copy of Bill here...

as well as other Bill Berkson books lovingly stocked at SPD...