About Artwork

Nina Katchadourian’s Sorted Books project has been ongoing since 1993. The works are presented either as photographs of the book clusters that she deliberately selects from a specific collection, or as the actual stacks themselves shown on the shelves of the library they were drawn from. This work was developed as a result of an invitation that Katchadourian received in 2010 from the Delaware Art Museum to work with the books in their M. G. Sawyer Collection of Decorative Bindings—a collection comprising over 2,000 books that were acquired on the basis of their cover design. It provided her with the chance to examine the culture and history of the United States from approximately 1870 to 1920 through literary genres and book design. This selection of books demonstrates the opportunity for humor and comedy to be found in the otherwise administrative act of ordering and categorizing based on the clever knowingness of Katchadourian’s juxtapositions.