On Thursday, August 22, at 6 pm, join Stuart Kestenbaum and Susan Webster for a book launch and artist talk about their new book and current exhibition A Quiet Book: Collaborations in Writing and Visual Art.

FORWARD TO A QUIET BOOK

In a season of little comfort for too many, a book emerged that feels so pure, so essentially honorable, I truly bow down. A profoundly warm meditation to hold us in a better space of thought, to calm our shaken spirits, and it is the book you hold in your hands. A gathering of miracles, really, by two gentle, visionary artists who love one another and have been creating every day for so long they probably forgot what it is like to be without that spark. Susan Webster’s exquisite, organic collages (made from fragments they said), but in a season like this, what else do we have? Bits and pieces of elemental beauty, better selves. Staring into them one feels that precious edge of quivering hope that lights up little children about to do something fun. A gracious opening day, a joy that belongs to anyone and is yet to come. And the companionable carefully lettered words (dotted! made from individual dots!) emerging from the magical pen of Stuart Kestenbaum offer such grounding phrases and lines, even breaking single syllable words which slows us down while reading, that a great smoothing of spirit occurs. You can’t rush this book and you wouldn’t want to. You want to absorb it, contain it. Somehow, it already contains you. Or, the person you used to be before everything felt broken. You need this book.

— Naomi Shihab Nye