Artists' Books

Dos Mujeres, Una Isla is the first book from innovative Cuban artist and designer Rolando Estévez’s El Fortín imprint. The Library holds the most prominent collection of Estévez’s books of any American university, thanks to the efforts of Professor Ruth Behar, whose poetry appears in this volume, along with works by Nancy Morejón. Behar forged a long and collaborative relationship with Estévez after meeting him at the Havana Book Fair in 1994. Estévez has since been an Artist-in-Residence at the University, and in fact Ann Arbor is the first city in the United States he visited.

This handmade book is the result of a collaboration between Carolyn Rodgers (BFA 2016) and a visually impaired young woman named India West. The artist uses a combination of images, text, and braille to document the collaboration and explore new perspectives in design. Created as part of a book arts class in the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design, this project so impressed the faculty that the Library commissioned a second copy for the collections of the Art, Architecture, & Engineering Library. Ours is the only copy of this work other than the artist’s own.