Transforming books into art

While on my road trip scouting locations in Nashville last week, I saw some cool examples of books turned into art in two of the hotels we stayed at. In the lobby of The Grady Hotel in Louisville, this piece uses books as a kind of mosaic tile canvas for a painting of a horse. Very apropos since Louisville is in horse-racing country.

A horse painted on books like a tile mosaic

And in the 21c Museum Hotel in Cincinnati, this piece by Wim Botha mounted encyclopedias on bolts and then carved them. I’d seen this done by other artists, but this execution was striking. This piece was untitled, but my wife and I both got MacBeth-ian “Alas, poor Yorick” vibes.

Untitled by Wim Botha

While I love seeing books donated to schools and libraries, or shared via a Little Free Library like the one we have, I recognize that some books become dated or become damaged. When that happens, it’s great when they can be upcycled into art.

Have you seen any great art made from books?


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What you can make out of 462 Rubik’s Cubes

Inspired by Rubik’s Cube art we saw at our local Red Robin, my youngest son Dexter and I created this massive Charizard that weighs in at more than 100 lbs. Dexter contributed the cubing skills, doing all the difficult cube configurations, while I did the easy ones and all the construction. Limited by the six cube colors, we had to adapt the colors of the Charizard sprite a bit, in essence creating our own shiny variant.

Charizard created from 462 Rubik's Cubes
In process construction of Rubik's Cube Charizard

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