By Irasema Quezada Hammock
Tuscaloosa, Alabama: 2021. Edition of 27.
4” x 4” closed, extends to 32”; 8 panels. Double sided accordion. Text set in Freight designed by Joshua Darden. Printed n Neenah paper on a Vandercook Universal press. Written, illustrated, printed and bound by the artist at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Numbered.
Irasema Quezada: “This artists' book is a part of my desire to seek truth and give voice to the history of the city of Birmingham, Alabama which I feel has been glossed over and sentimentalized. I took photographs of my walk around Birmingham and made reduction linoleum of those photographs. Text was taken from the Birmingham Wiki and annotated with my findings.
“As I walked the downtown in the city of Birmingham, I took notice [of] the beautiful architecture and details. I photographed textures and began researching the buildings and the founding of the city. This project began as a study of the downtown Birmingham neighborhood, Central City. As my research advanced, my dissatisfaction of the city’s recorded birth began to build. Looking at the first internet hit for the history of the city, Wikipedia, one begins to read the romanticized idea of this industrial city. Every link visited had the same information with the same idyllic language. It wasn’t until I came across an academic journal by W. David Lewis that the interests of the founders was plainly written in, what I felt was, a real account.”