Pop It! by Ben Blount & Sonnenzimmer

 
Pop It! is the spiritual and material manifestation of a serial collaboration with artist Ben Blount. Our collaboration formalized while developing the catalog design for the exhibition Chicago Avant-Garde: Five Women Ahead of Their Time at The Newberry Library. We worked with Ben extensively, creating the cover design for the book by passing press sheets between our respective studios. Together, we developed a lexicon of experiments, from which the cover and interior of the catalog were derived.
 
Pop It! mirrors the nature of the collaborative press work of our initial exchanges but cranks up the experimentation. This print edition differs in that it was made for sake of itself, for the sake of conversation, and for finding a common edge of our mediums and messages. Pop It! emerged over the course of many exchanges, some verbal, some material. It straddles abstraction and compression, emitting something only possible in the marriage of word and image, a direct hit to the synapses, a charged space to inhabit and exchange.
 
All proceeds (after shipping and shipping material costs) are being passed on to our equity initiative Ideas Beyond Formats, a BIPOC+ publishing grant we launched in 2021. Purchases will help us reach our goal of $7,000.00 to fund the 2022 grant cycle. We’ve raised $4,827.00 as of February 25th. Help us close the gap with your purchase.