Welcome
Thank you for visiting! We are excited to bring together communities of artists, publishers, writers, collectors and book art aficionados from around the globe to celebrate and exchange ideas on artists’ books!
Bienvenidas
¡Gracias por su visita! ¡Nos complace reunir a la comunidad de artistas, editores, escritores, coleccionistas y aficionados a la publicación para celebrar e intercambiar ideas sobre libros de artistas!
About
Mission
Tropic Bound’s mission is to promote and support the work of book artists while providing opportunities for dialogue and a platform for national and international artists and publishers to exhibit, sell and exchange artists’ books.
Tropic Bound is a bi-annual artists’ book fair with international participation. Launched in February 2023, Tropic Bound includes an educational symposium that raises the discourse of artists’ books and fine art books in South Florida and the Americas with the input of historians, artists, and academics.
Tropic Bound aims to elevate the understanding and value of hand-made artists’ books as an important contemporary art form where art and words meet. Working with artists, galleries, universities, institutions and publishers from around the world, Tropic Bound seeks to create a regionally accessible platform for people involved in the creation of books as an art form.
History
The idea for Tropic Bound was years in the making. Beginning in the fall of 2019 with the support of the John S. and James L Knight Foundation through a Knight Arts Challenge Grant, Tropic Bound began to materialize in earnest.
Officially formed in 2020 by Cristina Favretto, Sarah Michelle Rupert and Ingrid Schindall, Tropic Bound is the first international biennial artists’ book fair set in Miami to undertake the unique opportunity and focus of this historic and underrepresented medium.
The inaugural edition of Tropic Bound launched February 16th-19th, 2023 in the Miami Design District with over 1600 visitors in 4 days, from more than 20 countries, to see 64 exhibitors from around the world!
Tropic Bound will launch the call for entries for our second fair, February 6-9, 2025, on February 3, 2024!
What are artists’ books?
An artists’ book is a work of art that uses the form and/or function of a book as inspiration. It is an art object, intentionally created or conceived by an artist, that can manifest in different ways.
singular / one book
Artists’ Book
Maria, Finn and Alex collaborated on an artists’ book.
plural / many books
Artists’ Books
Layla and her partner collect artists’ books.
Photo by: Johnny Zhang (c) 2020
Meet the Team
Ingrid Schindall, Director
Ingrid Schindall is a passionate and productive printmaker and book artist based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Her prints and artist books have been exhibited internationally and nationally. She is devoted to her writing practice and has produced six limited edition books, all written, designed, hand printed and bound by the artist.
In 2014 Schindall opened IS Projects, a public access printmaking and book arts studio with the mission to cultivate a love and appreciation for print and book media in South Florida. In 2016, she co-founded Fort Lauderdale’s first small press fair, SPF: Small Press Fair Fort Lauderdale with collaborator Sarah Michelle Rupert.
Cristina Favretto, Director
Cristina Favretto is the Head of Special Collections at the University of Miami Libraries. She has worked in a variety of bookish capacities at the Boston Public Library, Harvard, Duke, San Diego State, and UCLA, curating and building collections on zines, culinary history, surfing, and Aldus Manutius, to name a few. Her areas of focus are women’s history and book arts, but she has also had a shadow life as a performance artist and the lead singer in a post-punk cabaret band. She was instrumental in building substantial artists’ book collections at Duke University’s Sallie Bingham Center for Women and Culture at Duke (where she was the first Director), at UCLA Special Collections, and now at the University of Miami.
Sarah Michelle Rupert, Director
Sarah Michelle Rupert is an artist, educator and cultural producer living and working in Miami, FL. Working with photography, video, collage, drawing and animation, her creative practice revolves around consumer and mass-communication culture and its beautiful, tragic and humorous interactions within contemporary life.
As a cultural producer, she works collaboratively with artists and organizations to build innovative and fun projects across artistic disciplines. She is the Director of Collections at Girls' Club, founding director of Mixed Use Space, and founding co-director of SPF: Small Press Fair Fort Lauderdale with Ingrid Schindall.
Tropic Bound 2023 Coordinators
Tayina Deravile
Amber Frank
Brooke Frank
Isabella Maria Garcia
Erica Mohan
Tropic Bound 2023 Volunteers
Connor, Daria, Nomi, Jett, Lia, Sofia, Lorraine, Megan, Gabriel, Nyle, Haley, Charlisa, Christie, Paul, Deborah and Oscar. Thank you!