Irma Boom
Cancelled due to COVID
Irma Boom is a Dutch graphic designer who specializes in bookmaking. Boom has been described as ‘The Queen of Books’, having created over 300 books and is well reputed for her artistic autonomy within her field. Her bold experimental approach to her projects often challenges the convention of traditional books in both physical design and printed content.
As Publisher’s Weekly explains, “What Boom does with books breaks all the rules. She designs them without page numbers (“Without page numbers, you discover other things that you were not looking for,” she says); she designs them without ink, without text (as in her homage to artist Ellsworth Kelly), or with text that spills over into the margins. She makes “fat” books of thousands of pages; she makes books so tiny they fit in the palm of a hand. She doesn’t think of an audience. “If it’s good,” she says, “the audience will appear.” Boom has been noted as the youngest recipient of the Gutenberg Prize, an award recognizing outstanding services to the advancement of the book arts. A selection of Boom’s books are held in the permanent collection of MoMA, and a personalized Irma Boom Archive has been set up at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, showcasing Boom’s work.
