Arion Press at The Drawing Center
Featuring Vincent Valdez’s Slaughterhouse-Five Drawings

This October, The Drawing Center is pleased to partner with Arion Press, one of the nation’s leading publishers of fine press artist books, to present a special two-week pop-up at 35 Wooster Street. Founded in San Francisco in 1974, Arion pairs visual artists with classic and contemporary texts to create limited-edition, handmade books printed by letterpress and illustrated with original prints and drawings. A selection of Arion’s limited editions will be available for purchase in The Drawing Center’s bookstore, including Porgy & Bess with lithographs by Kara Walker, The Lulu Plays with drawings by William Kentridge, Jim Thompson’s South of Heaven with drawings by Raymond Pettibon, Machado de Assis’s The Alienist with prints by Carroll Dunham, and Poetry of Sappho with prints by Julie Mehretu.

Most recently, Arion Press partnered with Houston-based artist Vincent Valdez who created original drawings for their latest publication, an edition of Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. As Arion’s inaugural King Artist in Residency, Valdez worked at the Press for six weeks and developed twenty-three original pen-and-ink drawings to bring Vonnegut’s darkly comic World-War II classic to life. Highlighting this unique collaboration between visual artists and Arion’s team of expert craftspeople, the pop-up will also include a presentation of Valdez’s drawings in The Drawing Center’s lower-level gallery. Taken as a whole, the drawings coalesce into what Valdez calls a “visual testimony of transformation, hope, love, and survival in 21st-century America.