Publication Turns Abstracted Idea into Concrete Realization

The Clinton Hill publication

In addition to organizing many exhibitions, workshops and events, the Georgia Museum of Art also annually publishes a number of exhibition catalogues and other publications. The most recent of these publications is unique not only in its content, but its construction. The catalogue, “Clinton Hill,” was written by museum director Dr. William U. Eiland and surveys the life and career of Clinton Hill, a multitalented artist who was a Renaissance man of the abstract.

The structure of the physical book contains a number of unique elements that catch the eye of any who pass it. The front cover includes a die cut, allowing parts of the interior pages to be seen. The front and back covers are glued on in separate pieces, leaving the spine visible. The title of the book is printed on the folded edges of the signatures, with binders’ thread exposed over it. The book is also printed on two different types of paper: a high-recycled-content stock in a birch color, printed with a single Pantone color (including vintage photographs of Hill at work), and a silk-coated white art stock for the color plates. Hill’s work in collage and with handmade paper inspired its design, by Almanac of St. Louis.

In the foreword of the publication, Eiland describes Hill’s art as “works of intense vision, of radical experimentation, of lyrical loveliness . . . unknowable things of the unbridled imagination, of the human spirit, of the abstracted idea, and of its concrete realization.”

With an artist whose work inspires such passion, it is fitting that the publication is an out of the ordinary project suitable for the man who lived and worked “without apology or circumspection.”

Copies of “Clinton Hill” are available for purchase at the Museum Shop, on Amazon or on our website for $40.