On December 13, 2025, I was honored to teach a bookmaking class entitled “Unfolding Possibilities” at LACMA (The Los Angeles Museum of Art). It was fun to teach right in front of the extraordinary monumental outdoor sculpture, “Levitated Mass” by Michael Heizer, a 456-foot-long concrete slot constructed on LACMA’s campus, over which sits a 340-ton granite megalith.
Upon entering LACMA’s Resnick Pavilion, we observed the use of layered and torn paper in artist Mark Bradford‘s “150 Portrait Tone“, visited the ongoing exhibition, “Realms of the Dharma: Buddhist Art Across Asia” to observe accordion fold structures, and the “Deep Cuts: Block Printing Across Cultures” show to view a variety of codex book structures with pages and signatures as preparation for our bookmaking process. We found inspiration in the large-scale outdoor sculptures of Ai Weiwei: “Circle of Animals/ Zodiac Heads (2011) and Simone Leigh 16′ tall Sentinel (2022); finding commonalities between the artworks and our reaction to them.
After our energizing and thought-provoking artwork, sculpture, exhibition and museum gallery visits, we returned to our outdoor workspace, and let the fun begin: Folding, measuring, gluing, hole-punching, sewing and embellishing to create our own Unfolding Possibilities.
How great for the New Year.
We created accordion-folded book which unfolded to reveal pockets and pages. Students learned to fold and sew “signatures” (gatherings of folded pages) into the “valley” (downward or exterior-pointing) folds of the structure.
The amazing teaching assistant Alexis was a great support, and a credit to the LACMA education department!
Education Department Staff Susi Castillo keeps Everything on track!
For those interested, this Unfolding_Possibilities_step-by-step contains the diagrammatic step-by-step instructions for the folds and the pamphlet stitch.
