How has chance affected the book arts today? What are way in which luck, chaos, randomness or other manifestations of chance are employed in the creation of a book art?

2012 marks the centennial of John Cage’s birth - inventor, composer, printmaker, and mycologist. In this exhibition,The San Francisco Center for the Book pays tribute to Cage and his in?uence on visual arts, as well as his enduringlegacy and love of experimentation with music, wild mushrooms, Zen Buddhism, I-Ching, visual art, printmaking,and typography.

Curated by Hanna Regev, Left to Chance appreciates the range and impact of Cage’s work across various disciplines byinviting book artists to use serendipity, randomness, unpredictability, luck, found objects, and chance-determinedprocedures to generate new works that are free of any particular order or rule, as well as using new technologies (e.g.,laser cutting, digital printing, video works). These processes form new shapes and structures that challenge traditional bookmaking, and may result in unexpected works such as collage, edible handmade paper, or 3-D structures that ?oat on cyberspaceplatforms.

Left to Chance also builds on the curator’s earlier exhibitions, including the Seduction of Duchamp, Get Lucky: theCulture of Chance, at SomArts, San Francisco, and Herbert Molderings’ book Duchamp and The Aesthetics of Chance: TheArt as an Experiment.
Curator Hanna Regev has an extensive background in the museum ?eld with master’s degrees in Museum Studiesand Modern European History. Her areas of practice focus on curation, public programs and teaching. She works withmany cultural organizations and art galleries in San Francisco and the Bay Area developing public programs associ-ated with exhibitions she produces.

For the San Francisco Center for the Book, Ms. Regev’s most recent exhibition was Banned and Recovered: ArtistsRespond to Censorship (2008) spanning venues at both SFCB and the African American Museum and Library atOakland, which then became a traveling exhibition Banned and Recovered: Artists Intervention, under the manage-ment of Exhibit Envoy, formerly the California Exhibition Resources Alliance.