Search

Collection of artists' books created by artists participating in the Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition; donated by the founder of the coalition Beau Beausoleil between December 2019 and March 2020. Each participating book artist was asked to complete three books over the course of a year that reflected both the strength and fragility of books, but also showed the endurance of the ideas within them.

Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here is an arts initiative and an archival collection, conceived as a response to violence and directed at creating shared cultural spaces. The project and the collection were initiated in 2007 following a car bombing of al-Mutanabbi Street (the street of the booksellers) in Baghdad, Iraq. As of 2019, the archive holds approximately 260 artists' books, 200 prints, and 100 letterpress broadsides as well as 35 photographs (from the newly launched and related project, Shadow and Light).