The Chico Poems is a suite of eight poems contained in a custom designed case. This project was inspired by my late mother Chico Nebenzahl (1916-2000), who penned the poems in the early 1940’s. With the support of a McKnight Fellowship for Book Artists, the project took a year to produce as I employed the light of the sun to create the cyanotype prints in the spring, summer and fall of 2021. Letterpress and cyanotype printing come together to share these short, sometimes acerbic poems. A posthumous collaboration with my mother, who wrote poetry and fiction in her in twenties in Chicago but never shared them widely, gave me a chance to bring these poems out of their long rest and into the light.
In the collections of The Museum of Fine Arts Houston Hirsch Library, the Newberry Library, the Phoenix Public Library, Rare Book Room, the University of Colorado Boulder Rare and Distinctive Collections, the University of Delaware Special Collections, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and the The Francis V. Gorman Rare Art Books and Media Collection, University of Minnesota.
