Sonia Farmer’s artist book project, A True & Exact History, was on display in “May You Live in Interesting Times”, a juried exhibition at the Northern Arizona University Art Museum from February 4 to April 18 2020.

This exhibition, “will embrace widely varying conceptions of the ‘book’ created in an equally diverse range of media. The Museum is producing this event in the firm belief that, in the age of virtual media, there is still a profoundly powerful effect to be drawn from prolonged interaction with a physical artifact in a “screen-free” environment.”

Read more about the exhibition in a review by Katie King at the Arizona Daily Sun. 

A poetic erasure of Richard Ligon’s A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (1675), the display included a copy of the artist book, the grid of mounted pages, the print-on-demand script, and a recording of the live reading, allowing the viewer to engage with the book in multiple formats. The entire display now resides in the Northern Arizona University Art Museum permanent collection.

Photograph courtesy of Northern Arizona University Art Museum.