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Texas Book Festival 2011

OCTOBER 21, 2011
Poster, 34" x 23.5"

A few months ago, I was approached by the organizers of the Texas Book Festival, one of the premier literary events in the country, to be the featured artist for this year's festival. In its 16 year history, the Festival has featured the work of painters, photographers, and other Texas-based fine artists, but never an illustrator, so it was a particularly gratifying honor. Over the course of my 20+ years in the field, I've created art for hundreds of book covers, several children's books, and increasingly "authored" my own work through personal projects and gallery works that have found a home in a commercial context after-the-fact, and that experience has given me a special affinity for the literary field.
Full page magazine and newspaper ads

 
Founded by Laura Bush in 1995, the festival has featured literary luminaries such as Frank McCourt, Robert Caro, Sam Harris, Ingrid Betancourt, Maureen Dowd, Adam Gopnik, Barack Obama and R.L. Stine.
 
This year the festival features over 200 authors including Jim Lehrer, Molly Shannon, Chuck Palahniuk, Susan Orlean, Jon Scieszka, Lawrence Wright.... and me.
 
I'll be speaking on Sunday about my work in publishing, portraiture and personal work and how these things came together in my recent collaboration with Gary Golio, "When Bob Met Woody", published by Little Brown earlier this year.
The work that was chosen for this year's event is part of that body of self-authored work, and adding to the pleasure of this honor was working again with DJ Stout and Stu Taylor at Pentagram Design, whose work on this campaign was, as always, terrific. Below are just some of the implementations.
Bookmarks

Newspaper supplement and vistor's guide



Tonight's the Gala, so I'll get the chance to meet some authors whose covers I've created work for in the past, like Steven Saylor, Jim Lehrer, and Michael J Rosen. Should be fun!
© 2024 Marc Burckhardt