**Institute 193 Features Amy Pleasant: The Messenger’s Mouth Was Heavy Limited Edition at Printed Matter’s Virtual Art Book Fair**

This month, Printed Matter will launch its first Virtual Art Book Fair (PMVABF), presenting more than 400 exhibitors from over 40 countries. Since 2005, Printed Matter’s Art Book Fairs have hosted international exhibitors featuring a wide variety of published works—from zines and artists’ books to rare and out of print publications, and contemporary art editions. Held shortly after the 15th anniversary of the inaugural NY Art Book Fair, this online Fair gathers the NY and LA Art Book Fair communities and expands the Fairs’ reach to welcome more exhibitors and visitors than ever before.

Institute 193 is pleased to announce that we will be presenting Amy Pleasant: The Messenger’s Mouth Was Heavy Limited Edition as our featured book for PMVABF. We will also be adding 20 signed copies of The Messenger’s Mouth Was Heavy, as well as the rest of our catalog. Our book fair “table” will be available as a website hosted by CARGO beginning February 24, 2021. We will be posting more information on how to access this in the coming days. We are so excited for this opportunity, and cannot wait to share our contribution to PMVABF when we can.

About the book:

Amy Pleasant's first monograph, The Messenger's Mouth Was Heavy, released December 2019 from Institute 193 Press and Frank, includes more than 200 pages of the artist's paintings, drawings, and ceramic works, developed in conjunction with her exhibition at Institute 193, titled Someone Before You, on view from November 9 - December 20, 2019. The numerous work reproductions in the book showcase Pleasant's iterative but deeply human process, where she subtly explores the fragmented human form, most often rendered in monochrome. Contributed essays from Katie Geha and Daniel Fuller speak on her work's relation to gesture and language, the graphic underpinnings of Civil Rights movements in the South, and the empathetic possibility of recognizing faces in inanimate objects, a phenomenon known as pareidolia. The Messenger's Mouth Was Heavy Limited Edition was released in 2020 and includes one individual, hand-painted page by the artist, limited to only 35 copies.

Amy Pleasant: The Messenger's Mouth Was Heavy Limited Edition
Published by Institute 193 in collaboration with Frank
11.5 x 9 inches / 248 pages
ISBN: 978-1-7328482

Concept and Editing:
Amy Pleasant and Michael Aberman
Design:
Michael Aberman
Proof/Copyediting:
Paul Michael Brown
Printing:
die Keure, Belgium