The Upstate Book Project is a collaborative art project connecting artists throughout the Upstate area to write and illustrate a book one page at a time. The idea is that one artist starts a story and illustrates his or her page then hands it off to the next artist to continue the story and illustrate their page until the project is complete. Artists are juried in by a panel of judges. Selected artists then have 48 hours to submit their story line via email and four weeks to submit their illustration to a designated drop-off point. The story submissions are then edited for content. The artwork is photographed and compiled into book format and uploaded to a cloud publisher. The final product is a book in bound magazine format containing the entire story, written and illustrated by a group of artists/writers that may have never even met. More info at theupstatebookproject.com
The first Upstate Book Project was launched in October 2012. So, here almost five years later, I decided to do the project again. With that said, I called the usual suspects; Jim to help me with the major issues, Ian to photograph the work, Steve to edit and promote, and Susan for outreach and connectivity. I also brought in Nikki to handle a few updated technologies. All were on board with version 2.0 of the project. Technology has advanced a lot in five years, thus calling for an updated approach to several aspects. Just like last time, we had regular working lunches to try to pull this together by October 1st. It’s a good thing I kept the mainframe and Google Docs from the original, because the first time around it took us almost two years to put it together. The exhibit is dropping Saturday, April 8th, at The Hub City Tap House.
We said we would do the project again, then we said we would never do it again. Then, we did it again. I said I wouldn't do it again, again. Jim said he wouldn't do it again before but now thinks I / we should do it again because of new elements. I got interested at that point. So I think we will regroup and approach it better next time and do it again. Maybe.