We asked A.R.T.'s 2024 Honoree Julie Ault to speak with us about her ongoing publication practice.

A.R.T.: As an organization A.R.T. is committed to creating better access to the arts and literacy through publishing and the free distribution of books to public institutions of learning. We believe that books create access through their form, how they are mediated, and how they may be shared in public spaces of reading.

In your oral history interview for the Archives of American Art, you’ve stated that the books you’ve published, such as “Show and Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material,” function as tools of conservation and self-preservation. You state that books are “conservative in the sense that they conserve and preserve the subject, the history from a perspective at a time.”

Could you tell us why you insist on the printed book as one of your main artistic mediums? What does the book allow you to do that traditional exhibition making strategies do not? And how do books serve your practice’s wider emphasis on transforming art-making into a tool of social critique and transformation, on the one hand, and on the other, of making art public in novel ways?

Julie Ault: Exhibitions are fleeting situations made to be experienced in person. Location influences and limits who visits a show. Viewers generally have limited time to devote to an exhibition and usually don’t want a great deal of reading to do.

A primary function of a book is the possibility for continuation. Books distribute with a wider ranging reach and have an enduring material life. Working on a publication that I hope will be around for years, perhaps longer, prompts me to grow and deepen my inquiry into a subject matter and further test the ideas, findings, and modes of articulation I use. I also appreciate that books can provide a private one-on-one experience.

In relation to books, I used the term “self-preservation” not as protection or self-defense but as a way of continuing the presence of my past immersions in particular topics and time frames and as a means for freeing some of the mental space those immersions occupy, so I can continue working anew. Books are the tangible places where I locate myself in relation to what Paolo Freire terms a "thematic universe."

But I don't mean to say books are more important than exhibitions—they offer different potentials. I need and love to work in both ways. And I often collapse the boundaries between the forms and exploit the transfer of exhibition-making and publication-making methods back and forth.

I love the physicality of books and rely on them for inspiration, research, to open new paths of experience, and to be in close contact with voices and visual evidence across time periods and geographic gulfs.