This exhibition features innovative and diverse pop-up books from the Book Arts & Private Press Collection. The works on view demonstrate how contemporary book artists are using the book structure to inform their art. Of special interest are works by Philadelphia-based artist Colette Fu, whose work explores her Nuosu Yi ancestry and the cultural traditions of diverse ethnic minority communities in China. Fu will be teaching an introduction to pop-up book structures in McCabe Library on March 28.

Artists' Books: Pop-up!
February 18 - April 26, 2026

Dedicated in 1967, the Thomas B. and Jeanette L. McCabe Library has a history that began millions of years earlier, with the schist that forms its walls, and that will end untold years in the future, as it returns to the earth. In between, it is a building constantly in flux. Created as an act of permanence, to preserve the books and archives within its walls, McCabe has had to constantly adapt to the changing ways that people use libraries. Built by skilled hands that honed it from wood, concrete, and stone, many more hands make sure every day that it retains its function.

Curated by students in ARTH 067: Building Architecture from Dirt to Dust, this exhibition examines these many hands, including quarrymen and construction workers, custodians and archivists, architects and journalists, donors and woodworkers. Using the very archival documents housed in McCabe and some beyond, students follow ten themes (dirt, material, design, construction, capital, furnishing and decor, media, renovation, maintenance and care, and dust) that illuminate the myriad people and processes that have shaped and reshaped this familiar structure. In telling the many histories of McCabe Library from dirt to dust, the objects in this exhibition tell a larger story about all buildings—as the products of diverse forms of labor, shaped collaboratively, and with long lives that extend far into the past and future.

McCabe Library Cratsley Lounge (2nd floor)
Through March 1, 2026