Judith Hoffberg

The Los Angeles Times announces the death of Judith Hoffberg at 74:

Since 1978, Hoffberg had edited and published Umbrella, a journal increasingly dedicated to artists’ books, which are works of art that are realized in book form. She tended to favor books with a “sculptural quality” that embodied their subject with pages that might form, for example, a necklace or a silk snake.

Jay Belloli, director of gallery programs at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, said Hoffberg was “incredibly important in the emergence of artists’ books in Southern California” and once ran a bookstore that gave them their primary exposure in Los Angeles. [ . . . ]

Over about 20 years, Hoffberg curated more than 20 exhibitions, including “Women of the Book,” which opened in 1997 and toured the country for years. The show featured works by Jewish women that often explored family roots. One artist portrayed the Holocaust experience of her parents on papier-mache models of their tattooed arms. Another showcased the thin contents of her deceased parents’ safe-deposit box.

Judith Hoffberg dies at 74; Art Librarian and Curator (Los Angeles Times)