And what’s your story Alex?

Biography

B. ALEXANDRA SZERLIP is a multi-award-winning writer (two-time National Endowment for the Arts fellow, two-time Yaddo fellow, MacDowell fellow, Villa Lena fellow (Tuscany), American Library Association awardee, Excellence in Journalism award from Society of Professional Journalists). She has contributed to The Paris Review Daily and The Believer, among other publications, and has worked in professional theater, as a book editor, painter, sculptor and graphic designer. Raised on the East Coast, she lives in San Francisco.

Artist Statement

B. Alexandra Szerlip’s subject matter has run the gamut from Pulitzer Prize poets, Academy-Award winning costume designers, industrial design pioneers, court jesters, Japanese shunga, and sex slavery in S.F.’s Chinatown, to Mixtec snail-dye gatherers, spy technology, Medieval animal trials, 19th century, museum-quality Oriental rugs, the history of invisible ink, the controversial legacy of Charlie Chan, the relationship between alligators and men in the American South, and the history of the ballpoint pen – to name a few.

In 2000, she began creating mixed-media “book sculptures” that proved surprisingly controversial.

In 2022, after a long hiatus, she returned to painting, working mostly with acrylics, but occasionally oils, watercolors and gouache.

Her focus leans toward portraiture inspired by vintage, b/w, anonymous (both subject and photographer) photographs. An overall theme of Mortality /Anonymity has emerged, combined with what a curator friend calls “a gonzo edge.”

“Looking at old photographs,” wrote Roland Barthes, “I’m astonished by the fundamental question: ’Why is it that I’m alive, here and now?’”

‍ As with her writing, her portraits cut a broad swath - from alligator wrestlers, Japanese aviation pioneers, 1930s films and Victorian child criminals to one-man bands, twins, and Belle Epoque postcards transformed into queries about gender politics.

You may have heard

  • … artist Barbara Alexandra Szerlip uses books to make sculptures either causing us to see them as relics even further-- a tiny nail in the coffin of their ubiquity-- or as a shrine to their superiority. It all depends on how you look at it.

    —Kimberly Brooks
    contemporary American artist and author
    “B.A. Szerlip: Books As Sculpture.” Huffington Post. March 26, 2009

  • I learned a lot about Norman Bel Geddes from B. Alexandra Szerlip's book. He was a complex, controversial genius, worthy of this biography. His visionary design of GM's Futurama exhibit for the 1939 NY World's Fair revolutionized people's thinking about the future.

    —Don Norman
    bestselling author of The Design of Everyday Things
    DesignLab, UC San Diego

  • An exceptional profile [of Norman Bel Geddes]... Szerlip's detailedness and thorough research is evident in this supportive yet fair telling of this complex, controversial genius.

    —INNOVATION magazine

You’ve got questions?

  • A Google search will turn up a number of my magazine features and an occasional interview. Please contact me with specific questions or inquiries.

  • Where to start? History, advertising, film, vintage photographs, fashion, outdated technologies, travel, literature ….

  • It’s been a gradual process, mostly unplanned.

    In retrospect, the book sculpture was inspired by my father’s basement wood workshop, which fascinated me growing up. Though I can’t imagine what he might think of how “the wood gene” has manifested.

    Writing? I was a voracious reader, early on. If memory serves, I wrote a 6th grade science paper in iambic pentameter … but it may have been simply rhymed verse.

  • There’s something about certain “old” objects - photos, tools, etc - that resonate with me. They have provenance, have passed through who-knows-how-many hands, have stories to tell but chances are the only way to know those stories is for me to invent them. There’s an obvious thread between my writing, paintings and sculpture - but it took years for me to realize that.

    And there are crossovers. Two-dimensional writing morphs into three-dimensional sculpture. Writing finds its way into some of the paintings. Some paintings are even entirely text.

  • Some people are uncomfortable with what they perceive as ambiguity.

    I subscribe to the theory that people should form their own connections to a piece of art. Sometimes I have a specific concept in mind, sometimes not. Often I’m simply following my instincts and the work ends up surprising me. It’s witty! It’s political! Whatever. And I think, “Where did THAT come from?”

    But that shouldn’t color your enjoyment or appreciation. If it works for you, that’s what matters. If it inspires a conversation, or stirs up a hornet’s nest, great!

Drop me a line.