Book artist Felicia Rice collaborated with visual artist Enrique Chagoya and performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Peña to create the Codex Espangliensis, an accordion book that, when fully unfolded, expands to a length of 21 feet. Packed with symbolic imagery – representations of Aztecs, conquistadors, and American pop icons; references to Mexican culture – and word compositions in English, Spanish, Spanglish, indigenous Mexican languages and French, this massive text tells a multi-layered story of Mexico’s historic and continuing struggles.

In the panel depicted here, the viewer is bombarded with graphic and iconographic imagery. What particular chapter of Mexico’s rich but troubled history is being told here? The visual cues are both compelling and complicated. On the left Spanish conquistadors are committing acts of savagery while Superman stands off to the side, ignoring the brutality and seeming to smirk smugly. On the right, a tank occupied by

Jim Koss came to book arts incrementally. He learned to read by way of comic books. As a young boy, he and his father made stapled books, written and illustrated by his parent and colored in by himself. College brought him to etching and lithography and later to poetry. In the artist’s words, “I soon realized that words could tell the same story as images…words could do what images couldn’t and vice versa.”

In Ramona Creek, Koss combines his own poetry with woodblock prints that comfortably straddle the space between abstraction and naturalism. The dark dynamic shapes set against an evanescent warm background suggest a magnificent forest at that moment when the afternoon sun fades into evening light.