Please join City Books for the opening of The Survey of Bookish Habits by Jo Novelli-Blasko on Saturday, March 7 at 7 PM. The event is free. Refreshments will be served.
Jo Novelli-Blasko is an artist and curator living in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Her practice combines watercolor, research (in the form of surveys), writing, and performance. She is the founder of The Habitorium, a vehicle for painting and research about the habits of people she has not met. Novelli-Blasko will display a small collection of paintings drawn from responses (Sep-Dec 2019) to “The Survey of Bookish Habits,” defined by Jo as “intentional gestures involving the use and storage of books.” Individual paintings are citations from the completed surveys, layered with imagery from The Habitorium’s holdings of vernacular photographs. Additional surveys available at the exhibition’s opening reception will be collected on March 15. Jo will tabulate and analyze the results and will post them in the gallery on April 14, 2020.
Novelli-Blasko studied Art History and Women’s Studies at Arizona State University, then Performance Studies at New York University. She has taught about performance, art history, writing, and the interdisciplinary humanities. She has tutored and mentored students at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute of the Arts. Novelli-Blasko’s scholarly work focused on the performative nature of the archives in contemporary art, and she has presented internationally on the matter. Jo’s creative work has been shown in rogue contexts across the United States with more formal stagings at The Space (Long Island City), the Ice House, Grant Street Studios, and Trunk Space (Phoenix AZ), and Venue of Merging Arts (Johnstown).
For additional information, please see TheHabitorium.com