New book exploring Turkish artist Serkan Özkaya’s project to create hand-drawn versions of newspaper pages printed to replace the papers’ “real” pages . The book, which like the project is entitled Today Could Be a Day of Historical Importance, is a limited edition work of art that comes sealed in a tin can, presenting the owner with a dilemma: open the can and get to the content or preserve it as a collector’s item.

For Today Could Be a Day of Historical Importance, launched eight years ago, Özkaya collaborated with newspapers across the globe to hand-draw the text and images of pages of their papers after they were laid out by the newspaper’s editors. The drawings were printed in place of the typeset pages, resulting in accessible, affordable, and unexpected works of art that were distributed to millions of people. The book includes discussions, interviews, and articles on the project, in addition to hundreds of color reproductions of all of Özkaya’s newspaper pages and photographs documenting his working process. Today Could Be a Day of Historical Importance is published by artwithoutwalls, the nonprofit arts organization that sponsored Özkaya’s most recent collaboration with Louisville’s The Courier-Journal in April 2009. The Courier-Journal recently won an award of excellence from the Society of Newspaper Design for this collaboration with Özkaya.

Özkaya’s book design was executed by Vahit Tuna and A4 Ofset, the recipient of the best printing house award given by SAPPI. The lower right-hand corner acts as a flip-book, showing a short “movie” of Özkaya at work rendering The New York Times.

“This book is a work of art in itself,” said Alice Gray Stites, director of artwithoutwalls. “Like many of Özkaya’s works, it is simultaneously playful and serious, whimsically calling into question our ideas of authenticity and reality.”

The opening essay by critic Isaac Spradlin, Extra! Extra! Works of Art, 75 Cents!, focuses on Özkaya’s collaboration with The Courier-Journal. Özkaya’s collaboration with The Courier-Journal was commissioned by artwithoutwalls, a Louisville-based organization dedicated to bringing contemporary art into people’s daily lives, as its inaugural project. The book also includes articles and essays by arts writers including Ingo Arend, Diane Heilenmann, and Randy Kennedy of The New York Times.

Today Could Be a Day of Historical Importance was first realized in 2003 with the Turkish intellectual daily Radikal, where Özkaya hand-drew the first and last pages of the paper. Özkaya then went on to execute the concept in Sweden (Aftonbladet), Germany (Freitag), and the U.S. (The New York Times and The Courier-Journal).

Price inclusive shipping costs