Moving Parts Press has published handsome and innovative artists’ books, broadsides, and prints under the direction of Felicia Rice since 1977. These editions of new literature, works in translation, and contemporary art explore the relationship of word and image, typography and the visual arts, politics, and popular culture.
The Press is represented by a logo depicting a multi-armed freak from a pirated edition of the Nuremburg Chronicle printed in Augsburg in 1497. The logo also evokes Kali, the Hindu goddess associated with eternal energy.
Felicia Rice 1978
“Courage and sublimity create a body of work where craft, execution and vision coalesce. The books and broadsides, the images, bindings and typography accrue and bear their own witness to excellence.” —Gary Young
The Chicanx/Latinx Series has fed the editorial and artistic direction of the press for more than 30 years. This series of contemporary Chicanx/Latinx artists and writers explores the intersection of cultures, disciplines, and book structures in both limited and trade editions. Notable among these works is Codex Espangliensis, an artists’ book that chronicles and confronts the realities and surrealities of border culture, the result of a collaboration with Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Enrique Chagoya. Having garnered international attention, the trade edition of the book has remained in print continuously since 1998 and has only recently gone out of print.
The limited edition artists’ book, DOC/UNDOC Documentado/Undocumented Ars Shamánica Performática, published in 2014, builds on this success with the addition of Rice’s own imagery, an electronic soundscape, and experimental video. A trade edition of DOC/UNDOC presents this seven-year collaboration with Gómez-Peña, Gustavo Vazquez, Jennifer González and Zachary James Watkins in its entirety and is available from City Lights Books. Published in 2019, Borderbus with poet Juan Felipe Herrera, is the latest in this series. In 2020 Califas: An Ancestral Journey/El Viaje Ancestral was co-published with Museo Eduardo Carrillo as an artists’ book and as a commercially-printed trade edition. In 2022 a longterm project with Amalia Mesa-Bains resulted in a second commercially-printed photographic book, Venus Envy: Chapters I-IV, which currently is accompanying a series of exhibits of her work in museums around the U.S.
Work from Moving Parts Press has been included in exhibitions and collections both nationally and internationally, from AIGA Annual Book Shows in New York and Frankfurt to the Victoria & Albert Museum. Moving Parts Press has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants including The Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship, Elliston Book Award, Stiftung Buchkunst Schönste Bücher aus aller Welt Ehrendiplom, and grants from the NEA, CAC and the French Ministry of Culture.