Carol Bove
1971–
In the early 2000s Carol Bove began making understated assemblages of books, magazines, and curios on pedestals, tables, or wood-and-metal shelving units. The meticulous arrangements position the recent past of art and design—minimalist forms and modernist decor—in the context of the social and political upheavals of the 1960s, a decade that looms large in the cultural imagination and in Bove’s own self-understanding: she was born at its twilight and raised in Berkeley, California, a mecca for the counterculture, student protests, and leftist politics.
Adventures in Poetry exhumes an archive of this period in dog-eared volumes culled from thrift shops and garage sales: Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, Abbie Hoffman’s Revolution for the Hell of It, Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s The Medium Is the Massage (splayed open on the bottom shelf), books on the activist Angela Davis, LSD, avant-garde art, and communism, as well as Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon and a monograph on the abstract painter Nicolas de Staël, cracked open at the far left and sitting atop John Giorno’s Cum (the installation takes its title from Giorno’s publisher, Adventures in Poetry). Bove investigates how these juxtapositions might reveal fissures in the canonized narratives that can be plumbed anew or how they might reanimate the objects’ dormant dimensions (for example, the utopianism or sexual emancipation many of them encode), a new poetic meaning emerging from the synthesis. The work’s force emerges not just in examining how we receive cultural artifacts from the past but in imagining how future archaeologists will interpret our present thirty years hence.
Introduction
Carol Bove (born 1971) is an American artist based in New York City. She lives and works in Brooklyn.
Wikidata identifier
Q5044261
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed July 23, 2025.
Country of birth
Switzerland
Roles
Artist, installation artist, master
ULAN identifier
500128920
Names
Carol Bove, Pericles Boutos
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed July 23, 2025.
