Groundwork, the catalog of Amy Trachtenberg's site-specific installation is now available from Oro Editions. Groundwork, located in the entryway rotunda of the San Jose Public Library's new Hillview Branch, includes eight sculptural columns and a frieze of 26 paintings that together re-imagine the landscape and labor history of San Jose's agricultural past. The Groundwork book documents Trachtenberg's process with an early architectural intervention and development of sculptural forms and images to cultivate memory.

Richly illustrated with images from Trachtenberg's sketchbooks, photography, and source material the book reveals the exacting creative process, with the intricate fabrication and installation involved in shaping stacks of tractor tires, old-growth redwood, oversized steel elements, and madrone branches into the elegant, surprising architectural columns; we learn the visual vocabulary of abstract geometric forms and intensities of light and color that emerge in the paintings of the Shadow Frieze.

The book includes essays by writers Rebecca Solnit and Mary Burger, Solnit offering a meditation on the associations of library, language, forest; and Burger interpreting Groundwork as an innovative public artwork commemorating labor history.

64 pages color paperback

$14.95 plus $3.50 shipping and handling