Judge's comments:

We loved the overall concept and the idea behind the issue of people who were unable to afford bail, remain incarcerated even though they have been neither tried nor convicted.
The “Redaction” font and print finishes were beautifully done.

Description:

Redaction brings together a complex set of contents, contexts, and materials. An artist (Titus Kaphar) and his paintings, a poet (Reginald Dwayne Betts) and his poetry, and their collaborative screen print series (Redaction) which examines the issue of money bail in the United States, where people who are arrested, but unable to afford bail, remain incarcerated even though they have been neither tried nor convicted.

The prints, originally exhibited at MoMA PS1 in New York, combine Titus’s etched portraits of incarcerated women and men with Dwayne’s poetry derived from selectively redacted legal documents, typeset in a project-specific Redaction font designed by Forest Young with Jeremy Mickel (MCKL Type). “Redaction as a tool of revelation,” as Dwayne describes it.

With black cloth, black and white foil stamping, multiple paper stocks, and special inks, the result is a mass-produced artist's book. The fundamental idea was to reproduce the artworks with a process that mirrored the artistic process, rather than regular CMYK four-colour printing. In careful collaboration with lithographic experts Sebastiaan Hanekroot and Rossella Castello at Colour & Books in the Netherlands, the original silkscreened artworks were separated back out and processed for offset lithography with white and metallic inks on Fedrigoni Sirio Black paper at Die Keure Printing in Belgium.

Some separated layers were maintained as dividing sections, printed on translucent vellum to explode and expose the Redaction print structures, enabling readers to understand the components—the people, the words—that went into each print. The artworks in the book are deliberately printed on single-sided sheets: as Titus said, “we expect folks to cut them out and put them on the wall.”

While the book has all of the elements of a traditional hardcover—cloth, board, foilstamping, head and tail bands, cover overhang—it’s actually so-called flexibound, with lightweight board, and thus designated “softcover.” For very good reason: in many prisons, hardcover books are still considered contraband.