Haunted Histories: The Artists’ Books of Clif Meador

Dead Life, Clifton Meador, 2021

Clifton Meador combines writing, photography, printmaking, and design to make books that explore how the narratives of culture, history, and place are the basis for identity. His work explores themes of labor and production, violence and beauty, and chronological slippage between the past and the present. 

This exhibit highlights the range and dynamism of Meador’s artists’ books, including his newest work, Endloser Krieg/Endless War, which confront the ever-ongoing political violence and climate-change induced ecological disasters that wreak irrevocable havoc across the earth. The works in this exhibition highlight Meador’s sustained inquiry into photography and image-making, probing how pictures—whether portraits, landscapes, or news images—produce meaning and conceal violence. 

Clif led the MFA in Book and Paper program in the Interdisciplinary Arts Department at Columbia College Chicago, collaboratively founded an experimental graduate program at SUNY New Paltz—the Visual Research Laboratory—and was director of Nexus Press in the 1980s. He served as Chair of the Department of Art at Appalachian State University for five years and is now a professor in the Graphic Design and Graphic Communications Management programs there.

The exhibition, Haunted Histories: The Artists’ Books of Clif Meador, will be on view at the Kohler Art Library September 2–December 20, 2025.

Clif Meador will give the 8th annual Bernstein Book Arts Lecture on Tuesday, October 7, 2025 at 5:00pm in room L150 of the Elvehjem Building. The lecture is free and open to the public, with a reception to follow. 

Curated by Anna Simon and Maggie McLaughlin.