As part of Laramie County Library System’s ongoing commitment to fostering creativity, literacy, and lifelong learning, we are proud to present our 2025 book arts exhibition, ChromaTome: Books & Broadsides. This annual exhibition invites our community to experience the art of the book in new and unexpected ways—where storytelling moves beyond the written word into a world of color, texture, and design.
Featuring works by artists and printers from across the country, ChromaTome celebrates the book as both a visual object and a narrative force. Whether you’re an avid reader, an art lover, or simply curious, this exhibit offers a unique opportunity to explore how we share meaning through materials, type, and color.
Introduction from exhibit curator, Kayla Clark:
Color can unify or disrupt, clarify or abstract. It communicates emotion, signals identity, encodes memory, and evokes place. Culturally, symbolically, or simply aesthetically, color is a source of narrative—a language that speaks across time and form.
This exhibition explores the intersection of color and text through the tactile, expressive media of book arts and letterpress. As the title ChromaTome suggests (chroma/color and tome/book), the works on view consider how color functions not just as decoration, but as a vital narrative element in the stories we tell and the forms we print.
A group of multidisciplinary artists, printers, designers, and makers were invited to reflect on color as both subject and storyteller. Whether newly created or revisited from their archive, each work presented here contributes to a collective library of visual language—where our personal and cultural palettes shape, fracture, and bind the stories we choose to share.
Enjoy this vibrant exploration of color and its power to shape, challenge, and illuminate the printed page.
—Kayla Clark, Curator
This exhibit will be on display July 3 through August 31 on the first floor of the Laramie County Library.
Artist list:
Frank Baseman, Pennsylvania
Kayla Clark, Wyoming
Dan Elliott, Kentucky
Olivia Ewing, Wyoming
Globe Collection and Press, Maryland
Emily Hancock, Virginia
Megan Irwin, Missouri
Rhiannon Jakopak, Wyoming
Jesse Kirsch, Maryland
Epiphany Knedler, South Dakota
Alexander Landerman, Indiana
Winona León, Texas
Marnie Powers-Torrey, Utah
Tim Rickett, South Dakota
Mark Ritchie, New Mexico
Lisa Beth Robinson, North Carolina
Lars Roeder, Wyoming
Beth Sheehan, Alabama
Dana Smessaert, Indiana
Claire White, Indiana
David Wolske, Texas
Image: She Ran with Color by Marnie Powers-Torrey