AS A TYPOGRAPHER, Kathleen Burch founded a high-end computer typesetting studio -- now known as Burch Typografica -- in 1979 from which she created and directed production of numerous award-winning publications, signage, and other collateral materials. Major clients: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Ballet, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Levi Strauss, Pac Bell, Chronicle Books and Fraenkel Gallery/Bedford Arts publishing houses, along with four years of pro bono design for Capp Street Project installations with many artists of international renown.
As a publisher, she joined Burning Books in 1981, publishing a dozen books with contemporary writers, composers, and artists; each challenges the possibilities of the book in content and form yet remains accessible. In a multi-year project published in 1987, "The guests go in to supper.," Burning Books published their interviews with seven avant-garde composers including John Cage, Robert Ashley, Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson, Charles Amirkhanian, along with major work. Mills College held a Burning Books retrospective exhibition in 1996.
"Indicia . . . a romance" (prototyped in 1984, while Burch pursued graduate studies in the Book Arts Department at Mills College in Oakland, California. Her undergraduate work in English Literature was also at Mills) is Burch's encyclopedic work distilled into a 6x9-inch multi-level bookwork, dealing with memory, game theory, chance, story-telling, and esoteric romance using symbols and literary romances from the last 3000 years of western civilization to incite the reader to play a game and tell a story.
"dear kathleen: i'm glad you do what you do."
--john cage, 1989
She has created her bookworks and publications using all kinds of computer software -- from telex-based code to the object-oriented -- with a range of low-to-high production techniques such as diazo or letterpress printing from polymer plates.
As a Xerox PARC artist-in-residence for the year 2000 Burch will experiment with cutting-edge equipment, such as a laser-cutting CAD-operated "etch-a-sketch" (which she's already managed to set on fire) and a 4-color Docucolor Xerox printer, and collaborate with Xerox PARC R.E.D. group scientists and other artists-in-residence to produce bookworks during and for a 6-month exhibition at the Tech Museum of San Jose called "Experiments in the Future of Reading" running from March 1 through September 9, 2000. RED group is headed by Rich Gold, and the residency program itself is the subject of a recent book co-published with Leonardo/MIT press.
As Co-Founding Director of the
San Francisco Center for the Book, which she co-founded with Mary Austin in 1996, Burch serves on the executive committee of the board, and took active part in a six-month strategic planning project for the Center. She liaisons for the Center with the American Institute of Graphic Artists. She has also served a two-year term as chairman of the Pro Arte Libri board, an international book arts organization, and a two-year term as vice-president of the Pacific Center for the Book Arts board.
At the San Francisco Center for the Book, Burch refined and redefined much of what she learned in her earlier work in museum installations and publishing. She designs and writes increasingly successful fund-raising packages for individual donors. She designs and oversees all of the Center's collateral and signage, which includes signage and public communications for exhibitions, "The Schedule" that markets to the Center audience with legibility and accessiblity, exhibition catalogs, as well as art direction and typographic design for the Center's website. The Center itself has grown its audience from 700 to 6000 in three years.
In addition to all this, she's married to an energy-efficiency czar, who's an internationally-recognized expert on distance learning, and whom she has found constantly amusing since 1977. They live in Mill Valley, California, and enjoy the invisible companionship of a lively assortment of household gods. She enjoys swimming, Mt. Tamalpais, and (guess what!) reading.
and it's all been fun!
