Awake in the Dream World

A fantastic, strange, and mysterious world, real and imagined, is featured in Awake in the Dream World, a mid-career retrospective of artist and bestselling author Audrey Niffenegger. Book art, works on paper, and paintings reflect her captivating narrative talent and her confrontations with life, mortality, and magic. Niffenegger's artist's books are presented in depth-including aquatints, lithographs, and letterpress prints that illustrate surreal characters in murky and romantic settings. Her self-portraits reveal self-assurance and whimsy alongside anxiety and loneliness. Another motif in Niffenegger's work probes darker corners of the human heart and mind-dreams, fantasies, and the hopeless struggle with what Shakespeare called "this bloody tyrant, Time." Essays by Audrey Niffenegger, National Museum of Women in the Arts Curator of Book Arts Krystyna Wasserman, and Art Institute of Chicago Curator and School of the Art Institute Professor Mark Pascale explore the artist's influences and work. Published in conjunction with the June 21November 10, 2013 exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.