Today, artists Sara Rivera and Denise Delgado will lead a workshop called Book Arts & Alteration in the Age of Omission at Urbano, a non-profit community art studio located in Jamaica Plain that fosters participatory art as a vehicle for personal transformation.

The workshop will run from 3:00 pm – 6:00 pm and will be held within Librería Donceles, a traveling bookstore of more than 10,000 used books in Spanish.

Created by New York-based artist and educator Pablo Helguera, Librería Donceles acts as a meeting place for the community to host bilingual salon-like gatherings for conversations, performances and workshops designed to encourage cultural understanding, tolerance, and social activism.

Rivera and Delgado have set aside texts from the collection and will lead workshop participants through an interference with these books, changing them linguistically, narratively and physically as a way to experiment with ideas and materiality. The language and history of Latin America, dystopian narratives and mapping processes, along with other themes, may emerge from this activity. The end product of the workshop will be a set of sculptural, altered artist books that will again become part of Librería Donceles, perhaps to be shelved in an entirely different section than where they started.

The Urbano Project is located at 29 Germania St Bldg F, Boston, Massachusetts 02130.

This workshop is co-sponsored by Project Urbano and JP Reads, a community initiative to explore a single book through author readings and more.