Ana Maria Caballero

Book 1/1

Ana María Caballero’s Book Sculptures question how society values poetry and propose the book as a sculptural object.

Milk, the third volume from this eight-part series, exists as a single edition and contains one eponymous poem printed 197 times in its pages. When taken as integers, the digits in 197 add up eventually to 8, a number that represents abundance.

As with the other tomes in Caballero’s Book Sculptures, Milk has a unique ISBN and the anatomy and structure of a traditional book.

Caballero is deeply interested in exploring new ways to transact poetry. When objects are transacted, they are exchanged, shared, given, received. Value is assigned.

Sometimes verse is considered to be immaterial, but nothing is more material than the artworks, verses, memories that enter our minds as we wait in line, sit in traffic, boil eggs. Nothing is more material than what makes us tick.

Caballero’s Book Sculptures celebrate the materiality of poetry and the renewed cultural agency afforded to verse via blockchain provenance.

The collector of the physical 1/1 book also receives a 1/1 video work of a single page of the book endlessly turning while Caballero reads the poem, accentuating the artist’s expansion of the ways poetry can be experienced, exhibited and transacted in the digital age.

Milk is the recipient of a 2024 Christopher F. Kelly Academy of American Poets Prize and was also published by the Academy of American Poets Magazine, one of the most prestigious literary publications of our time. It forms part of Caballero’s prize-winning book MAMMAL.