For Utah artist Jim Frazer, 2025 became a year defined by watching his books travel—moving into exhibitions and collections across the country while remaining rooted in the landscapes that shaped them. His work has been in book arts exhibits in Texas, Wisconsin, California, and Washington.” Even as those books circulated widely, their source remained local: “In all those cases, the books exhibited have been based on experiences in the Utah landscape, mostly in Salt Lake City,” he says.

Some of the year’s projects found permanent homes. His book 500 Walks in the Woods, based on his daily walks in the Wasatch Hollow natural area near his home in the Sugar House neighborhood of Salt Lake City, was acquired by libraries at Baylor University and the University of Virginia. Another piece, San Juan, inspired by a river trip through southeastern Utah, is now in the collection of the Kohler Art Library at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and Frazer notes that other books based on similar experiences in the Utah landscape are in other collections in other states. He says, “I have no way of knowing who will look at them, or what they will think, but they will be seeing the Utah landscape when they do.”

San Juan, in particular, carries a deep historical thread. “The San Juan book has quite a bit of Utah history in it, spanning from the prehistoric era down through Spanish explorations and nineteenth century prospectors, all woven into a meditation on how we know what we think we know that meanders like the river that inspired it.”

Along with the work itself, Frazer finds joy in the practice. “I have had a lot of enjoyment from my work with artist books,” he writes, “and I’m appreciative for the Book Arts Program at the U of U where I took my first workshops.” (To see work by the Book Arts Program’s current students, don’t miss Booking a Brouhaha in the Special Collections Gallery of the U’s J. Willard Marriott Library, Level 4, through February 20, 2026).

Frazer’s involvement in the book arts community is not limited to Utah. “During Covid, the Rocky Mountain chapter of the Guild of Book Workers held online sessions every other week for almost two years where I met via Zoom book artists from many other states,” he says. Local connection has been more elusive. “Closer to home, I have hoped for more in-person interaction with other book artists,” Frazer writes. “We have some folks in SLC, and some in Provo centered around BYU, but it seems somehow easier to meet with people in Colorado online than with those nearer by in person.” One promising effort is being led by BYU’s Christopher McAfee: “Christopher McAfee, who works in conservation at the library at BYU, has made an effort along those lines by recruiting people to form a Wasatch chapter of the Guild and I’m looking forward to working with whoever is willing to encourage interest in our area.”

Several experiences from the year shaped his thinking in ways that don’t always appear on a résumé. In March, Frazer traveled to Guatemala—“a wonderful trip” that included camping in the jungle and visiting Mayan archaeological sites. The journey inspired a new book, All That Will Remain, which reflects on the decline of the Maya. Frazer notes that theories about the civilization’s collapse often emphasize three interlocking causes: “the demands for ever increasing labor on the part of many of the working class to maintain the lifestyle of a relatively small number of elites, wars between various rival city-states, and the environmental stress of climate change caused by deforestation and over-use of available resources.” The parallels to the present felt pointed: “It seemed to us to be a cautionary tale, as the themes of the causes of the Mayan decline sound all too similar to the present-day headlines.”

Frazer’s time at Trevor Paglen’s workshop at Anderson Ranch resulted in this modified portrait.

In July, Frazer attended the Machine Vision workshop at Anderson Ranch Art Center in Colorado, taught by Trevor Paglen. Paglen’s investigations into AI and surveillance—including a project using facial-recognition algorithms on photographs of clouds—formed part of the workshop’s conceptual foundation. As Frazer writes, “We learned ‘vibe coding’ which in our case meant asking Chat GPT or Claude, Gemini, etc. to write Python scripts for image analysis.” The workshop brought together participants ranging “from art students to a PhD robotics engineer,” leading to “the best and most wide-ranging discussions that I remember since grad school.” Frazer returned with several working applications—each with its own GUI—despite having “no previous knowledge of coding.” The workshop will be offered again this coming summer.

Taken together, the exhibits, acquisitions, experiments, travel, and community-building form a portrait of a creative life that is both place-rooted and outward-reaching. Frazer may not know how his books will be encountered in distant reading rooms, but he knows what they carry: Utah’s landscapes, its histories, and the questions that flow through them.

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