Ndesign: James Allen

It’s tempting to say James Allen has X-ray vision, because he’s seemingly able to see through books. At least, the East Nashville-based artist can visualize how a book’s two-dimensional layers of words and images can be exposed — one stratum at a time — to create three-dimensional sculptures. 

Armed with a fine blade, a keen eye and boundless patience, James treats books as if they were precious raw materials, like marble. Slicing away thin leaves of paper, he reveals partial images at various depths. His resulting “book excavations” divulge stories in a visual language more poetic than the original prose.

Take The Dangerous Book for Boys, for example. By removing material from early pages of the popular mischievous manual of boyhood, he allowed negative space to frame images and words deeper in the volume. Conflating text and images from various depths, he transformed the book into something between sculpture and collage, while preserving the playful theme of the literature.

Likewise, in a piece he titled “Too Heavy for Superman,” James excavated textual exclamations throughout pages of comics to produce a high-energy topography of typography: “Boom!” “RROOAAR!”

After earning a BFA at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, James lived in New York City, then Seattle and eventually Portland, Ore., where he and his wife, photographer Holly Feral, worked at Driftwood magazine. James’ work is still represented by Russo Lee Gallery in Portland. After the COVID-19 pandemic, the couple moved to be near Holly’s family in Tennessee, where James connected with collage artist-poet Scott Zieher at ZieherSmith gallery.

In preparation for ZieherSmith’s summer group show of baseball-related works, James painstakingly excavated the illustrated manual How to Speak Baseball, leaving a dynamic portrait of an athlete whose whirlwind of limbs appears to be in every possible baseball stance at once.

In advance of a November 2026 solo show at ZieherSmith, James chiseled into a 28-volume set of Time-Life Library of Art books showcasing Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Rembrandt van Rijn, Vincent van Gogh and other icons. Spending two days on each artist, he exposed colors and images until each volume read as a cohesive multilayered composition. In the dazzling case of the Marcel Duchamp volume, James unearthed generations of dreamlike imagery — from Duchamp to René Magritte to Hieronymus Bosch — to unveil a landscape of disparate snippets united by their underlying surrealism.

While James’ work has earned national accolades and placement at the Ringling College of Art and Design, Middle Tennessee State University, Johns Hopkins University, Baylor University, and the University of Caliornia, Los Angeles, among other collections, he knows not everyone approves of his cutting into books. But he maintains that the materials he alters aren’t endangered. More than 1.5 million copies of The Dangerous Book for Boys have been printed, for example. “There’s no chance this book isn’t going to exist,” he says. “I’m not cutting up illuminated manuscripts.”

As layered as any of his artworks, James’ colorful attic workspace abounds with books that people have given him or he has salvaged, all awaiting his surgical skill and X-ray eyes. “I want to make art out of found stuff. I’ve always been an environmentally minded person,” he says, pointing to frames he constructed from reclaimed pallets and offcuts of hardwood flooring. “Partly, it’s not wanting to consume. Partly, it’s the starving artist thing.” 

I watch as James slides the Van Gogh-themed excavation back into its Time-Life slipcover and scans the wall-to-wall encyclopedias and atlases in his home studio. “The possibilities are endless,” he says. “Fortunately, my wife was like, ‘We need more bookshelves,’ not ‘We gotta get rid of some books.’”