The Luck Archive: Exploring Belief, Superstition, and Tradition

(Paperback)

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Artist Mark Menjivar was in an antique bookshop in Fort Wayne, Indiana, when he found 4 four-leaf clovers pressed between the yellowed pages of an aged copy of 1000 Facts Worth Knowing. Their discovery beguiled Menjivar so much that he began a multiyear exploration into the concept of luck and its intersections with belief, culture, superstition, a

Reviews

"Menjivar's project opens up the possibility, if only for a moment, to reflect on our own beliefs and traditions. And more importantly, it opens the potential to connect, through a tangible object, to the ethereal ideas that tie us and these symbols together."--Glasstire "In the few years since he started talking to people about their lucky objects and superstitious beliefs, he's learned about some crazy rituals."--Slate

Author Bio

Mark Menjivar is an artist whose work explores diverse subjects through photography, stories, and found objects while emphasizing dialogue and collaboration. His work has been shown at venues across the country, including the Houston Center for Photography, the San Antonio Museum of Art, the Wignall Museum of Art, the University of Wisconsin---Milwaukee, Baylor University, the Southwest School of Art, and Central Michigan University. In addition, his work has been featured by TED, NPR, New York Times, New Yorker, Village Voice, Gastronomica, Orion Magazine, and GUP Magazine. In 2009 his series You Are What You Eat won Director's Choice from CENTER and was a Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 project. In 2011 Menjivar received an artist grant from the Brackenridge Foundation. He lives in San Antonio, Texas. Harrell Fletcher has produced a variety of socially engaged collaborative and interdisciplinary projects since the early 1990s. His work has been shown at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the de Young Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum, ArtPace, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Drawing Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Seattle Art Museum, Domain de Kerguehennec, and the Royal College of Art, among others. He was also a participant in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. From 2002 to 2009 Fletcher coproduced Learning To Love You More, a participatory website, with Miranda July. He is an associate professor of art and social practice at Portland State University in Oregon.