Books are among the most important historical and cultural records that define the times in which we live. Content Object (C/O), a bicoastal studio founded by Kimberly Varella, produces content-driven, object-oriented work specializing in book design—books that tease, please, explain and inform on a wealth of art and cultural topics.

Born in Detroit, Varella gravitated to the Bay Area, where she attended Laney College in Oakland, California, from 1992 to ’93 with a focus on printmaking and the San Francisco Art Institute from ’93 to ’96 with a focus on printmaking, book arts, filmmaking, and performance and installation art. Then, she relocated to Los Angeles, where she received an MFA in art from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 1999.

Varella founded C/O in 2012. “The timing could not have been better,” she says, detailing how art books were making a cultural comeback in the wake of a clearly false prophecy that “print was dead.”  From 2005 to 2012, Varella was a part of Department of Graphic Sciences (DGS), a design collective between herself, Liz Anderson and Gretchen Larsen based in Los Angeles’s Chinatown at the heart of an erupting, vibrant art scene.

DGS concentrated on identity and branding for local nonprofits and art institutions. There, Varella designed some of her first books with arts organization Machine Project, the Pomona College Museum of Art and publishing company WhiteWalls. Coincidentally, her first major monograph was for the artist (and her former professor at CalArts) Charles Gaines titled In the Shadows of Numbers: Charles Gaines Selected Works from 1975–2012 to accompany an exhibition of the same name.

“After I started C/O,” Varella says, “barely a month had passed before I got a call from Naima Keith at The Studio Museum in Harlem, now director of education at LACMA, asking to do another book for Charles Gaines. And then a few months after that, I got a call from Brooke Hodge at the Hammer (where the Gaines exhibition would travel) asking if I would design the Made in LA 2014 book that would be co-curated by Michael Ned Holte, who had written for the first Charles Gaines catalog at Pomona.

“As I see it, the growth of C/O was based on part luck, part kismet, part talent, part chemistry,” she continues, “who knows, really, but the connections kept coming in unbelievable ways.”

Varella’s education in art, film and video, printmaking, bookmaking—handmade books, to be specific—and performance art translated flawlessly to book design. “All durational [practices],” she adds. Her first job out of grad school was working for a small design studio in Santa Clarita, where she found herself tasked with translating ads made on mechanical boards into Quark documents. Since she didn’t go to design school proper, she learned typography on the ground. “To help alleviate an intense feeling of imposter syndrome, I ferociously went to libraries, bookstores, art book fairs and design museums to try to exhume the magic and nuance of letterforms,” she reveals.

Book subjects range from John Waters: Pope of Trash, a definitive title on Waters’s filmography—he earned the sobriquet from no less a cultural luminary than William S. Burroughs—to by Alison Knowles: A Retrospective (1960–2022) on the work of a founding member of the Fluxus movement, an international network of artists who aspired to merge different artistic media and disciplines.

C/O recently received the prestigious Krasnza-Krausz Book Award for Isaac Julien: Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass. The design studio has also garnered numerous AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers awards as well as citations from Communication Arts, Museum Publication Design Competition, the New York Times and the American Alliance of Museums, which awarded first place to two of her books: Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. in 2018 and Nineteen Nineteen in 2020.

In 2023, after 26 years in Los Angeles, Varella and her family made the cross-country move to Goldens Bridge, New York, a hamlet in the town of Lewisboro in Westchester County. With a population of less than 2,000, it’s a marked departure from sprawling Los Angeles but only 44 miles from Manhattan, easily accessible by train. Her new studio is an annex to the main house, which was built in 1860, and has lots of windows and radiators, making bookcase arrangement a bit tricky. However, the setting is green and lovely.

She lives with her husband Robby Herbst, whom she met at the CalArts art program. They eventually collaborated on the Journal of Aesthetics
& Protest, a magazine for which Varella designed the first four issues. Their daughter Juniper was born at home in Los Angeles—the same house they lived in for 24 years on Council Street in Historic Filipinotown. Despite relocating to the East Coast, she is reluctant to consider herself a New Yorker with her roots still strongly tied westward, so the sobriquet bicoastal is relevant to the perennial Angeleno.

In New York, Varella works collaboratively with designer Gabrielle Pulgar, who also relocated from the West Coast and travels from Queens to Goldens Bridge three days a week. Pulgar holds a degree from ArtCenter College of Design in graphic design and just wrapped up her first book with Varella: Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson: Infinite Space, Sublime Horizons.

Much as Lao Tzu said, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” book design begins with a definitive choice. “Books are half typography and half everything else,” Varella says. “Every project is like entering an entirely new universe, and the learning curves can be steep. I always lead with a deep dive into researching the content—from histories to people, aesthetics, philosophies and material. Everything gained in this stage slowly unfolds in the design process, which takes about nine months a book. And yes, the metaphor of the human gestation period is often commented upon.”

C/O’s client list is heavy on museums, art galleries and libraries—cultural institutions with a wealth of research material. The projects Varella undertakes frequently tell the stories of foundations or individuals who’ve made their mark in art, photography, design or history.

She enjoys tackling large projects such as Hollywood Bowl: The First 100 Years or Nineteen Nineteen for the Huntington Library, which presents a capsule history of that formative year in world history, as well as Past/Forward: The LA Phil at 100, which she made in collaboration with fellow designer Jessica Fleischmann. No subject seems to be too big for the artist turned designer. “I invite the chaos—and then I tame it,” Varella states.

Collaboration, brainstorming and organizational skills are key to undertaking big topics. “Kimberly approaches making with others like the artist that she is,” explains Thomas Lax, curator of the department of media and performance at MOMA. “At once conceptual and pragmatic, she makes big ideas felt, not only easy to understand but also into objects you can’t help but touch. To put it simply, the Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces exhibition I co-organized on filmmaker and artist Linda Goode Bryant’s historic gallery could not have been accomplished without the verve Varella brought to the catalog. A handbook for transformation and the creation of Black space, the publication she designed and created with us is a testament to an expansive vision for the continued desegregation of the art world in the United States.”

Rebecca McGrew, senior director of institutional relations at art gallery Vielmetter Los Angeles, remembers, “I started working with Kimberly in 2006 on a publication for the first museum exhibition of Machine Project at the Pomona College Museum of Art—now Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College—where I was senior curator until 2023. Over the years, we worked on many exhibition catalogs and design plans together. I loved working with Kimberly because of the creative collaboration, and I truly consider her a brilliant artist and graphic designer. I loved the thoughtful process of visioning and brainstorming unique ideas for each book. I loved how Kimberly willingly engaged with and nurtured the vision of all the artists we worked with.

“As a curator, it was important to me to advocate for the artist’s vision, and Kimberly supported this philosophy in her design practice,” she continues. “We worked closely together at every stage of the process, and I appreciated her guidance and ethos during every step as innovative ideas emerged organically, allowing the projects to expand and maximize both the artist’s and Kimberly’s vision. The early generative stage of creative collaboration and our mutual understanding of creative visioning went on to influence my curatorial practice in considering how to engage with and work with an artist, always nurturing and highlighting creative collaboration.”

Isabel Venero, acquisitions editor for publishing company Rizzoli Electa, concurs. “I have been working in publishing for more than two decades, and I have yet to work with a designer who has Varella’s intuitive insight, intellectual rigor and care for the materiality of a book,” she says. “The confidence in her vision is matched by her collaborative approach to every project. She is often the first person I think of when I start to conceptualize a book, both editorially and materially, because she adds so much to each of those essential considerations.”

When book design mirrors the content it is in service to, it creates a perfect symbiosis of subject and form. Over the last dozen years, Varella has designed an impressive catalog of 60 books and counting—a cornucopia of art movements, artistic oeuvres and historical timelines. It’s anyone’s guess what she will turn her artistic eye to next as her studio kicks into high gear. ca