Books of Nonsense, the work created by Evergreen House's first artist-in-residence, Randy C. Bolton, is now on display in the exhibition gallery at Evergreen. A printmaker, digital artist and professor of art at the University of Delaware, Bolton spent two months last summer working in the Maroger Studio that had belonged to Alice Warder Garrett, who lived at Evergreen from 1920 to 1952.

Books of Nonsense, which continues through Sept. 30, was inspired by the historic house's collection of nonsense works written by Edward Lear in the late 19th century.

"My working process started by going through the shelves of children's books in the Evergreen House," Bolton says. "Using a booklike format, I paired together pages of seemingly unrelated images primarily because of their shared formal qualities, while intentionally allowing any conceptual links to remain ambiguous or misleading. My purpose in these 'books' was to see and think about old or familiar visual information in a new way and to uncover connections between seemingly unrelated ideas based on a more poetic or absurd type of logic."

At 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, July 25, J. Susan Isaacs, associate professor of art history at Towson University, will discuss Bolton's work as part of A Summer Evening to Celebrate Contemporary Art at Evergreen (see "In Brief," in this issue of The Gazette).

The lecture is free, and attendees will receive the book produced by Evergreen based on the exhibition. On other dates, admission to the exhibit is $3, which includes the book.

Evergreen's artist-in-residence program was created to continue the tradition of patronage provided by Alice Warder Garrett to artists of her day, and to offer artists the opportunity to respond to various aspects of Evergreen's collections, architecture and grounds, in the process of creating new works of art.

For more information, call 410-516-0341 or go to www.jhu.edu/historichouses.