Black & White, 256 pages, Softcover, 8½ x 11 x 1 in
Printed in an edition of 1,000 copies

Using the “girlish” perspective artist Pam Butler developed in her street posters “Good Girl Project” she builds The Good Girl Book into a relentless, ironic and humorous critique of the fears and fantasies that continue to dominate our cultural dialogue as well as our personal self awareness.

The “Good Girl Project” was a series of posters plastered on city streets in the 1990s. Using bold marker lines in her signature cartoonish style the project was a public meditation on a search for self in our world of the prepackaged, homogenized and stereotyped. These drawings, mostly of women, were mixed with words and phrases such as “good girl,” “slut,” “bitch,” and “suppose I was very beautiful.” (The Daily news said of Butler at the time “she makes you think, actually think as you walk down the street.”)

The book picks up where this project left off delving deeper into the internal madness wrought by contemporary imagery and messaging. New material is added, such as drawings of astronauts, and “cute” forest animals along with scattered text, and ephemera from the street project, bringing new layers of angst to the original material. The original posters appear in the book cropped manipulated and collaged, or sometimes left just as drawn. Photos of the posters as installed on city streets, also cropped, collaged and as taken, keep the book grounded in the original grit of it’s source as an intervention in public space.