A joint exhibition featuring 444 original, hand-numbered paintings by ambient music pioneer Brian Eno and Dutch artist Bette A. opens Saturday at North Figueroa Bookshop in Highland Park, pairing gallery-style art with vinyl listening stations and readings drawn from Bette A.'s fiction. The show, titled Slow Stories: Paintings by Bette A. and Brian Eno, runs through October 25 at the shop located at 6040 N. Figueroa St.
A Bookshop Built for Cross-Media Art
The exhibition is presented by North Figueroa Bookshop and Unnamed Press, according to the Daily News. The bookshop itself was established as a joint venture between Los Angeles independent publishers Unnamed Press and Rare Bird, with founding sponsorship from Grove Atlantic and MCD Books, according to North Figueroa Bookshop. That structure — part bookstore, part publisher showroom — helps explain why an international collaboration between a British musician and a Dutch novelist would land in a Northeast Los Angeles storefront rather than a traditional gallery.
The venue already leans into visual art beyond its shelves.
What's Inside the $444 Complete Edition
The Slow Stories project centers on a $444 complete edition that bundles a signed and numbered painting, a limited-edition white-vinyl pressing of 2 Slow Stories, and a hardcover edition of Slow Stories by Bette A., per the seed facts tied to the exhibition. The vinyl includes ambient compositions by Eno alongside Bette A. reading two of her own short works, The Endless House and The Other Village, with listening stations set up inside the exhibit itself. Eno is widely credited with inventing the ambient music genre and released the foundational Ambient 1: Music for Airports in 1978.
Unnamed Press publisher Chris Heiser described the project's intent in comments tied to the release, saying Slow Stories is a multimedia piece of collaborative art centered around storytelling. The publisher has weathered surprising swings in scale before — Chelsea G. Summers' 2021 novel A Certain Hunger sold nearly 200,000 copies for the press, compared with typical small-press sales under 2,500 copies, according to the Los Angeles Times.
A Decade-Long Literary Partnership
Bette A. has published with Unnamed Press for more than a decade, having released her 2015 debut Rus Like Everyone Else and her 2023 novel What's Mine with the press before launching the Slow Stories multimedia project, according to The Vinyl District. The standalone book edition of Slow Stories collects 16 short fiction works that the author developed and rewrote from memory across two decades, paring down narrative plot to focus on meditative slowness, the outlet reports.
Her collaboration with Eno did not begin with paintings. The two previously co-authored What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory, published by Faber & Faber. Born in Amsterdam in 1984, Bette A. studied Image and Language at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and completed a Master's in Creative Writing at Oxford University, per her Wikipedia entry. Neither Bette A. nor Eno is expected to attend Saturday's opening.
Proceeds Tied to Climate and Storytelling Causes
Artist proceeds from the exhibition will go to EarthPercent and Heroines! Movement. EarthPercent, the music-industry climate foundation whose seeds emerged in 2020 from co-founders Adam Callan and Hiroki Shirasuka, who teamed with Brian Eno, had raised over $1 million and distributed roughly $500,000 to 20 environmental grant partners by early 2024, with a goal of mobilizing $100 million by 2030, according to EarthPercent.
Heroines! Movement focuses on women's stories through international projects, according to Heroines! Movement. Each of the 444 hand-painted canvases measures 20 by 20 centimeters and is individually numbered and dual-signed by Bette A. and Brian Eno, according to Bette A.'s official website.
The opening reception runs from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday at North Figueroa Bookshop, 6040 N. Figueroa St. in Highland Park, with the exhibition remaining on view through October 25.
