The Pongo’s Dreamis an illustrated artist book by Melissa Huddleston and Benjamin Lord. The text of the book is translated and condensed from a short story in a pamphlet first published by the Peruvian novelist and anthropologist José María Arguedas in the mid 1960s. Arguedas’s tale is a barbed and profane yet ambiguous allegory of colonialism, landscape, religion, race, power, and revenge. The narrative form is appropriated from the middle European fable, transforming the genre from a great distance. While the story is well known in Latin America, it is virtually unknown in the United States.

Huddleston’s lush, inventive paint-on-paper illustrations subtly reinvent the still-urgent questions the book raises. Her approach to characterization, landscape, and narrative timing draws from the traditions of Western children’s book illustration and the early modern inventions of the livre d’artiste, with the witty flourish characteristic of her painting practice.

Two years in production, the book is an oversize softcover, lushly printed on a RISO printer using 88 separate passes of color (including the characteristically shrill RISO fluorescent pink hue). Additional colors were hand-applied using dilute acrylic paint and handcut stencils. The slightly misregistered printing style evokes religious tracts, non-profit pamphlets, and early popular lithography.

2015. 10.25 x 14.5". 32 pages. RISO and pochoir on cellulose paper. Black foilstamp on card cover. Hand-assembled perfect binding. Edition of 100.