The Codex is an intensive project and exhibition of 19 artists, who are annually invited to create authentic, open-ended artwork individually within a bound book over the course of a year. 

Organized and founded by artists Kaitlyn Basta and Mostafa Darwish in 2018, the Codex Project is a long-term project, with the first of what will be an annual exhibition in January of 2020. In partnership with lead fabricator Bryan DeProspero and gallerist Evan Slepian of Works on Paper Gallery in Philadelphia, PA, the Codex Project seeks to support a community of artists with innovative ideas and who are recognized as having a strong sense of authenticity in their work.

Selected participants for the Codex Project work by hand in distinctive styles and methods. The exhibition will display books as pieces in themselves, rather than as supplements or preliminary studies to larger work. 

The book's use as a composition is a deliberate choice. 

The project’s organizers encouraged participants to treat the pages as finished works, to utilize all their books’ pages, and to expand their own sense of quality in their work in whatever sense that means to them. It is an intensive project with only these limitations. The project is meant to encourage artists to question what drives and challenges them, inviting proactive change and potential in as many ways as possible.

By showing the artists' books together in the same format, we hope to strengthen the idea that the pursuit of quality work is equal, and the differences between the pieces inside them shows how quality is self-defined.