His first livre d'artiste, Zebra Noise with a Flatted Seventh, was included in Artists' Books in the Modern Era, 1870–2000 at the Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
[1] Victoria Dailey has called Wagener the first California artist since Paul Landacre to achieve prominence in the art of wood engraving.
Simon Brett, noted British engraver and writer, wrote that “No one else I know of is making such avant-garde grand opera in wood-engraved prints.”[4] Mark Dimunation, Head of Special Collections at the Library of Congress, referred to the book as a “work of maturity and grace.”[5] In 1999 Wagener was elected as a member of the Society of Wood Engravers in England.
This book, some ten years in the making, features a new translation of the Parmenides fragments by Robert Bringhurst, Canadian poet, typographer and author, and uses two new Greek typefaces commissioned for this project by Peter Koch.
[13] This book continued Wagener's observations of the sometimes stark and austere details of California's landscape and featured two fold-out panoramic engravings of Yosemite.
At the 2013 Codex Book Fair and Symposium held at the Craneway Pavilion, Richmond, California, Wagener met the New Zealand poet Alan Loney.
[15] David Pascoe made a short film about the making of this book that focuses on Wagener, the engraver, Patrick Reagh, the printer, and Craig Jensen, the bookbinder.
Edwin Dobb, independent writer and lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, interviewed Wagener about his development as a book artist engaged in wood engraving.
[16] Wagener created an engraving of Festival Hall from the Panama Pacific International Exposition held in San Francisco during 1915.
The broadside was designed and printed by Fred and Barbara Voltmer and Li Jiang at Havilah Press, Emeryville, California.
Past recipients of this award include Ward Ritchie, Jack Stauffacher, Peter Rutledge Koch, Patrick Reagh, Carolee Campbell, and Sandra and Harry Reese.
During a meeting in late 2015 to discuss a future book, the writer Edwin Dobb suggested that they resurrect a previously stalled project about exotic desert plants.
The book was officially launched at a talk Wagener gave at the Huntington Gardens, San Marino, California in January 2017.
The 2017 Reva and David Logan Symposium on the Artist's Book was held at The Legion of Honor (museum) in San Francisco.
In the late 1970s Wagener picked up a copy of A Vegetable Emergency by Maxine Chernoff from the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, California.
In 2017 he conceived the idea of letterpress printing a number of these poems accompanied by abstract color engravings from his Umbraculo Series.
This 2021 book featured twenty-four engravings by Richard Wagener, haiku and haibun poetry by Christopher Herold, and an essay,The Lost Forest by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist William Dietrich (novelist).
This book presented twenty wood engravings seen in botanical collections around the world including London, Edinburgh, Melbourne, Kretinga, Vienna, Helsinki, Costa Rica, and California.
He studied biology at the University of San Diego and earned an MFA in painting from Art Center School, Los Angeles (now Pasadena), California.
[18] Wagener wrote an essay for Carving the Elements, a companion to The Fragments of Parmenides, discussing the development of his engravings to illuminate the text.