https://complit.princeton.edu/

See the lovely new website designed for Princeton University’s Department of Comparative Literature, featuring images from the Graphic Arts Collection. Thank you.

Note their calendar of events includes “Novel of the Year?” at 4:30 p.m. on October 21, 2015, with Michael Wood, Chair of Judges 2015 Man Booker Award, in conversation with James English, University of Pennsylvania. “No annual book award generates as much controversy, outrage, and general hype as Britain’s £50,000 Man Booker Prize. Now approaching the end of its fifth decade, the Booker has for most of its history been restricted to authors from the UK, Ireland, and the Commonwealth. But last year eligibility was extended to all authors writing in English, thereby enlarging the Booker’s claim to be the leading literary award in the Anglophone world. How has this shift from an essentially British to a “global Anglophone” orientation affected the prize and its critics? What will it mean when the Booker names its first American recipient? Join us to explore these and other questions about the Booker, the book-prize industry, and the current literary scene with this year’s chair of the Booker jury, Michael Wood, and UPenn professor James English, author of The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value and The Global Future of English Studies.”

Save the date: A public screening and discussion of Pacho Velez’s film, Manakamana, will be held on Thursday, October 1 at 7:00 p.m. at the Princeton Garden Theatre at 160 Nassau Street. The acclaimed documentary follows a group of pilgrims in Nepal as they travel to worship at the Manakamana Temple.

The screening will be followed by a question and answer session with Pacho Velez and film scholar Chi-Hui Yang. Tickets are free but reservations are necessary and as we found out with our Versailles film screening, it is important to make a reservation early.

The film is presented by The Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Visual Arts as part of Local Color, an exhibition of sculpture, photography, film, and artist’s books by Melissa Frost, Pam Lins, Pacho Velez, and Jeff Whetstone. On display from September 16 through October 9, 2015, in the Lucas Gallery at 185 Nassau Street, the exhibiton opens with a reception on Wednesday, September 23 from 4:30 to 6:00 p.m. http://arts.princeton.edu/events/local-color/2015-09-16/

Melissa Frost is a graduate student in Princeton’s School of Architecture.
Pam Lins is a sculptor and a Lecturer in the Visual Arts Program of the Lewis Center for the Arts.
Pacho Velez is a filmmaker and a newly appointed Arts Fellow in Princeton’s Lewis Center for the Arts.
Jeff Whetstone is a photographer and a newly appointed Professor in the Visual Arts Program of the Lewis Center for the Arts.

With one more day to go, the campaign to fund an exhibition and catalogue for the annual 50/50 book design competition has been successful.

Hosted by the Design Observer Group and sponsored by the American Institute of Graphic Arts, this is the 92nd year that 50 books and 50 book covers will be selected to represent the best work published. Originally only books produced in the United States were accepted but now, an international selection are considered.

In October, these books will be exhibited at the AIGA design conference in New Orleans. If you would like to help and receive a copy of the exhibition catalogue, you have a few hours left to log into kickstarter.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/designobserver/50-books-50-covers

For more information and to see the winners of last year’s competition: http://designobserver.com/5050-2014.php

Cartoonist Henry Martin, a 1948 graduate of Princeton University, is celebrating his 90th birthday this week. A native of Louisville, KY, Martin majored in art history and wrote a 72 page senior thesis titled “A Study of Humorous Art” on cartooning. His first drawing was sold to The Princeton Tiger.
After two years at the American Academy of Art in Chicago, Martin launched a career as a cartoonist and illustrator, publishing in The New Yorker, Punch, Ladies’ Home Journal, The Saturday Evening Post, the Princeton Alumni Weekly and many other magazines. His single-panel comic strip, “Good News/Bad News,” was nationally syndicated, and he wrote and/or illustrated more than 35 books.
Martin left the commercial publishing world in 1995 but even in retirement, continued to produce cartoons for the community newsletter of Pennswood Village, in Newtown, PA, where Martin currently resides.

Some of Martin’s family who celebrated with him.

Inspired by the “Play Me, I’m Yours” piano project, which installed pianos in cities around the world, The Typewriter Project has installed typewriter stations at various locations around New York City. One booth is currently open to the public in Tompkins Square Park.

“The Typewriter Project is a series of site-specific literary installations which invite passersby to join in a citywide linguistic exchange that exists in both the analog and digital realms. These typewriter booths are each outfitted with a vintage typewriter, 100-foot long paper scroll, and a custom-built USB Typewriter kit, which allows every keystroke to be collected, stored, and posted online for users to read, share, and comment upon.”

In keeping with the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse, each author is asked to pick up where the previous person left off, contributing to communal text scroll. “By creating a new and unique form of public dialogue, this project hopes to capture something of the sound, narrative, and nuance of specific corners of the city. The Typewriter Project’s mission is to investigate, document, and preserve the poetic subconscious of the city while providing a fun and interactive means for the public to engage with the written word.”

In the summer of 2014, the Typewriter Project was installed on Governors Island and during winter of 2015, the booth was found in Chelsea. The third installation in the East Village will end on July 19th but hopefully, will not be the last. Hours of operation are Monday-Friday, 3:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. and Saturday & Sunday from noon to 8:00 p.m. The Typewriter Project is a program of The Poetry Society of New York. For more information: http://subconsciousofthecity.com/

The choral work, Five Days that Changed the World (2013), is a collaboration between the poet Charles Bennet and the composer Bob Chilcott. It features five historical events: the invention of printing, the abolition of slavery, the first powered flight, the discovery of penicillin, and the first man in space.

This performance of part one, “Thursday 29th March 1455: The Invention of Printing,” was organized by the Associazione Piccoli Cantori di Torino (The Association of the Boys’ Choir of Turin), who are the parents of the girls and boys in the Boys’ Choir of Turin. The Choir performs at the Tallone Printing House in Turin. http://www.talloneeditore.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=30&Itemid=222

The chorus sings:
The quick brown fox. Quick brown fox.
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

I saw them walking like footprints in the snow.
Saw them walking into houses all over the world.
Open the door of the eye and let them in.

I saw each letter. Saw each letter like a person.
Z was lonely and E was everyone’s friend.
I watched them gather together into words.

I knew if I took the letters one by one.
Knew if I held them tight in forty-two lines.
They could speak to everyone everywhere.

In the beginning there were footprints over the page.
The footprints of a fox who jumps.
Into your eye and over the lazy dog.

See also: Alberto Tallone (1898-1968), Manuale tipografico (Alpignano [Torino]: Tallone Editore, 2005-2013). Contents: Vol. 1. Dedicato ai frontespizi e ai tipi maiuscoli tondi & corsivi. 120 numbered copies printed — Vol. 2. Dedicato all’impaginazione, ai caratteri da testo & ai formati. 276 numbered copies printed — Vol. 3. Dedicato alle carte, filigrane & inchiostri. 293 numbered copies printed — Vol. [4]. Complemento al Manuale I, dedicato all’estetica degli indici, colophon e prospetti. 156 numbered copies printed. Graphic Arts Collection (GAX) 2015-0109Q

As a fundraising event for the New York Art Libraries Society, a small group was welcomed into the Watermill Center on Long Island for a tour of its buildings and grounds. Special thanks go to Deb Verhoff, Librarian, and Clifford Allen, Archivist, who gave up their Saturday to lead the tour.

The Watermill Center is an interdisciplinary laboratory for the arts and humanities completed in 2006 on the Long Island, NY site of a former Western Union communication research facility. Founded by theatre and visual artist Robert Wilson as a place for young and emerging artists to work, learn, create, and grow with each other, Watermill integrates performing arts practice with resources from the humanities, research from the sciences, and inspiration from the visual arts.

Watermill is unique within the global landscape of experimental theatrical performance, and regularly convenes the brightest minds from all disciplines to do, in Wilson’s words, ‘what no one else is doing.’

The Center itself is a 20,000+ square foot flexible working space including a 6,000 volume research library, galleries, rehearsal and staging spaces, workshops, offices, and residences situated on six acres of artist-designed and landscaped grounds. A collection of over 8,000 art and artifact pieces spans the history of humankind is integrated into all aspects of the building and grounds as a reminder that the history of each civilization is told by its artists.

For more information about the Watermill Center: http://www.watermillcenter.org/

Christopher P. Heuer, assistant professor from 2007 to 2014 in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University, has been appointed associate director of research and academic programs at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA.

In addition to its active fellowship program, the Clark organizes year-round scholarly programs, including lectures, conversations, colloquia, symposia, and conferences that “enrich the intellectual life of the Institute and contribute to a broader understanding of the role of art in culture.”

Among Heuer’s many popular classes while at Princeton taught with the RBSC collections were Early Modern Media, which examined ideas of media in the European world, ca. 1400 to 1799; and Northern Renaissance Art, a survey of painting, prints, and art theory ca. 1300 to 1550, with an emphasis on major figures such as Van Eyck, Bosch, Dürer, and Bruegel.

Heuer is currently a Samuel H. Kress Senor Fellow under the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, completing research for a book about the appearance of the Arctic in artistic practice from Renaissance times until today, to be entitled: The Iceberg and the Acrobat: Time and the Printed Image in the Northern Renaissance.

His other writings include The City Rehearsed: Object, Architecture, and Print in the Worlds of Hans Vredeman de Vries (2013), Vision and Communism: Viktor Koretsky and Dissident Public Visual Culture (co-author) (2011), and Dürer’s Motions: Kinetics of the German Renaissance (Reaktion Books, forthcoming).

Last night, the renowned painter, printmaker, and educator Ed Colker gave a presentation of his life and work at the Grolier Club in New York City. The audience was filled with Colker’s students, many of whom are now leading artists and educators themselves thanks to his training.

Born in Philadelphia, Colker attended the Philadelphia Museum School of Art, now known as the University of the Arts. Thanks to a Guggenheim Fellowship, he was able to study in Europe before returning to teach in Chicago. Colker rose to become Director of the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois.

He went on to found the Center for Editions at SUNY Purchase, where he served as both Professor of Art and Design and Dean of the School of Visual Arts. Colker has also served as a faculty member and Provost at Cooper Union and Provost at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

In 1960, Colker founded the not-for-profit fine art publisher Haybarn Press (initially Editions du Grenier) for publishing of fine art limited editions in collaboration with poets and in response to poetic texts. We are fortunate to have a number of his books and portfolios in the Graphic Arts Collection.