Please join us on April 6, 2018, for this event co-sponsored by the P. Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art.

One of several themes explored during the visit by students in VIS 326 “Pathological Color” with James Welling, was the artistic lineage from Ben Shahn (1898-1969) to Andy Warhol (1928-1987) to Sister Corita Kent (1918-1986).

All three of these celebrated artists also had connections with Princeton, beginning with Shahn who lived a few miles east in Roosevelt, N.J., a homestead originally designed for Jewish immigrant garment workers who wanted to leave New York City.

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Shahn’s painting and graphic arts were exhibited in Princeton and at the University. He participated, along with composer John Cage and Judith Malina, co-founder and director of the Living Theatre, in a 1961 panel discussion entitled, “Art and the Responsive Action,” at Princeton’s Murray Theater that inspired many residents to begin protesting injustice.

The following year, Shahn received an honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts from Princeton and that June, designed the set for a production of W.B. Yeats’s play, “Calvary,” at Princeton’s Theatre Intime. These are a few of many interactions Shahn had with the students and faculty.

                    
We are fortunate to own Andy Warhol’s self-published A is an Alphabet and Love is a Pink Cake, given to then curator Gillett Griffin on a visit to the artist in New York City. They are two of a series of books and multiples Warhol printed from 1953 to 1959 as personal gifts to introduce his work to art directors and publishers.

Early in March 1966, many of our students joined Rutgers colleagues to hear Warhol personally introduced a program of his films. Todd Simonds, class of 1968, interviewed the artist:

“Andy Warhol is a nervous, soft-spoken, ordinary-looking man. He dresses informally, wears his hair medium length, streaked artificially with gray. In short, he could get lost in a crowd. He also happens to be the man at the top Ol the Pop Culture heap. If he is not the ‘best, he is at least the best known. Mr. Warhol first gained national attention when his paintings of soup cans and salamis were suddenly in demand by serious art collectors in New York.”

“…With him he brought his circle of co-workers —actors, cameramen and friends. The Rutgers program consisted of three films, ranging from a back-and-white soap opera (one of his first films) through a 35-minute reel of a blonde-haired New York post-debutante named Edie Sedgewick eating breakfast to a wild, multi-projector floor show. Before the show began, Mr. Warhol and Gerard Malanga (who calls himself an “underground superstar”) discussed their work.”

You will enjoy reading the extended article here.

Born Frances Elizabeth Kent, Sister Corita created iconic works of Pop art and social activism. In 1962, she visited the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles where Andy Warhol’s soup cans were on view and began producing her own prints. Like Warhol, she favored brightly colored screen prints.

In 1962, Town Topics reported on an exhibition of liturgical art held at Princeton’s Aquinas Foundation on Stockton Street featuring Ulli Steltzer and Sister Mary Corita, among others. A few years later, the Calvary Baptist Church mounted a show of Carita’s serigraphs and another was held at Murray-Dodge on the Princeton campus.

The artist returned to campus in March 1968 to give a lecture at the Princeton Seminary as part of the fourth Edward F. Gallahue “Theology Today” conference. We are fortunate to have recently acquired a box-set of Corita’s screen prints from that year.

The class will study the history of color both printed and photographic. Here are a few more images from their visit.

See also: Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), Remarks on colour, translation of Bemerkungen über die Farben ([Pasadena, Calif: Archetype Press, Art Center College of Design, 1994]). “This work is limited to sixty copies. It is printed in 43 colors on Mohawk Superfine letterpress paper using foundry and wood type and polymer plates. The cover is handmade Diego Negra paper. The end papers are Japanese Moriki. The binder was Alice Vaughn. All work was printed on Vandercook proof presses at Archetype Press …”–Colophon. Graphic Arts Collection Oversize Z232.A59 W57f

A surprising number of international classes, workshops, lectures, and conferences in the book arts are being announced in the new issue of the online Book Arts Newsletter. Everything from gilding to binding; photo-polymer and digital printing; textual poetics and ur-text. Here’s the link: http://www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/pdf/newspdfs/116.pdf

This list is assembled and published each month thanks to Sarah Bodman of the University of the West of England, Bristol, where she is Senior Research Fellow for Artists’ Books. Here’s a little more about her work:

“Sarah is Senior Research Fellow for Artists’ Books at the Centre for Fine Print Research (CFPR), where she runs projects investigating and promoting contemporary book arts. She is also Programme Leader for MA Multi-disciplinary Printmaking at the Bower Ashton Campus. Sarah is the editor of the Artist’s Book Yearbook a biennial reference publication on contemporary book arts, published here by Impact Press (next issue 2016-2017). She is also the editor of the Book Arts Newsletter and The Blue Notebook journal for artists’ books. Sarah writes a regular news column on artists’ books for the ARLIS UK and Ireland News-Sheet, and an artists’ books column for the journal Printmaking Today.

Move over Shakespeare, Poe, and Luther. Next week brings the start of the Gutenberg 2018 Jubilee. Leading scholars of incunabula will descend on Mainz, Germany, for the opening symposium Friday, 26 January 2018. Held in the Atrium Maximum, Alte Mensa, Johann-Joachim-Becher-Weg 3-9, on the campus of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, the day of lectures is free of charge. A full program can be found here: http://www.buchwissenschaft.uni-mainz.de/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Kolloquium-2018-Gutenberg-Programm.pdf

The event website, in English, is here: https://www.mainz.de/en/service/gutenberg-jubilee-2018.php

“On February 26, 1468, the Mainz lawyer and humanist Dr. Konrad Humery, archbishop of Mainz, that he has got back a printing press from the estate of Johannes Gutenberg. This important document, which was preserved in the original in the Würzburg State Archive, confirms the death of Johannes Gutenberg at the beginning of the year 1468 and at the same time gives the important indication that he had a printing shop until the end of his life.

The commemoration of the 550th anniversary of the death of Johannes Gutenberg offers the opportunity to once again become aware of the media-historical consequences of his invention and to trace the immediate success story of the printing press. In less than 50 years approximately 28,000 early incunabula (incunabula) were produced in more than 300 officers across Europe with a circulation of about 10 million copies.” https://idw-online.de/de/news687644

A year of events, programs, tours, music, and study follows.

Suggestion: Prepare for the year by reading our colleague Eric White’s new book: Editio Princeps: A History of the Gutenberg Bible (Harvey Miller Studies in the History of Culture), reviewed here by Paul Needham: https://harveymillerpublishers.com/2017/12/06/paul-needham-on-editio-princeps-a-history-of-the-gutenberg-bible/

Congratulations to all the members of the College Book Art Association (CBAA) who made it to the national conference this weekend: “Collective Relevance: The Reciprocity of Art and Artifact” https://www.collegebookart.org/Philadelphia. Several panels have been rescheduled and tomorrow will be another full day if you can still make the trip.

The entire 67 page program can be downloaded here, including information on our 2018 Board of Directors and Officers. This weekend’s meeting will include both a silent and live auction, with books donated by CBAA members. The Emerging Educator Award and the Distinguished Career Award will be announced tomorrow evening.

A vendors’ fair has already begun, featuring a variety of book art-related tools and materials available for sale. Above is Paris by Barbara Mauriello, part of the exhibition of work by the faculty of the University of the Arts, on view during the conference. Other workshops and events are being posted on Twitter and Facebook as the days go on.

Friday morning began with a lecture from Sarah Suzuki, Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, Museum of Modern Art. Suzuki presenting highlights from the Museum’s 90 years of collections prints and printed books.

Many had been featured in her exhibitions over the last ten years, including Soldier, Spectre, Shaman: The Figure and the Second World War (2015-16); Scenes for a New Heritage: Contemporary Art from the Collection (2015-16); Jean Dubuffet: Soul of the Underground (2014-15); The Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec: Prints and Posters (2014-15); Wait, Later This Will All Be Nothing: Editions by Dieter Roth (2013); Printin’ (2011) with the artist Ellen Gallagher; ‘Ideas Not Theories’: Artists and The Club, 1942-1962 (2010) and Rock Paper Scissors (2010) with Jodi Hauptman; Mind & Matter: Alternative Abstractions, 1940 to Now (2010); and Wunderkammer: A Century of Curiosities (2008).

The CBAA Journal: Openings: Studies in Book Art, is now open access. Our most recent issue, Volume 3, Number 1 (2017)  can be accessed by clicking here.

Just off the main lobby in the new Lewis Center for the Arts, where an orchestra might be rehearsing a few feet away from a dance recital, is the Hurley Gallery. There you will find an exhibition featuring the work of 184 current and former students of David Reinfurt’s Graphic Design classes.

The show is organized around three large-scale projections on the walls of the gallery. Each is tied to a specific graphic design class: VIS 215 offers students an introduction to typography, VIS 216 moves onto discrete problems of graphic form, and VIS 415 is an advanced class where students pursue one common and substantial design project for the semester.

“These courses allow Princeton students to explore the graphic design mechanics of how the messages reach them in their immediate environments, whether physical or online,” said Reinfurt. “Information is always designed — it is intentionally planned and given a specific form. Through hands-on assignments, students learn about design by doing it and also talking about it. The range of classes we initiated seven years ago equip students with the communication and production skills to operate within design, as well as apply these to their major area of interest at Princeton and after. Graphic design, without an explicit subject matter of its own, just may be the most liberal of arts.”

According to the program website, many students have gone on to pursue careers in design. Lily Healey, Class of 2013, is currently working in the design department at The New Yorker. Neeta Patel, Class of 2016, has spent the last year as the graphic design fellow at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in Phoenix. When graduating, Patel wrote a class-day speech about her time in the Visual Arts Program and was recently featured in Fortune Magazine. Ben Denzer, Class of 2015, is a junior designer at Penguin Books. Nazli Ercan, Class of 2017, is currently a designer for Pin-Up architecture magazine in New York. Bo-Won Kim, Class of 2011, just completed an M.F.A. in graphic design at Rhode Island School of Design.

The gallery is open daily 10:00 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. through December 15; open daily 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. from December 16-28 (closed December 22 and 25).

Over the long weekend a broad cross-section of historian attended “Good, Fast, Cheap: Printed Words & Images in America before 1900,” a joint conference sponsored by the American Printing History Association (APHA) and the Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC) at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS). https://printinghistory.org/2017-conference/

The program was organization by Sara T. Sauers, APHA VP for Programs, and Nan Wolverton, AAS Director, CHAViC, (with the help of many others). Besides two dozen papers, there were exhibits, receptions, and a performance. A private visit to the Museum of Printing History in Haverhill, Massachusetts, rounded out the weekend. http://apha.memberlodge.org/event-2622155

We learned about typos in the Declaration of Independence, female run and printed newspapers (not only as sheet feeders), the time and cost of adding an intaglio image to a letterpress book, pictorial envelopes, what happened when newspaper publishers ran out of white paper, what happens when you take the ornaments off title pages (including those of William Morris), and much much more.

My favorite printed envelope

APHA is a membership organization founded in 1974 that encourages the study of the history of printing and related arts and crafts, including calligraphy, typefounding, typography, papermaking, bookbinding, illustration, and publishing. The organization does this through a wide variety of programs and services: the annual conference and Lieberman Lecture series; the fellowship program; the scholarly journal Printing History; and annual individual and institutional awards that honor distinguished achievement in the field of printing history.

CHAViC was established at the AAS in 2005 and is dedicated to providing opportunities for educators to learn about American visual culture and resources, promoting the awareness of AAS collections, and stimulating research and intellectual inquiry into American visual materials. CHAViC accomplishes these goals by offering fellowships, exhibitions, workshops and seminars, conferences, resources, and improved access to AAS collections.