Smith & Wolff at the New Hampshire Institute of Art exhibit

Sarah Smith, Book Arts Special Instructor, and Stephanie Wolff, Assistant Conservator, both have work on display at the New Hampshire Institute of Art exhibit: Artists' Books: From A to Zine.

The exhibit runs until April 29, 2015 and is located in the Amherst Street Gallery of the Institute in Manchester, NH.

Sarah Smith to be University of Otago 2016 Printer in Residence

It is my pleasure to announce that Sarah Smith has been selected to be the 2016 Printer in Residence at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.  Sarah is the Book Arts Special Instructor in our Book Arts Workshop, and during Spring Term 2015 is teaching a class in Dartmouth’s Studio Arts department.

Sarah will begin her 6-week residency in Dunedin in August 2016, and will be located in the Otakou Press Room in the University of Otago Library. This prestigious residency has run since 2003, and includes the production of a limited edition book. For more information see:

http://www.otago.ac.nz/library/printer_in_residence/overview.html

You can see examples of Sarah’s work here: http://olfactorypress.com/home.html

We look forward to this residency strengthening a growing partnership between the Otago Book Arts program and ours. Please join me in congratulating Sarah on this honor.

David Seaman

Associate Librarian for Information Management

Amos Kennedy Came to Town and Left an Impression

Amos Kennedy was on campus from January 28th to February 1st, dovetailing with the Martin Luther King, Jr. activities. His visit was sponsored by the Office of Institutional Diversity and Equity, Friends of the Dartmouth College Library, Preservation Services, and the Dartmouth College Library Book Arts Workshop.



Amos intersected with campus events in many areas. He visited Michael Chaney's class on Dave the Potter, where he viewed student work and discussed his own work and ideas (photo above). On Tuesday night he had dinner with ten students arranged by the Office of Institutional Diversity and Equity, and Wednesday night he was at a viewing of Proceed and Be Bold, a documentary about Amos by Laura Zinger (also available in the Jones Media Center). He was also interviewed on "Word of Mouth with Virginia Prescot on New Hampshire Public Radio (listen here).

The workshops were a drop-in style, and over the course of the workshops we estimated 200 visitors. Five posters were produced based on quotes that were submitted by members of the Dartmouth community.
Written by Deborah Howe.

Amos Kennedy Visit to Dartmouth

Sponsored by the Office of Institutional Diversity and Equality, Dartmouth College Library and the Friends of the Library.

Amos Kennedy is a letterpress printer using a distinctive voice to create posters, artists’ books, and publications. Through his strong graphics and bold typography, Kennedy pushes issues of race, freedom, and equality, often incorporating proverbs and tales of the Kuba and Yoruba people of Africa, as well as the work of African-American poets such as Paul Laurence Dunbar. Amos quit his corporate job at the age of forty to become, as he calls himself, “a humble negro printer”. He received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin, has taught workshops in over seven countries and is currently spearheading the Detroit Printing Plant.

The Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign holds a large collection of Amos’s work containing artists' books, postcards, and posters. His work can also be found in many other collections such as Northwestern University and the libraries of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, but Amos will sell you an original letterpress print for just fifteen dollars. “My posters are for everybody,” says Kennedy. He is also the subject of a documentary by Laura Zinger called "Proceed and be Bold.”

Exhibit: Baker Berry Library
Letterpress broadsides by Amos Kennedy reflecting on life, race and injustices. During the month of Janurary there will be an exhibit of Amos Kennedy's posters on display in Berry Main Street.

Event Schedule:
Events will take place in the Book Arts Workshop located in Baker Library, rooms 21-23 (West entrance, lower level, around the corner from the Orozco murals). All events are free and open to the public.

Monday, January 28th
11:00 AM - 1:00 PM Printing demonstration in the Book Arts Workshop hall with the Washington iron hand press.
1:30 PM - 5:00 PM Amos Kennedy will be printing his colorful and unique posters using the Vandercook press. Come by to print your own poster and see what can be done with type. This is a drop in workshop, participants are encouraged to come for an extended time period.

Tuesday, January 29th
1:00 PM - 4:00 PM Amos Kennedy will be printing his colorful and unique posters using the Vandercook press. Come by to print your own poster and see what can be done with type. This is a drop in workshop, participants are encouraged to come for an extended time period.

Wednesday, January 30th
11:00 AM - 2:00 PM Amos Kennedy will be printing his colorful and unique posters using the Vandercook press. Come by to print your own poster and see what can be done with type. This is a drop in workshop, participants are encouraged to come for an extended time period.
7:30 PM Proceed and be Bold: A Film by Laura Zinger. A few years ago independent film maker Laura Zinger made a documentary about Amos. The film covers Amos Kennedy’s background but more than that it addresses issues of race, finding your voice in the modern world, and discovering your passion. Come and see the film and hear a lecture by the man himself. This event is sponsored by the Friends of the Library. Location: Hood Auditorium.

Quetzalcoatl Premiere

Preservation Week 2012 has come and gone. How did you celebrate? There were a number of great activities all over the country – I hope you were able to participate and deepen your understanding of the need to preserve our cultural heritage today so that it may be passed on to the next generation. If you haven’t had a chance, be sure to review our preservation pointers.

Dartmouth's major Preservation Week event was a public screening of the film Quetzalcoatl. You may recall from earlier posts (here and here) that funding for the film restoration was provided by a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation. Part of the mission of the NFPF is to promote film exhibition and so projecting the film before an audience was a grant requirement.

Quetzalcoatl was ready for public viewing at about the same time that our colleagues at the Hood Museum of Art were preparing a major exhibit, "Men of Fire: Jose Clemente Orozco and Jackson Pollock". We decided to schedule the premiere during the "Men of Fire" exhibit (April 7 – June 17) and serendipitously Preservation Week fit right in.

April 25 was the premiere and Mary Coffey, Associate Professor of Art History, provided an introduction to an audience of fifty students and community members. She highlighted these aspects of the film:

• The director’s use of pan and scan to emphasize parts of the mural.
• The impact of the musical score by Theodore Newman.
• What parts of the mural the director included and what was excluded.

What a difference it made to experience Quetzalcoatl on the big screen! After the movie, Professor Coffey took questions from the audience and many commented that the film helped them better understand Orozco's work. One person stated that although he had studied the mural, he had never before been able to see at eye level the figures of Quetzalcoatl and the Christ in the way the film maker made possible.

If you would like to view the movie, a DVD copy may be checked out from the Jones Media Center. Ask for Jones Media DVD 13348. Or you may see it on Dartmouth's YouTube channel.

If you are in the Upper Valley, be sure to visit the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College to see the "Men of Fire: Jose Clemente Orozco and Jackson Pollock" exhibit from now until June 17.

Written by Barb Sagraves.

End of a Long Journey:

The Dismantling of the Guild of Book Workers "Marking Time" Exhibit.

On March 22nd, 2011 a group of volunteers assembled at the Library to dismantle the “Marking Time” exhibit that had been on display in Baker Berry Library since November of 2010.

Amongst the group, was Rutherford Witthus, one of the exhibitors. His book, Matan, Williams, Witten and Nagel, Crumpling a Thin Sheet, 2001, utilized the controlled spontaneity promoted by John Cage to produce crumpled pages. These are included in his book as well as beautiful printed scans of them.

It was a delight to have him here as we took a moment to have show and tell and he was able to illustrate how the pages were manipulated and handled.

For more information on Rutherford’s work visit his website.

After the show and tell and putting all the books back in their boxes, the team went to work with bubble wrap and packing material to get the books ready for shipping. Here students from North Bennet Street School busily match books with the right size shipping container and make sure the correct address is on the right box!

Elizabeth Rideout inspects the packages to make sure they are well sealed and RTG (ready to go).

McKey, loading the boxes onto trucks headed to the mail room for UPS pick up. It felt like an old friend was leaving after a wonderful visit. I hope all the binders were happy to finally get their books back.

Special Thanks to:
Linda Lemke, Rutherford Whittus, Stephan Stefanko, McKey Berkman, Arini Esarey, Erin Fletcher, Celine Lombardi, Anna Shepard. And most of all to the wonderful, thorough, and outstanding head of Shipping & Receiving, Jim Guay, without whom we would be at a complete loss.

Written by Deborah Howe

Panel Discussion

The Friends of the Dartmouth College Library invite you to attend a special panel discussion in conjunction with the Guild of Book Workers Marking Time exhibition currently showcased in Baker-Berry Library through March 20th, 2011.

Bound for Glory: The Hand-made Book as Aesthetic Object and Conceptual Process

Saturday, March 12th, 2011 from 2:00pm until 4:00pm in the Treasure Room, Baker Library.

Reception and tour of the exhibit and conservation lab will follow the panel discussion.

Panel participants:

Jeff Altepeter, Chair of the New England Guild of Book Workers
Richard Baker, binder in private practice
Alex Halaz, Professor of English, teaching History of the Book
Stephanie Wolff, Conservation Technician at Dartmouth College

This panel will discuss personal insights in creating hand-made books and the role of book arts in the academic world.

This event is free and open to the public, for more information, please call (603) 646-2236

"Marking Time"

The Guild of Book Workers traveling exhibition "Marking Time" is on display in Baker-Berry Library from November 5th, 2010 - March 20th, 2011. An Opening Reception is scheduled for Friday, November 12th, 2010 from 4-6pm in the Main Hall of Baker-Berry Library.

For the Guild's 2009-2011 traveling exhibition, members were asked to respond to the theme "marking time" and were invited to interpret the theme as narrowly or broadly as they wished.

In this exhibit of fifty works, traditional fine leather bindings stand alongside contemporary bindings that have been dyed, collaged, or incorporated with photographs or handwriting. Texts selected to be bound are as likely to be poetry or classics as they are science fiction or hard science. The show includes work in the codex format, complex folded structures, wooden constructions, hand-held toys, and sculptural objects. Text and imagery is produced by the most ancient and the most modern mark-making methods: calligraphy, painting, woodcut, letterpress, and digital output. In exemplary work, the artist's facility with craft, structure, material and content allows each individual to create a cohesive whole.

Our own Stephanie Wolff and Deborah Howe have bindings on display in this exhibit.

The Book Unbound & The Book Arts at Dartmouth

Baker Main Hall, Baker-Berry Library, September 7 - November 24, 2010

This exhibition highlights the book and the book arts at Dartmouth in anticipation of Marking Time, the new traveling show from the Guild of Book Workers, on display in the Berry Main Street exhibition cases from November 5, 2010 through March 20, 2011.

The Book Unbound & The Book Arts at Dartmouth was curated by Stephanie Wolff and Deborah Howe, with help from Barb Sagraves, Professor Alexandra Halasz, Richard Langdell, Laura Graveline, Joe Wright, Jay Satterfield, Pat Cope, McKey Berkman, Laura Braunstein, Book Arts Program participants and CoCo 11 students. Exhibit design by Dennis Grady.