Light at the Seam – a poem by Joseph Bathanti
The latest publication by The Paper Plant press is this broadside of a poem by Joseph Bathanti, a former NC Poet Laureate, ASU professor of creative writing, and the author of numerous volumes of poetry. This broadside was published in conjunction with ReVIEWING 14, the Black Mountain College conference which I attend each year and for which I create handouts related to the conference. This broadside is available for $10 plus $2 shipping – you can order here.
The Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center in Asheville has become ever more dear to my heart as I have developed a retirement habit of spending time most weeks in its library as well as that of the Center for Craft and the special collections room of Pack Library. The BMCM+AC staff used a quote from me to promote the library:
Soon after the BMC museum moved to its new larger location o Pack Square, I was privileged to conduct a special workshop in the library space celebrating the value of book arts in protecting freedom of cultural expression. Participants made paper, letterpress printed a quote on it, and explored my teaching collection of books as creative objects.
My longtime fascination with Black Mountain College has been rewarded with all the ways I have been able to benefit from attending the conference, visiting the museum, and teaching and learning in association with the wonderful community I have found through my pursuits. The current show, Weaving at Black Mountain College, was co-curated by Julie Thomson, a private scholar and friend who asked me to letterpressprint a sign and some response sheets for an interactive installation in the show.
The awful flip phone picture (by me) shows the letterpress sign and also a circular paper construction that I made emulating Buckminster Fuller’s Great Circles. Alice, program director at the museum, kindly allows my labeled paper construction to reside on this library tabletop. So here is my work in the art library I love to spend time in! Hope you visit this place sometime!
Highly Personal Rauschenberg Exhibit Brings Back Memories
“Auotobiography” lithograph set 1968
all images shown in deference to Robert Rauschenberg’s estate
The Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center is hosting a traveling exhibit of a special set of work by Robert Rauschenberg – gifts, many made just for her, to his studio manager and confidant of 30 years, Bradley Jeffries. It’s an outstanding show with an initial grouping that is one of the most sensually beautiful I have ever seen in this or any museum. A good range of different media from this most versatile artist is shown, but a predominant one is solvent transfer, which captures pre-existing images, from text to photos to anything, in a dreamy and bluish hued tone of nostalgia.
Much nostalgia for me in seeing a certificate of participation in a glass case, earned by Ms. Jeffries, for completion of the workshop The Power of Art, a program sponsored by Robert Rauschenberg at the Lab School, a self-contained day school in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. which serves students with learning differences. Her’s was for 1999; I was a charter participant the first year in 1994. I was a new art teacher at The Achievement School (now The Fletcher Academy) and applied for the workshop using student linoleum prints executed on scrap linoleum from the school’s gymnasium.
Mr Rauschenberg spent the day with us,as I describe on my Black Mountain College page.
Robert Rauschenberg found out as an adult that he had a learning disability ( as distinguished from being what he thought was “stupid”) from Sally Smith, founder of The Lab School. He became a supporter of the school, and the “Power of Art” program, of which I was a charter participant, rewarded art teachers who worked with that that population. Mr Rauschenberg treated us to a presentation along with his assistant, gave us signed posters, a five hundred dollar gift certificate to Jerry’s Artarama,and sat and listened to each of us present about our work. That evening, we were feted at a private reception at the National Gallery’s East Wing, and Mr Rauschenberg favored us with a tour of his own work on the walls. He discussed his decision to create the “white painting” while at Black Mountain (Josef Albers thought it a needless extreme), and he gave a vivid description of painting the huge 25 foot work which was on display in the main room -smearing his hands with the white lead paint for hours and then having to go into immediate treatment for weeks because of the lead poisoning. He was charming and down-to-earth, yet fragile and a bit ethereal in his personal presence. That was a wonderful day.
Below is a photcopy of my certificate. Sadly (and thoughtlessly) I displayed the original near a south-facing window and it has faded considerably. Just as bad, I used dorm room sticky to mount the poster Mr. Rauschenberg SIGNED. Such is life when you are a generalist with too many pies cooking. But now I have added this event to the several that have linked me repeatedly to Black Mountain College over the years, leading me now to be a private scholar in the field and an active participant in the activities of the wonderful BMC museum in downtown Asheville.
BMC Conference Features Leo Amino and More
The 13th Black Mountain College conference called ReVIEWing features Leo Amino, of whom I had not heard before this event. He pioneered the use of polymer resins as the material for abstract sculpture. My annual BMC give-away is pictured above, with a book mark quote from Amino experimentally coated with polymer resin.
This year’s conference is marked by an ever evolving process of globalizing or non-Westernizing the narrative of art in America while signaling the amazing resilience of the importance of Black Mountain College principles and experiences in that narrative. BMC was very early in integrating its faculty and student body, and the Sunday campus tours always recall the major role of beloved African-American staff were in college life. The role of students in governing the college, the powerful roles played by women throughout its history (especially during WW II and then much less so in the last failing years), and the progressive experiential and material-based art instruction at the center of its teaching, all made for a wonderful readiness to explore new ideas that permeated the atmosphere and the work done. Now BMC scholarship is investigating the ways artists like Leo Amino created art that helped open up the artistic tradition to a wider set of values.
John Cage Legacy Anchors BMC Conference
The 12th annual ReVIEWing BMC conference starts tomorrow and I will be giving away a very special booklet. I was so amazed to find out that John Cage made paper, no less with Beverly Plummer, the first NC papermaker of whom I was aware, with the idea of eating a poem. He is the focus of this year’s conference, and so I created my most elaborate BMC project so far. I assembled a collection of fibers and other ingredients and combined them using random pairings and combinations. Cage used the I-Ching for the chance operations that were a hallmark of his work, but I just made item cards, shuffled chosen blindly to make groups.
The materials from the list were combined with a small dose of grocery bag, cotton linter, and potato starch. Each sheet yielded 4 bookmark samples for the booklet.
The papers are lightly attached and so if anyone really wanted to eat their poem, they could, and I hope they will let me know how that goes. Thanks to Julie Thomson, BMC scholar, who hand beat the hibiscus fibers, and to Alice Sebrell, who bestowed the salvage cotton bond paper used for the booklet itself. The BMC spirit lives on and is celebrated and enacted each year at this wonderful event.
Utopian Dreams at Fruitlands Museum
The Fruitlands Farmhouse in Harvard, Mass.
So proud to have my letterpress work displayed at an exhibition at The Fruitlands Museum. Fruitlands was the site of Bronson Alcott’s 19th century utopian community, and the show Recruiting for Utopia: Print and the Imagination explores past and present examples of “the capacity of print and the schematic imagination to build community.” For over a decade, I have been creating hand-laid paper printed objects to give away at the annual Black Mountain College conference conducted by the BMCM+AC. Shana Dumont Garr, curator at Fruitlands and former Program Director at Artspace in Raleigh, received a couple of these at the conference and learned of my tradition. She asked to display these items for the show. The museum purchased all the available items I sent, and now is collecting my mail art pieces!
Below is the Wayside Gallery, a large Fruitlands outbuilding which hosts the exhibit.The pictures zoom in a bit to show my pieces, with the Anni Albers Red Meander and Ted Pope’s blue broadside reasonably visible. The show now runs through March 21, 2021.
My photo below shows the collection of of conference handouts involved. I make about 50 and give away to the visiting scholars and the conference regulars that provide most of my friends in my retirement town.Click on the phrases to read about these pieces. Fish by Ted Pope, Harper Lee bookmark(BMC Museum workshop), Red Meander, Cut-up, Jacob Lawrence, John Dewey on reason.
The larger show in which my pieces take part is a fascinating duel show with a historical collection and a contemporary collection of visual artifacts. Shana Dumont Garr, curator at Fruitlands, explained the overall premise of the exhibit: “To look at New England in two specific time periods: the 1840s and 2019-2020. And to explore how print and design helped express peoples’ worries and their desires to make the world a better place.” There is a local feature article here. I hope to make it to the show to see printing from the time of my favorite Transcendentalists, and see some creativity from my fellow artists in the show.
raleighrambles.com
portrait by Guillermo Velasco
Raleigh Rambles 