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.
Whoso List to Hunt
Happy to announce the current publication from The Paper Plant, this broadside of a poem by Sir Thomas Wyatt. One of the very first sonnets written in English, Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poem is based on Petrarch, the Italian master who established the form. The broadside is executed on hand-laid recycled paper with 25% banana tree fiber (from my yard), letterpress printed with a stenciled monoprint. Available here.
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.
Fish, A Broadside by Ted Pope
Ted Pope is a stalwart and beloved performer who features at the annual Black Mountain College conference held every year by the BMCM+AC on UNC-A’s campus. His presentation of his poetry is unmatched in creative delivery – from crumpling each piece after reading and tossing to the audience to lying prostrate while reading to whipping a deerskin as warm-up. The Paper Plant is proud to announce the publication of a broadside of Ted’s poem Fish. This broadside is offered in celebration of Ted’s inclusion in Appalachia Now!, the show that opens the newly renovated Asheville Art Museum.
The broadside will be available in the museum’s gift shop and is also available from The Paper Plant.
I look forward to Ted’s performance and much more at this year’s BMC conference.
Jacob Lawrence in BMCM+AC’s New Space Highlights Annual Conference
The 10th annual BMC conference takes place September 28-30, 2018 at the Reuters Center on UNC-A’s campus. A show of work examining his work and life at BMC opens September 28th in the BMC museum’s new space. This will be the 8th out of 10 I have attended; in recent years I have started creating a printed hand-laid paper object to give out. Above is this year’s, using a quote from the website of the Jacob and Gwen Knight Lawrence Center. Looking forward to it!
raleighrambles.com
portrait by Guillermo Velasco
Raleigh Rambles 