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!
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. $12 ($2 shipping) order 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 (was) available in the museum’s gift shop and is available for $10 plus $2 shipping: order here.
I look forward to Ted’s performance and much more at this year’s BMC conference.
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portrait by Guillermo Velasco
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