This webinar will present and discuss new research on print and reading cultures in Africa, from the mid-19th century to the present day, by introducing four new books published by Cambridge University Press in November and December 2020, within the Colonial and Postcolonial Publishing strand of the Elements in Book and Publishing Culture series:

Reading Spaces in South Africa, 1850 -1920s  by Archie L. Dick
Publishing against Apartheid South Africa: A Case Study of Ravan Press by Elizabeth le Roux
African Literature and the CIA: Networks of Authorship and Publishing by Caroline Davis
Underdevelopment and African Literature: Emerging Forms of Reading  by Sarah Brouillette 

Following an introduction to the new books by each of the authors, there will be a panel discussion about the 'decolonisation' of print culture and reading studies, which reflects on the possibilities, difficulties and challenges in this process. The event is being organised by Cambridge University Press as part of its Literature and Performance Festival 2020.

To register for the event, please sign up at the 'External Link' below. If you would like to attend but are unable to make this date, please register anyway and you will be sent a link to the recording after the event.

In High-Low Tech: Exploring the Intersections of Manual Craft, Digital Fabrication, and Virtual and Physical Experiences in Graphic Design, designer and educator Diane Lee invites participants to consider creative possibilities at the intersections and overlaps of historic and contemporary practices in the field of graphic design. As design disciplines shift to increasingly orient towards digital products, human-computer interfaces, and virtual experiences, there is also a sustained interest in physical, tangible, design objects. Graphic design programs across the country are—at the same time—equipping themselves to support new media platforms (AR/VR), and digital fabrication (3D printing), as well as experiencing a renewed interest in analog processes like RISO printing, letterpress, and calligraphy.

This session intends to bring together design educators and practitioners whose methodologies integrate both the digital and material; who make use of both high- and low-tech tools; and/or both virtual and physical experiences. We invite proposals that respond to the following questions:
- How does an understanding of analog and manual production methods support exploration into digital fabrication methods and/or designing virtual experiences?
- How might we contextualize analog processes, like printmaking, bookbinding, and calligraphy, for students whose career paths will most likely be characterized by designing interactive digital experiences?
- How have you supported a “both/and” approach to analog and digital production methods?

Session Chair:
Diane Lee, San Jose State University

Presentations:
"Office Offset"
Jan Blessing

"Making to Transgress, Risograph Printing as the Practice of Freedom"
Elaine Lopez, Maryland Institute College of Art

"Applying Variable Font Design to Letterpress Type Production"
Ryan Molloy, Eastern Michigan University

"Both Analog and Digital Syntheses"
Tricia Treacy, Dartmouth College

"Migrating Dimensions: The Book Space and Sculptural Typography"
Rebecca Leffell Koren, Washington University in St. Louis

This session will consider bound volumes created or transformed through the incorporation of independently printed images. Inspired by recent scholarship that addresses the popularity of modifying, enhancing, or creating books in this manner, this session will focus on the production and reception of such books between the widespread adoption of the printing press in Europe, circa 1500, and the nineteenth-century rise of public museums and libraries, with their increasingly standardized and discrete organizational systems. Papers may address any books into which independently printed images have been incorporated, whether these books include text and whether they are analyzed as unique items or as products of broader creative or curatorial practices. This session seeks papers that consider both the material and the conceptual aspects of these complex volumes. Themes may include the agendas of specific creators; the codex as a structure and ways in which prints were designed for, or adapted to it; or how these works inform histories of reading, book and print production, or book and print collection. Papers may also address how these books relate to those of earlier centuries. Themes addressing subsequent reception are also welcome. Such themes include interpretive and practical challenges that the books present, and opportunities they offer, to the evolving institutional and media landscapes of the twenty-first century.

Session Chair: Jeanne-Marie Musto, Program Committee, Bibliographical Society of America

Presentations:
"Reading Between the Lines: Passion Prints in a Hybrid Book of Hours, ca. 1480-1490"
Larisa Ann Grollemond, Getty Museum

"Bibles Unbound: The Material Semantics of Nineteenth-Century Scriptural Illustration"
Sarah C. Schaefer, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

"Crossed Gazes: Prints in Books in Parma and Berlin"
Silvia Massa, SMB-Kupferstichkabinett

"Making Paper Windows to the Past: Extra-Illustration as the Art of Writing"
Julie Park

Please visit the 'External Link' below for more information about attending this online session.

The typographical collections of the Plantin-Moretus Museum are internationally incontournable. The Officina Plantiniana was widely renowned for its immaculate and splendidly illustrated print work. Woodblocks were not only used to print book illustrations, but also for ornamental initials and other decorative elements.The collection of nearly 14,000 woodblocks has remained relatively invisible for a long time. In the early 1960’s the woodblocks were treated with a poisonous anti woodworm product, which makes consultation substantially difficult. With the support of the Flemish government the Plantin-Moretus Museum has now digitally photographed the entire collection. By putting online these digital pictures, linked to basic descriptions in the online catalogue, this exceptional and unique collection is now available for use by the international research community and the wider public alike.

The webinar intends to stimulate interest and research in woodblock collections in general and this extremely valuable collection in particular. The seminar is aimed at book and art historians, students, curators and anyone with a keen interest in the wonderful world of woodblocks.

PROGRAMME
16.00 - 16.05
Welcome

16.05 – 17.25
Session 1: Digital approaches to woodblock collections

Jolien Van den Bossche (Museum Plantin-Moretus)
The Digitization Process of the 14,000 Woodblocks

Bruno Vandermeulen & Hendrik Hameeuw (Imaging Lab KU Leuven)
Advanced Imaging of Woodblocks with the Portable Light Dome System

Michael Goodman (Cardiff University)
Things to Make and Do: Making the Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive

17.25 – 17.30
Short break

17.30 – 19.00
Session 2: Describing woodblocks stimulates new historical research

Joost Depuydt (Museum Plantin-Moretus)
The Challenge to Describe a Diverse Corpus of 14,000 Woodblocks

Lisa Voigt (Ohio State University)
Tall Tales and Crocodile Tails in Plantin’s Illustrated Travel Accounts

Stephanie Leitch (Florida State University)
Woodblocks and their Afterlives

Moderated discussion after each session.

Please visit the 'External Link' below to register for this free event.

This exhibition celebrating the 300th anniversary of his birth brings this Piranesi principle back to life in all its creativity. It is centred around Piranesi’s masterpieces of engraving, his books, pamphlets, satirical illustrations, and drawings from the collections of the Kunstbibliothek and the Kupferstichkabinett, some of which are being shown for the very first time.

An exhibition catalogue will be published by E.A. Seemann Verlag. Leipzig, 144 pages, 135 colour illustrations, ISBN 978-3-86502-443-5 (German edition), 978-3-86502-444-2 (English edition), RRP: €27.

The Japanese Art Society of America invited Dr. Jeannie Kenmotsu (Japan Foundation Associate Curator of Japanese Art and Interim Head of Asian Art at the Portland Art Museum) to deliver the lecture “Joryū Hanga Kyōkai, 1956–1965: Japan’s Women Printmakers" on Thursday, November 19, 2020. Please visit the 'External Link' below for a recording of this special program.

Clare Kobasa recently joined the Saint Louis Art Museum as assistant curator of prints, drawings and photographs. Kobasa also will manage the museum’s Print Study Room, where students, scholars and members of the public can make appointments for free viewings of more than 14,000 works on paper in the collection.

“Clare brings a wealth of relevant experience and curiosity to the position,” said Elizabeth Wyckoff, curator of prints, drawings and photographs. “We look forward her fruitful collaborations with colleagues throughout the Museum and with the many visitors to the Print Study Room.”

Kobasa recently completed a two-year appointment as the Suzanne Andrée Curatorial Fellow in Prints, Drawings and Photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she helped run the museum’s study room for works on paper. She also curated several exhibitions and installations, including “Woodcuts: Groove and Grain,” which explored the variety and malleability of the oldest printmaking medium.

Prior to her position in Philadelphia, she was a predoctoral fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana–Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome, and held internships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago and Yale University Art Gallery.

Kobasa received a doctorate and a master’s degree in art history from Columbia University and a bachelor’s degree in art history and history from Swarthmore College.

Saint Louis Art Museum, "Clare Kobasa Joins the Saint Louis Art Museum as assistant curator", News release (October 27, 2020).

This December 28, 2020 will be the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Prairie Print Makers, a democratically-minded organization established “to further the interests of both artists and laymen in print making and collecting.” Ten active printmakers and one art dealer gathered at the Lindsborg studio of Birger Sandzén (1871-1954) to plan out an exhibition society that would also offer a gift print commissioned from well-known printmakers to subscribing members. These "Associate" members paid $5 annual dues, and "Active" artist members paid $1 dues to participate in the traveling print exhibitions. "Honorary" memberships were occasionally bestowed. The exhibitions' academic year schedules quickly filled for venues from Honolulu, Hawaii; to Fort Worth, Texas; to Rochester, New York, as well as providing art experiences for many underserved, small communities in the Midwest. The Prairie Print Makers continued to show and share affordable fine art prints until disbanding in 1966, never having raised their fees and attracting more than a hundred American, Canadian, and United Kingdom printmakers to the roster through the years.

In this exhibition organized from the Sandzén Gallery's permanent collection, 61 of 101 known Prairie Print Maker artists are represented via 112 prints in a variety of techniques. An accompanying, 32-page catalogue is available, underwritten by the Barton P. and Mary D. Cohen Charitable Trust.

Please join us for a free webinar highlighting material in Princeton University Library’s Special Collections on Friday, December 4, 2020 at 2pm EST.

This December we will offer you a tour of our collection of pre-zoom, pre-cinema optical devices and prints, rare artifacts designed for shared public entertainment or personal moments of wonder, leading up to the invention of the motion picture. Julie Mellby, Graphic Arts Curator, will be joined by Christopher Collier, Executive Director, and Jesse Crooks, Operations Director and Head Projectionist for Renew Theaters, who will share some of the history and treasures of Princeton’s Garden Theater.

Through a series of live webcams, we will attempt the phantasmagoria experienced in the past as we peer into 18th-century peepshows, twirl phenakistoscopes, open a gigantic megalethoscope, and crank a miniature cinematograph. Feel the sense of wonder as still images come to life, turning day to night, causing volcanoes to erupt, and conjuring faces to rise from anamorphic chaos.

Please register in advance at the 'External Link' below.

An online "Working Progress" event by Veronica Peselmann, Volkswagen Postdoctoral Fellow in Art History, University of Southern California

Response by Henry Jenkins, Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education, University of Southern California