It’s Reunion 2013: Come to the Library!

We’re so excited to welcome back our alums this weekend. There are so many fabulous events planned it will be hard to choose among them, but don’t forget to stop by the Library! Using the card catalog , ca 1975Come in and visit with the Lady Cornaro, sit in your favorite study spot, and see all the changes that have happened since you left. Did you use a card catalog when you were here? Did the librarians all wear cardigans and glasses? Well, there is still a remnant of the old card catalog in the building (see if you can find it!), and we do still wear glasses and sweaters. Well, some of us do – it’s chilly in here and contacts are annoying! But many other things have changed, so come on in, chat up a librarian or two, and take a walk down Biblio-memory Lane. And if you get a chance, drop in on one of our official presentations. Ron Patkus will be talking about the Special Collections Adopt a Book Program, and Gretchen Lieb will be talking about her archival research on the lives of Lucy Maynard Salmon and her partner (and librarian!) Adelaide Underhill.

ADOPT A BOOK – CONSERVING TREASURES IN THE VASSAR LIBRARYGeorgius Everhardus Rumphius, D‘Amboinsche Rariteitkamer, 1705
Friday, 3-4, Main Library, Special Collections

Presentation by Ron Patkus, Head of Special Collections and Adjunct Associate Professor of History, on the Adopt-a-Book Program, which provides conservation treatment for fragile and damaged items in the Archives and Special Collections Library.  Come to see some of our ailing treasures and hear more about how we plan to preserve them for Vassar’s current and future scholars.

 

LUCY MAYNARD SALMON AND ADELAIDE UNDERHILL: LIVES OUT OF THE ARCHIVE
Lucy Maynard Salmon and Adelaide UnderhillSaturday, 3-4, Rocky 203
A presentation by Gretchen Lieb, Reference Librarian, featuring selected materials that focus on the partnership between Lucy Maynard Salmon and Adelaide Underhill, two important women in the early years of Vassar College, and the way that their relationship informed, shaped and sustained their work and their lives.

GENERAL HOURS

Thompson Memorial Library / Archives & Special Collections

libcomp combo

Friday, 8:30 am – 4:30 pm
Saturday, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm
Sunday, 9:00 am – 12:00 noon

Art Library

art lib combo - Copy

Friday, 8:30 am – 4:30 pm
Saturday, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm
Sunday, 9:00 am – 12 noon

Music Library

Music combo shorter

Friday, 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Saturday, 10:00 am – 5:00 pm
CLOSED on Sunday

 

 

Pop-Up City(es)

Carlos Ignacio Hernández, VC 2013, presented his Urban Studies thesis in the Library’s courtyard this week.  The Library was happy to provide Carlos with the space for his installation and event. Below is his description of his work.

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My project is titled Pop-Up City(es). It is located in the Art Library Courtyard at Vassar College, a normally deserted space with no real sociability or programmatic qualities. With this in mind, this project aimed to occupy the space with a temporary structure that “pops up” and activates the precinct. A wooden frame made out of birch supports a perforated pegboard roof. Through the orifices of the board, synthetic string pieces make their way from top to bottom, conforming proportionally almost all of the structure’s negative space. On the sides of the structure, timelapse projections of four cities relevant to me and my life are shown. Caracas where I was born, Hong Kong where I went to high school, Copenhagen where I studied the sleek angles of Scandinavian architecture, and New York City, a metropolis in which I’ve spent a considerable amount of time and as a result of the lack of timelapse videos of Poughkeepsie that were available online.

Georg Simmel wrote on the urban experience and stated that the IMG_0966 smaller“psychological foundation upon which the metropolitan individuality is erected is the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli.” (Simmel, Metropolis and Mental Life). I wanted to work with simulation of the idea of the city blasé attitude that fills our sidewalks and the replication of an urban journey that was overwhelming and over stimulating in visual terms.

The class session on Diller + Scofidio’s Blur Building was equally pivotal in the creative stages of this process. For the architects, when architecture is dematerialized and equated to the dubious, Blur becomes an experiment in the construction of de-emphasis and media becomes physically tangible. Pop-Up City(es) aims to contest the space-building process through barriers or walls.IMG_0970 smaller Instead, the switch in physicality between the “barrier” and the inside emphasizes the negative space inside the suprasensorial structure. Like the Blur Building, my installation is “a habitable medium” and is meant to generate a sense of curiosity in the spectator and invite her/him to explore and interact with the project in order act against the mobility of image/immobility of spectator dichotomy that Friedberg introduces in her book The Virtual Window.

Brenner and Schmid’s Planetary Urbanisation manifesto brought ideas about international urban connections and transnationalism:

The creation of new scales of urbanization. Extensively urbanized interdependencies are being consolidated within extremely large, rapidly expanding, polynucleated metropolitan regions around the world to create sprawling “urban galaxies” that stretch beyond any single metropolitan region and often traverse multiple national boundaries.

Pop-Up City(es) is a city made out of cities. Through the timelapse projections of cityscapes around the world, this project aimed to comment on the global urban hierarchy and interdependence of cities around the planet, that grow as extensions of each other as a result of agglomerated urbanization. You can enter the structure on the Hong Kong side and exit through Caracas, or vice versa.

In Beatriz Colomina’s piece titled Enclosed by Images, the following introductory statement is made:

We are surrounded today, everywhere, all the time, by arrays of multiple, simultaneous images. The idea of a single image commanding our attention has faded away. It seems as if we need to be distracted in order to concentrate. As if we-all of us living in this new kind of space, the space of information–could be diagnosed en masse with Attention Deficit Disorder. The state of distraction in the metropolis, described so eloquently by Walter Benjamin early in the twentieth century, seems to have been replaced by a new form of distraction, which is to say a new form of attention. Rather than wandering cinematically through the city, we now look in one direction and see many juxtaposed moving images, more than we can possibly synthesize or reduce to a single impression.

The combination of elements of this piece (a frame filled with strings, projected images and interaction with the spectator) make it a combination of the ideas mentioned above, which Colomina carefully articulates so well.

Artist’s books of Shirley Jones and the Red Hen Press

Posted on behalf of Ron Patkus, Director of Archives and Special Collections
Red Hen collectionI recently completed a descriptive bibliography of the works of Welsh artist Shirley Jones and the Red Hen Press.   A descriptive bibliography is composed of detailed physical descriptions of books, and in order to compile such a work, it was necessary for me to examine copies of every issue that has been produced by the press.

Etched Out, 2002

Etched Out, 2002

Between 1975 and 2011, Jones produced 32 books, 27 of which are artist’s books.  Since 1983, when the Red Hen Press imprint was established, 20 books have appeared.  The artist’s books tend to be folio-sized, and are offered in limited editions, usually of 40 copies.  Today libraries around the world house copies of these books; the press is especially well represented in colleges and universities in the United States.  The Library of Congress owns what is thought to be the only complete collection.

Since 1985 and the publication of A Dark Side of the Sun, each book has been announced with a prospectus.  The prospectuses are usually small two-leaf folds, specially printed, which provide information about the book, such as the number of illustrations, the typography, paper, and so on.  When the book is printed, such details can be found in the colophon at the back of each book.

Chwedlau

Chwedlau, 2005

The books usually deal with one of three subjects: personal and family issues; contemporary life in Wales; or Old English and early Welsh literature.  Some books feature Jones’ own writings or translations, and others draw on the work of other writers.  Vassar’s collection concentrates on works dealing with Welsh literature; they include Llym Awel (1993), Y Morgrugyn Cloff (1999), Chwedlau (2005), and Taith Arall (2007)

Jones has become especially well-known for the prints that appear in her books; often they are first encountered on the title page.  The artist makes use of etching, aquatint, and mezzotint, all intaglio processes.  The last two can achieve great tonality in images. Nature is a common element in Jones’ illustrations, and she often uses the symbol of a mandala (a circle that has spiritual significance) as an identifying mark.  Sometimes her books also include blind etchings.

Shirley Jones not only creates the illustrations in her books, she also does the printing of text pages herself.  She has used a variety of fonts over the years (Times Roman, Baskerville, Perpetua, Gill Sans, Caslon, Bodoni), though Baskerville is the most common.  Often her typographic approach includes colored passages, large initials, and italics.   Paper is typically handmade or mould-made from a British paper mill, though papers made outside the U.K. have sometimes been used.

Nocturne for Wales

Nocturne for Wales, 1986

Red Hen Press books have usually been offered to collectors in either an edition binding or a deluxe binding.  Edition bindings typically presented cloth covers, with the book placed in a box.  The deluxe bindings added other features, such as quarter morocco covers, onlays, or different endpapers.  The bindings have sometimes been created by Shirley Jones, but more often she has relied on other bookbinders, such as John Sewell and Jen Lindsay.  On occasion, still other bookbinders (e.g. Mary French and Jan Ascoli) have created special design bindings, but these are unique copies that technically were not issued by the press.

It’s easy to see why the books of Shirley Jones and the Red Hen Press are considered fine examples of contemporary artist’s books.  In 2013, the 30th anniversary of the press, exhibitions will be held at several locations in the U.S. (including here in the Vassar College Library, as well as Swarthmore, Smith, and the University of Vermont) and abroad.  To order copies of the bibliography, which includes comments by the artist on each of the books, visit the Oak Knoll Press.