Chapbook Festival

Join us for the Third Annual Chapbook Festival, happening this week March 2-5, 2011, at venues throughout the city. We'll start things off Wednesday night, March 2 at 6;30 pm with a panel discussion with Ed Go, Co-Editor, Other Rooms Press and Wennie Huang, Visual Artist; Mary Walker Graham and Robert daVies, Rope-a-Dope Press; and MC Hyland, DoubleCross Press. They'll take us inside the collaborative process, talking about their experiences producing works that combine the visual and the verbal, and the rewards and challenges of working collaboratively.

Events continue at CUNY Grad Center,(365 Fifth Ave at 34th Street) March 3 and 4 with a bookfair of chapbook publishers, workshops for writers, a reading of prize-winning Chapbook Fellows, and a roundtable and launch of Series II in Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Documents Initiative.

We'll be holding hands-on Book Arts workshops for Writers here at the Center all day on Saturday, March 5. Join us for a hands-on immersion in bookmaking. Participants can choose to set their words in metal type, or try their hand at some basic binding structures. Prior registration is required, by calling (212) 481-0295. There will be a $20 material fee payable at the door.

Also on Saturday, at Poets House, there will be an event What the Chapbook Means to Me with Jen Bervin and Anna Moschovakis. Visual artist and poet Jen Bervin and Ugly Duckling Presse editor and poet Anna Moschovakis discuss the way the chapbook has shaped their work, sharing highlights from their own collections and the Poets House archive.

The complete schedule of events is here.

Art Study Tours

We're trying a new kind of program out this winter, which you may have noticed: Our series of five Art Study Tours, which bring you behind-the-scenes into various institutions, collections, and artists’ studios.All five events this winter focus on paper, parchment, and plant life as raw material for tool making. Students can sign up for the entire series or just for one class, each taking place on a Thursday afternoon during the months of January to March. We kicked the series off with a trip to The Scriptorium- part of the Three Faiths exhibition at the New York Public Library. 

 

Master Calligrapher and Illuminator Karen Gorst curated the Scriptorium, as an accompanying educational tool, and she brought the arts of parchment making, ink and pen making and illumination to life in her presentation about these materials and their role in the production of fine medieval manuscripts. 

Member Laurence Fayard sent us an email after the tour: "It was an incredible opportunity to listen to Karen's explanations about Vellum and pigments in the special exhibition Scriptorium. Her talent in Illumination shown in one of the videos, as well available online, is a performance in itself.  The major exhibition Three Faiths is a treasure that must be seen more than once." (Thanks Laurence!)

Our second event was February 3rd, at the Grolier Club, a gallery talk and presentation with

Ann Kalmbach, Co-Founder, Women’s Studio Workshop and Terez Iacovino, Artist, about the exhibition Hand, Voice, & Vision: Artists’ Books from Women’s Studio, at the Grolier Club. After a tour of the show, we learned more about the Women's Studio Workshop's ArtFarm Project, which was developed to experiment with various plant fibers not usually associated with hand papermaking. The project has been in operation since 1999; we got to see work made at the studio using fibers grown in the program, and learned more about how the program has developed. (There's a lot more information here, if you're interested.)

Next up is a studio visit to Dobbin Mill papermill, the base of operations for Robbin Ami Silverberg: artist, hand papermaker, and proprietor of Dobbin Mill Books. Dobbin Mill is a hand papermaking studio located in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, founded in 1989. Her studio offers spacious facilities: a professional papermaking studio, an artist book studio, a courtyard for working outdoors, and a papermaker's garden. The focus of the work in the Mill is the production of Silverberg's artwork. It additionally produces the paper used in Dobbin Books' artist book collaborations. We'll be meeting there to learn more about her work, and about the hand papermaking process on Thursday, February 24, at 3pm.  You can register online here, or by calling the Center. If you'd like to learn more about Robbin, her website is here.

Coming up next month: a tour of the Garden and the Shed up at the Cloisters, and also the Thaw Conservation Center at the Morgan Library & Museum. Yee-haw!

 

Independent Study

Do you have a project in mind that you'd like to start working on? Are you looking for a formal structure in which to develop new work? I've got the perfect solution: Independent Study, coming up next month with instructor Susan Mills.

This class is for everyone who enjoys working independently in the bindery. The open studio structure creates a positive environment for exploration, discussion, consultation, crits, and project development. Students will have full access to the Center’s binding tools and equipment to use to develop their work, and the feedback and guidance of an experience binder.

Susan Mills is a bookbinder who has operated her own bindery since 1990. She teaches hand bookbinding at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and her book works can be found in institutions and libraries throughout the United States and Canada. You can see some of her work here.

This class is offered over four Sundays in March, 3/6, 3/13, 3/20, and 3/27, during the day, 10am - 4pm. You can register online here.

Image: Edition of artists books by Susan Mills.