00:00:00 MODERATOR: Hello. Good morning everyone. Time to get started. Hi. Welcome to the twenty- first (21st) Annual New Jersey Book Arts Symposium. It's hard to believe it's been twenty-one

(21) years but our Founding Director, Michael Joseph, has been in charge -- I believe -- of every single one of them added. For many years it was held in Newark at the Dana Library at Rutgers and I believe it

00:00:30 was a Princeton one (1) year and this is the third year in New Brunswick at the Rutgers

Libraries. I also wanted to thank our co-sponsors very much. You've been so supportive and one of the great advantages of having it at Middlesex County is that we have the Middlesex County Cultural & Heritage Commission and just to point out a few dignitaries: Isha Veyez who is the head of the Arts History Program Services at the Commission; and Eva Walter

00:01:00 is in charge of folklife at the Commission; and our Director Emeritus, Anash Gennus who was responsible for much of the history of that great organization. You'll be hearing a word or two (2) from Isha later on. So, welcome to the Rutgers Library. You've come during the two hundred fiftieth (250th) anniversary celebration just in time for the kickoff, which

00:01:30 is going to be this coming Tuesday with a ringing of the bell at Old Queen's. We have a great exhibition that we'd love you to see. It's almost up, so you could see the preliminaries today but please come back. We have a big public program on Thursday this coming Thursday the 12th at five thirty (5:30) p.m. We're going to kick off the exhibition and the anniversary celebration at that time. Again, we're very proud to host this at the Rutgers University Libraries. And

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I would like to now introduce you to our Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian, Krisellen Maloney. Krisellen comes to us from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Many, many years of experience in libraries and we're really excited about working with her and this is her first Book Arts Symposium. So, without further ado. KRISELLEN MALONEY: Well, I'm very honored to be here to

00:02:30 welcome you to this year -- the twenty-first (21st) New Jersey Book Arts Symposium and I should have probably coordinated my remarks a little better because mine are going to almost be a repeat of what Ron just said. But, I did want to acknowledge that the symposium was founded by Susan Salzberg and our own Michael Joseph in nineteen ninety-four (1994), and it is such a wonderful community that me

00:03:00 being up here is difficult to acknowledge all of the people that have been involved for all of the years, so I'm going to rely on others to do that. But I do want to say that it's very important for us to have it here. What I did before to prepare for this is I looked at a couple of the symposia that were available on RU Core -- the videos. Just so you know, this one (1) is going to be videotaped -- you probably know that - and it will also be on RU Core. RU Coreis

00:03:30 indexed by Google so you can just simply type "New Jersey Book Art Symposium" in and you'll see the video and it's really great. It was really helpful for me because I did learn some things as I went back and looked at the the videos that are there. The most importantI think is that the weather in New Jersey is very unpredictable in early November, so the video of last year's symposium shows a group of people in turtlenecks and winter coats and happy to finally see sun. I ntwo thousand twelve (2012)

00:04:00 the symposium was canceled. So, the Princeton symposium was actually I believe canceled due to Hurricane Sandy. So, today's balmy seventy-five (75) degrees is welcome to me coming here from Texas. I can tell you it's eased my transition quite a bit but it really does add to the unpredictability of the of the weather here. Another thing that stands out though is the amazing content. I looked at

00:04:30 last year's and I thought it was so spectacular, how could we how could we do this again. How could you do this again? I look at what's going on today and I'm just amazingly impressed by this group of people and what you've done together. So, I'm looking forward to this continuing over time. It's fostered such a vibrant book art community in this area. You know, this event and you coming together in this way one wouldn't expect to see New Jersey as

00:05:00 being such a -- sorry I don't want to say it that way, especially coming from Texas, so I don't mean to say it that way -- but it is such a vibrant community, such a rich community. You should all be very proud of what you've done here. In the interest of time I'm not going to acknowledge all the participants. I do want to take a moment to acknowledge the support of the Middlesex County Cultural & Heritage Commission because that's very important to us and in a few minutes Isha Veyez is also going to speak. So,

00:05:30 thank you all for coming. I hope you have a wonderful day. I know it started off great already.

Thank you to Michael Joseph and Ron. I hope you enjoy the day. Thank you. MODERATOR: So, the Middlesex County Cultural & Heritage Commission [is] certainly the largest and most active commission in the state. We support so much in terms of culture, arts and history in New Jersey and it's really been their dedicated staff

00:06:00 that has done it all and it's made it the premier one (1) and I think that's one (1) of the reasons why we're here today through that co-sponsorship. So, without further ado, here is Isha Veyez to greet us. ISHA VEYEZ: Good morning. On behalf of the Middlesex County Board of chosen Freeholders, I'm delighted to be here. Three (3) years ago when

00:06:30 we were approached to be a co-sponsor of this symposium Ann and I were absolutely delighted to co-sponsor it. But unfortunately, at that time, year one (1), I was traveling to India and Nepal and last year I was in Amsterdam and London and [I] could not make it. But this year since I had no exotic travel plans and I was going to be here I was so excited and determined to be here today. Of course, we are always very pleased to support this remarkable event – twenty-one (21)

00:07:00 years -- it's remarkable. Congratulations all of you. Book and arts are perfect together and we all know this is a rapidly evolving field and this symposium not only explores the contemporary interpretations of [the] book as art, but also preserves and documents the history and the tradition of book arts. For that we are very grateful. We congratulate Michael Joseph his team and all of you here who have made this symposium a

00:07:30 continued success for twenty-one (21) years. Of course, we at the Middlesex County Cultural

Heritage Commission want to be part of this success for many more years to come. Thank you and congratulations again. MODERATOR: So, Michael we're nice and early. Michael Joseph Rutgers University Library's Rare Book Librarian and the founder of the New Jersey Book

Art Symposium. MICHAEL JOSEPH: Hi. I

00:08:00 just love that Southern voice. Thank you, Kris and thank you Isha and Ron for making everybody feel welcome and thank you everybody for coming out on this beautiful autumn day. Everyone thinks November is kind of the coldest part of the year. There's a poem by Robert Grace in which he calls November the "rawest of seasons," but this part of November can be exquisite. I

00:08:30 heard on the radio this morning that this weekend is Peak Fall Foliage Viewing Weekend. Thank you very much for surrendering your peak fall foliage viewing to come here. Let me also thank Asha Ganpat -- who's outside cleaning up and working on the workshop -- for a fabulous workshop this morning. Asha is a trip. Asha you are at trip! In the

00:09:00 best sense of the word. I'm just going to talk about a couple of wrinkles in the program. Karen is going to come up and introduce the featured speakers, but before I do that I want to ask Lois Morrison to step up here and talk to you about a matter of some profound concern to everyone who does books -- everyone who is involved in making artist's books and involved in letter- press and in the history of the book. So, Lois if you would. LOIS MORRISON: I was startled, I 00:09:30 got a call from Julie Chen who has been teaching at Mills. She's was a student at Mills years ago.

She's been teaching at Mills since and was applying for her doctorate -- not her doctorate -- for her full professorship at Mills and all of a sudden with thirty (30) days notice they were told that they were considering closing

00:10:00 the program for Book Arts at Mills College. Mills College is the gold-standard of book arts teaching in this country. They are wonderful. It is a woman's college. I don't know how much writing will really help. When they thought about becoming a coeducational school, the write-in from every single alumna in the country kept them from going coed. So, they did not go coed due to a write- in.

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I'm hoping if we write in --there is a sheet out on the table, right on it. Tell them you don't like it. Tell them it was the gold-standard. Tell them we really don't think that they ought to do that. OK. Two (2) other small things. One (1) other thing. Down in the basement is a cafe called the

Scarlet [Latte]. On the walls, on the back walls is a For Sale section of books: fifty (50) cents for a

00:11:00 soft-back and a dollar for a hard-back. I just picked up an Anne Bradstreet book of poetry and a George Eliot book that I hadn't read before, all for nothing almost. Good luck people. I'm just telling you. MICHAEL JOSEPH: Thanks Lois. I also wanted to say in addition to thanking Isha and thanking Kris formally, if at some point during the day you feel moved or stirred or 00:11:30 you're having a good time I want you to go up to Isha or Kris and say, "Hey, I'm having a kick- ass, balls-up, great time. So, thanks man for making this possible. I dig it." Or you can say that to me too. I'd like to hear that too. It's nice to see new faces. It's amazing that new people come after twenty-one (21) years. To me it's not so amazing that friends beloved faces come, but seeing new people catching on to the book arts is an interesting and

00:12:00 exciting phenomenon. I want to talk about a couple of new wrinkles to the program because we haven't done the same thing for twenty-one (21) years. We evolved like Hillary Clinton's position on so many wonderful and important issues. By the way, I am a Hillary Clinton supporter, let me just out myself since I've just dished her. There are two (2) corrections to the program. Lynn

00:12:30 Bushman -- you'll notice in second line of the Who's Who -- is now a faculty member at the New School. She's not a lecturer at the New School, she's now a faculty member. It is big news. On the eighth line of the Who's Who, Elizabeth Mackey is no longer affiliated with the art museum, but she's still a full -time faculty member.

00:13:00 Two (2) new things which I think you'll like. One (1), you see the evidence out on the table in front of you. We're going to insert something that we've tentatively called the Curators Cornucopia. We've invited Diane Windham Shaw to talk about the books in her collection at Lafayette College. We've known about Diane forever and been a big admirer of

Diane's and we've tried to think what would be the best way of collaborating with her. We

00:13:30 think this is it. We'd like to reinsert the curatorial perspective into our proceedings. So, we'll hear from artists, we'll hear from writers, and we'll hear from a curator also. We'd like to make this a continuing piece -- a continuing module -- of our symposium and find other ways of collaborating with Diane. So, I'm going to introduce Diane shortly. Save your applause, but thank you Diane. We're also launching a new piece -- I don't

00:14:00 really think we have a name for it yet -- but we want to do readings from artist's books and readings from books. Of course, we all know text is not essential to artist's books, but text is essential to books that artists make sometimes. They are two (2) different things: books that artists make and artist's books. Artist's books are about something. Books that artists make are not about anything. The texts are about something and they may be beautifully

00:14:30 rendered texts, but artists books have intentionality. They are about something. Well the texts that are going to be read from at the lunchtime reading are beautiful texts by writers who are also legitimate writers -- in fact two (2) of my favorite writers, Sarah Case Dangle and Barbara Henry -- while they're reading from their books, they're going to be showing images of the artifact. So, we're going to be looking at artifact from the perspective of the text. I think

00:15:00 this will be interesting and fun. Last year, if you were here you'll remember the fabulous poet Rachel Haddus gave a reading and her husband, Shalom Gorowitz, showed videos that he had made incorporating Rachel's reading into them. They reoriented us in an interesting way and I want this part of the program to sort extend that kind of vibe. That will be the second part of our two (2) hour lunch

00:15:30 break, which is a long lunch break. Not necessarily too long, but amply long. Some other pieces of the program not new, but worth mentioning: at the end of the day after the final featured artist, Judith K. Brodsky, our dear friend, our colleague for so many

00:16:00 worthwhile, good years, our partner in crime, is going to reflect on the presentations and we will introduce you to -- of course we might say Judith K. Brodsky, needs no introduction and therefore doesn't get one (1), but we will give her one (1). But she is of course a great artist.

One (1) of the first artists, one of the first ladies, one of the first people in the New Jersey art scene and the founder of the magnificent Brodsky 00:16:30 Center for Innovative Editions. One (1) other thing before I introduce Diane which I know you want to know about. Especially new guys. All the activities of the day take place in this area. We don't go out. We are inside. So, that means after the morning for lunch

00:17:00 you go right out here where you do the workshop and where you had coffee and Danish this morning and there'll be tables set up for lunch. The lunch will be buffet style so you can grab sandwiches. We have a lot of vegetarian sandwiches as well as carniveran sandwiches. Bestial, brutish sandwiches and fruits and salads and dainty foods for dainty eaters. Then we come back inside and

00:17:30 our black ops team sweeps away the tables and they become clear for the Book Arts Jam. So that means when Judy is done reflecting upon our day and we've had a discourse because everyone gets to talk about it -- we constantly talk in the libraries -- we gossip, but we constantly talk and question authority. This is a sidebar comment. About

00:18:00 a few years ago, we had a publicity committee in the library. We needed a publicity committee and they launched a competition and the competition was to come up with a catchy slogan that would promote the libraries to the rest of the university. Somebody on the publicity committee came up with a catchy slogan. Who saw that coming? The slogan was, "The library. 00:18:30 The place to go when you need to know." I thought that's exactly wrong. Exactly. Wrong. It should be -- if we need a catchy slogan -- "The library, the place to go when you want to question what you think you know." After

00:19:00 we're done talking about the artist's work, talking about Judy's summary, misunderstanding each other a little bit, then we have a Book Arts Jam, which means all of you guys who brought pieces of work that you've done over the year can set them out on the tables and show them to each other, sell them, swap them. Have a sort of pop-up exhibition and that will last as long as

00:19:30 you do. We will have some cocktails with that. Last year we had champagne and cake because it's our twentieth (20th) anniversary. This is only twenty-one (21) so we're just going to have little Prosecco. Now, it's my privilege to introduce my friend, my colleague from Lafayette College Diane Windham Shaw. Diane Windham Shaw directs Special Collections and College Archives at Lafayette College. She got her B.L.S. and her

00:20:00 master's degree from Emory University, where she spent five (5) years as an archivist. She came to Lafayette in nineteen eighty-five (1985) and for about half that time she has been vigorously and magnificently collecting artist's books. Now there's another part of Diane that you probably don't know and that is, she does curatorial work with the Marquis de Lafayette Collection at

Lafayette and 00:20:30 The Ministry of Culture and Communication has honored that work by my making Diane one (1) of the Order of Arts and Letters. I'm sorry, a Chevalier. If you're curious about that collection, Diane will be exhibiting it at the Grolier Club in two thousand sixteen (2016). So,

00:21:00 now, it's my pleasure to introduce the Chevalier Diane Windham Shaw. DIANE WINDHAM SHAW: Well thank you so much Michael. I thought that you might have fun with that Chevalier thing. I have to say that I can't believe this is my very first

00:21:30 New Jersey Book Arts Symposium and it certainly won't be my last, but it's actually the first time that Michael and I have been able to meet after knowing about one another for all these years. So, I really want to thank him for the invitation. I also want to thank my dear friend,

Karen Grachionne with whom it has been so great to reconnect this year and to actually fill in the gaps in our collection of your fabulous fabulous work. I'd

00:22:00 also like to bring greetings to my colleague Ron Becker who, you heard from earlier. I've known

Ron for so many years now and I admire him tremendously. He's one (1) of the best folks in the special collections biz today. I also would like to thank my colleague, Pam Murray, who's here with me today, who not only catalogues all of our artist's books, but she is also my valued partner in our acquisitions and exhibitions 00:22:30 efforts. She makes these already wonderful tasks even more rewarding. Finally, thanks to all of you. Many of you I know already and the rest of you I look forward to meeting during the course of the day so please do introduce yourselves. I'd like to talk briefly first about our artist book program at Lafayette; how it got started, what we collect, and what we do with the books after we get them. I usually date the

00:23:00 beginnings of our collection to the year two thousand (2000) when we asked Lafayette Professor, Curlee Holton, who runs Lafayette's Experimental Printmaking Institute on campus, to curate an artist book show for us. It ended up being a very international show because

Curlee had great ties to a number of Mexican book artists and their work was included. We ended up purchasing a number of pieces from the show. One (1) of them is on the

00:23:30 table by Lois Morrison in fact. Our connection with the EPI was one (1) of the important catalysts in the development of our program. As an African-American artist himself, Curlee's EPI was a gathering place for some of the greatest Black artists working today. Many came to the EPI to make prints and often experimented with making books as well. The wonderful synergy with this program enabled us to meet artists,

00:24:00 to share artists, and to recommend artists that we thought would benefit from an EPI residency and we became the repository for books made there. We also, about that time, began attending the Oak Knolll Book Fair and then I also took a rare book school course from Johanna Drucker on developing strategies for collecting artists books. We began to receive regular visits from specialty booksellers like Vamp and Tramp and from book artist cooperatives such as

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Booklyn. Then of course building the relationships with individual book artists has also brought us great joy and wonderful books. None of this would've been possible though without some serious resources at our disposal to launch a truly new collecting area and to build it rapidly and substantially. Credit here is due to our Dean of Libraries, Neil McElroy, who treated Special Collections like an academic department allocating

00:25:00 to us the kind of funding accorded to our largest departments such as English and Art. We also had funding to invest in appropriate housing for our artist books, you know these things are hard to house. Phaze boxes and other protective enclosures we have been purchasing regularly. One (1) of the things I like best about artist books is the variety of benefits they bring to Special Collections. Their potential for exhibition and curricular enhancement is

00:25:30 virtually unlimited. We have probably been more successful with the former, but we are working very hard on the latter. We have an ambitious exhibitions program at Lafayette. We do four (4) major shows a year and three (3) or four (4) smaller ones. We have brought along examples of our exhibition postcards for many of these shows; actually, Pam and I had a great time pulling out all of these old postcards and remembering these shows, and you all are welcome to gather anything that you want from the end

00:26:00 of the table over there. But I will mention a few a few of these. We hosted a couple of important traveling shows, one (1) from the Guild of Book Workers and another from the

Center for Book Arts. We curated the twenty-fifth (25th) Anniversary Exhibit exhibition for Carolee Campbell's Ninja Press. We hosted a group exhibition from Maureen Cummins, Nava Atlas and Ann Lovett, as well as a solo show of the work of Lois Morrison. Just last

00:26:30 Spring we had the honor of putting together an exhibit called Crossing the Delaware, which featured the work of four (4) New Jersey book artists, MaryAnn Miller, Liz Mitchell, Maria Pisano, and Maryann Riker who is presenting later today. Next year we are collaborating with Bucknell University on an exhibition of the dramatic artist books and book objects of Warner

Peffer(sp). A small catalog keepsake will be issued in conjunction with the exhibits. Bucknell's is in the Spring of two thousand sixteen (2016)

00:27:00 and ours is in the Fall. A few years ago, we purchased a group of freestanding, plexiglass vitrines especially for showcasing artist books and put them in a high traffic area of the library. They have enabled us to do some smaller shows of approximately ten (10) to fifteen (15) books that can respond to an anniversary or support other programming on campus. Pam usually curates these shows and they are terrific. In the last few years we have shown Cuban

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Artist’s books, remembering 9/11, alphabet books, African-themed artist’s books, Al- Moutanabi, book arts and the environment, envisioning Moby Dick, quilt-themed artist’s books, artist books of the Americas, and currently we have on view Alice 150: Commemorating the hundred and fiftieth (150th) Anniversary of the Publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in Artist’s Books. The thematic areas that we have delineated for

00:28:00 our artist book collecting initiatives have helped position us to take the books into the classroom. We have staked out the following collecting areas: environmental themes, international works, literary themes, photography, sculptural books, race relations, social and political commentary, women and gender, and if that weren't enough, we had to add serendipity -- a category that would allow us to acquire anything that knocks our

00:28:30 socks off no matter what. So, we have successfully used artist’s books in English, American Studies, art and photography classes, as well as in a number of our first-year seminars. Last week we had a wonderful session for a religious studies class on sex, gender and religion and the professor is now planning to incorporate artist's books into her class on the Holocaust later this Spring where we'll be able to use books from Carol Rosen's powerful Holocaust series. Now

00:29:00 for the fun. I'd like to turn to the pieces that I brought with me to share with you and of course this makes me want to say, "so many books so little time," but that's my apology for not being able to show you all of the books that we truly admire and adore. It was very hard to choose so I decided on a couple of books that were particularly significant to me at the beginning of our collecting initiatives

00:29:30 and another group that's particularly effective in the classroom, and then a couple of others that I think are just spectacular. I'm going to segue over here. So, first up is Carolee Campbell's

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The Real World of Manuel Cordoba. The poem is by W. S. Merwin. This is of course [a] Ninja Press publication date nineteen ninety-five (1995) and the story on this one (1) is that I was wandering through the aisles at Oak Knoll Book Fest and I came upon Carolee, whom I had never met, and she asked me if I --I began looking at this this book and she asked me if I -- would like to actually see this fully extended. Of 00:30:30 course I said yes yes yes, and she and I together unfolded this volume. I think it expands maybe eighteen (18) feet. It reproduces the Merwin poem. Down the side is a river bed or a river t rack

00:31:00 that is supposed to be the Amazon. In reality it's the Colorado River which Carolee rafted and knows very, very well as a stand in for the Amazon. I was immediately smitten and then when I was told that the paper was persimmon-washed Japanese paper that just sent me over the edge. I later learned that persimmon wash, that persimmon actually helps waterproof paper and keeps insects as bey. So, this

00:31:30 is particularly appropriate for a work about the Amazon. Anyway, we had to have it and that began for us a standing order with Carolee for all of her works. I should show you the case because she has this wonderful early map reproduced and it all wraps

00:32:00 up together and is pure perfection and as most of her works are. So the

00:32:30 second book I'd like to talk about is a book by Amos Kennedy, Jr. called Mask and the story about this book is that I was in Johanna Drucker's class at the University of Virginia for the Rare Book School Week and 00:33:00 Bill Stewart, who many of you know of Vamp and Tramp was actually in the class. He was taking it a second time. I'm not sure if he didn't pass the first time. Anyway, Bill had a suitcase of books to sell at Virginia and Johanna gave him permission to show them to the class. After he pulled out everything -- well actually I spotted this right away -- and knew that I really loved this book.

I

00:33:30 was afraid that somebody would jump for it and that I would not get it. I was unnecessarily nervous. At the end of class, we had to go around the room and everybody had to say which books they liked and why. Finally, when they got to me, I said I love this Amos Kennedy book and I'll buy it right now. At which I did and brought it home and it's just a magnificent book

00:34:00 that I later wrote about in our library newsletter and called it "a feast for four (4) of the five (5) senses." It is this beautiful over-printing, you can hear the paper and listen to it. You can hear it. It has a very pungent smell. We've not let anyone taste it, but I'm sure it could be a book for all five (5) senses. But I have long adored this one (1). So those

00:34:30 are two (2) formative books for me. The next three (3) books I'd like to talk about are books that we have used effectively in the classroom and they have sort of a common characteristic; these are books that upon first look appear lovely, innocent and some in some cases perhaps even frivolous, but they are anything 00:35:00 but. That makes them wonderful to teach with. Students and faculty really respond to them.

The first one (1) I'd like to talk about is this work by Maureen Cummins, Crazy Quilt, some of you will know it. I've only got three (3). It actually opens into nine (9) squares, but of course it's beautiful, colorful, the silk screen printing evokes the embroidery that's

00:35:30 often seen on these crazy quilts that many families have. But it's what's written on the squares that is so devastating. You look at it [and] you think it's a beautiful, beautiful quilt, but instead -- let me just refer you to what I said here -- "Each square contains shocking statements from mental patients." This this particular crazy quilt commemorates the experiences of nineteenth

(19th)

00:36:00 and twentieth (20th) century women institutionalized for insanity. Cummins chose the quilt motif, she says as quote, "A reference to the fact that women in the Victorian asylums were forced to sew. While the crazy quilt style with its use of useless and unwanted scraps of fabric is a commentary on the position of marginalized populations in our society." So, it's powerful statement. The printing is on both sides. It falls

00:36:30 out quite dramatically. The second book in this category is the beautiful botanical here by Lois Morrison. This actually was in our very first show and I think we probably got one (1) of the last copies that we purchased on first look. These are beautiful flowers. It looks like a botanical accordion fold. You 00:37:00 see that the flowers have botanical names, things like stratria puer(sp) puella Braziliana(sp), puella Chinininsas(sp), Africana-Americana puer adolescence(sp). Then you notice there are figures of children on the flower petals and strange words written inside the stamens and the pistils like guns, drugs and knives. Suddenly it dawns on you that the

00:37:30 endangered species are the world's children. The street boys and girls of Brazil, Chinese girls,

African-American adolescent boys and others and they are endangered by the things written on the reproductive portions of the flowers. A very powerful volume indeed. The final book in this category and perhaps

00:38:00 I think one of the most successful artist's books is this trio of books from Victoria Bean at Circle

Press entitled, Cake, Dirt and T-Bone. How many of you know this piece? Not many, right? OK. I'm glad. I'm going to read to you from Cake. I'll read

00:38:30 you one (1) page, one (1) entry from cake. "Twelve (12) pieces of fried chicken, mashed potatoes with gravy, fourteen (14) jalapenos, orange juice, chocolate cake." That's one (1) page.

Now from Dirt, "One (1)

00:39:00 flour tortilla and a glass of water." And from T-bone, "T-bone steak, French fries, refried beans, salad, jalapeno peppers, chocolate cake, ice tea." You do notice that on the back of the pages there

00:39:30 are black bars that sort of cancel out the type on the other side of the page. Does anybody have any idea what I might have been reading? Anybody want to venture? That's exactly right. These are last meal requests, which when you learn that, it is absolutely devastating information after you've looked at these books and laughed at the menu. Cool Whip and cherries as one (1) and students always giggle

00:40:00 about that one and then when you find out that these are last meal requests, it is so impressive that in this simple and devastating way Victoria Bean has given us commentary about who is on Death Row and how they spent their final day. It is one (1) of the most powerful artist's books that I've ever seen. Now finally, the last two (2) are here just so you can appreciate how very good they are.

00:40:30

This colorful piece right here is a letter press work by D.R. Wakefield, a British artist who was actually a master printer for Leonard Baskin and helped print some of the most sumptuous products from the Gehenna Press. This book is entitled, Resistance is Useless:

Portraits 00:41:00 of Slaves from the British West Indies and was published in England in two thousand four

(2004). What Wakefield has done is, with his spectacular etchings, he has imagined the faces of slaves who revolted or who otherwise protested against their fate. He has imagined their faces. He has given them nameplates, because so many

00:41:30 were nameless and he has set in type their stories in sort of the form of an eighteenth (18th) or nineteenth (19th) century broadside. It's another powerful and brilliantly realized volume. Then finally this wonderful piece here is by Sun Young Kang. Some of you may know her. She was a graduate of

00:42:00 the University of the Arts in Philadelphia about two thousand seven (2007). She is a remarkable artist and this particular work I think is just a tour-de-force. There are five (5) of these volumes and in each there are one hundred eight (108) small boxes with the character meaning "way" or "path" burned

00:42:30 into the cover of each little box by incense. It's the same character, but she has taken the design of the character from stamp designers and calligrapher. So, they're all different visually. The amount of time and the unbelievable care that she has taken with this piece and again I'm only showing two (2), there are five (5). In the addition [there] were ten (10). 00:43:00 This book won three (3) Purchase Prize Awards at the Hybrid Book Festival in two thousand nine (2009) and we were also a purchaser of it. So are only ten (10) of these and we are thrilled to be the owners of one (1). It's a masterpiece. So that is actually my little romp through some of my favorite artist's books. I really am honored to be the first curator to talk and I hope that you keep this up. I think it's a great venue for us to show

00:43:30 our stuff. Thank you. Thank you so much. KAREN MCDERMOTT: Thank

00:44:00 you Diane. That was beautiful. If anyone's ever gone to Lafayette and gone into those collections -- I had the pleasure of doing it for several days once -- it's just heaven. So many beautiful books and I am so glad that you were able to do this. I hope you do it many more times. We actually want to remember also Bill Dane who was our Librarian from the Newark library

00:44:30 and he used to talk about the books and that he had in his collection and it's so beautiful to now have a new curator who's happy to you know show with such enthusiasm these beautiful pieces of art. [It] makes me think about how we really are like the giant book arts family -- there's so many people that are here today and so many people that are in her collection and in other collections that it really is 00:45:00 a unifying group. I'm also really happy to see lots of new faces too. So, it's a kind of a reunion in a way and it's also a new gathering for lots of people. We were talking outside and I suddenly realized, wow, we've made it to twenty-one (21) years. So, we are now officially adults. I guess we could legally drink too. It's my

00:45:30 real pleasure to introduce the artists that are going to be speaking this morning and I think we usually have questions at the end. Hopefully we will have time because each artist is going to show their work. Our first artist, you may have noticed this beautiful piece and there are some other beautiful 3-D pieces that are outside. We have small cases this year so some of them are so statuesque and beautiful, but

00:46:00 they're going to be just displayed for the day in that room. Lynn Bushman is the creator of these beautiful pieces. She is also a colleague of mine. We both teach at Montclair State and I know you've come to many symposiums and I'm really happy that you're finally here to show your work to everyone. She was born and raised in New York City. She has her undergraduate degree from Cornell

00:46:30 and she did sculpture for eight (8) years before segueing into book arts and she was also an illustrator for twenty-four (24) years. She teaches at Parson's and Montclair State and she now lives in Montclair. So, Lynn, tell us all about these beautiful books. LYNN BUSHMAN: I've 00:47:00 always had a problem finding myself and to find the "play" button. First

00:47:30

I want to say how flattered I am to be invited. I just want to point out because it's on a Friday I don't always get to come to the symposium. I'm overjoyed to have been invited so I could cancel my classes today. I

00:48:00 just want to make one other call-out as per Kris Maloney's comment about fostering a book arts community. I have to acknowledge, I'm sure most of you know about the Book Arts Roundtable started, I assume by Karen. Karen McDermott's baby and we've been doing this for sixteen (16) years and it has been a wonderful community. As you can imagine, a book arts community, you can sometimes get pretty

00:48:30 isolated. There's not a great venue of conferences for book artist and stuff so it's been a really great and inspirational group. So, to jump right in. I started as an illustrator. I graduated from Cornell with a BFA and as a teacher -- this has become a theme for me -- in four (4) years nobody mentioned making a living. So

00:49:00 there is this expensive degree to become a waitress. I scrambled and was able to study at the

School of Visual Arts with Jim McMullen who is a genius and I was able to be an illustrator for quite a few years. I'm only showing one (1), my favorite, that ended up being rejected by Alice McDermott, but it's still my favorite. I still make images now and then for projects, but

00:49:30 when I did depart from making illustrations I was folding laundry one (1) night at twelve thirty (12:30) watching TV and Robert Bly was presenting Coleman Barks, who was reading some Rumi poems. He said, Let the beauty you love be what you do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground." Probably

00:50:00 you have all experienced this, there are times when you can just hear something and I was floored that I was forty-one (41) years old and I still wasn't doing what I loved and it seemed like not the right thing to do. So, I finished my last series of illustrations and I conveniently had been collecting a lot of junk and I didn't really know why until

00:50:30 this. It was so synchronistic that everything just pulled together and I started making sculpture.

They tended to fall in the visually, sort of, as figures as you see. There are lots. I did lots of them and aside from having my children, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. For seven (7) years I 00:51:00 woke up every morning opened my eyes and said, "Oh goody, I get to work," and my family would go on vacations and I would stay home and work not have to cook dinner or talk to anybody. For seven (7) years if anybody had asked me who my favorite artist was I could have said me and as artists, you know that does not happen too often. This is one called Durga of

New Jersey.

00:51:30

Marital life is not a lot of walls. A lot of these are old enough that I have no idea what the titles are and I've lost a hard drive since then so, whatever. But in this, a lot of the components started to be movable. Those arms reach out and bend and things started to happen, kinetic things started to happen.

00:52:00

It was only through making this PowerPoint [presentation] that I noticed the progression. This is an interesting sidebar about the process of making art, the state that you're in when you're making it is significant. You don't necessarily want to completely reveal what it is you were going through. So, my family had made some comments on

00:52:30 my parenting techniques and so while I was doing it I thought I was calling it The Mother They Think I Am, but at the last minute realized it was too revealing so I called it Mother of the Year. The head is like a twenty-five (25) year old dried up, desiccated fish head. Remember when we bought that Elizabeth? One (1) of those things you just had to have and I would say that I 00:53:00 probably have seventy-five (75) to eighty (80) pieces sculpture that I did over those years.

One (1) day I came home from teaching and the shelving that I had in my studio where they were all stored had fallen -- pulled out of the wall -- and there were only about eight (8) left. So, it became clear that I was at a crossroads again. But by doing this I noticed how even more book-like aspects were entering

00:53:30 my work. So, here with the doors like a book cover and it was a lot about the reveal. How when you open a book and it reveals all its layers. Even in a piece like this, that you spin, it was like chapters. It all was feeling to me very book-like and again separate compartments, this was like a series of stories a bout

00:54:00 being. As a mother for years with children at home, the subject matter tended to be a lot about home and house, domestic issues that got a little boring after a while. Then suddenly it just jumped right into books and here was a sculpture that I made that had a book and I had a little motor in it so when it was shown, the pages of the book kept rotating

00:54:30 in that center section there. I think it was that book arts, the first one (1) about sixteen (16) years ago was it that long ago? Oh my God are we getting old. I went and I'd always made books, not very well, and I learned a lot about the actual mechanics and adhesives. What a great thing 00:55:00 to learn about and then I just jumped. I was invited to be in a show in New York with my sculptures and invited to be a part of the gallery and suddenly, having reached that goal, I felt finished. It also didn't seem like enough anymore -- the single statement of a sculpture even with the reveals in the movement -- and I had to make it more complex and books answered all those demands that I had. It has to work as a whole. It

00:55:30 has to work. Each page has to work as two (2) individual pieces. It has to work as a spread. It has to work kinetically. Kinetically the pages have to move nicely. It has to open all the way. You don't want your spine cracking. There was all this technical stuff and things. It was just so much more complex and my output got much slower because we there was so much involved. Here's one (1),

00:56:00 I did a series called Arboreal Borealis and the idea of combining and binding elements, big fat elements that didn't necessarily belong in books, was a nice challenge. Lots of windows and different surfaces. Here's another one (1). Arboreal Borealis II and I did

00:56:30 a lot of layering. So here on the left you see the twisted vine and on the right, those little things from a pine cone, but it was very satisfying when you looked through the book and they made these combined images. Here's one (1) where I used a page about lichens from an encyclopedia and then embedded some lichen. Then I took a workshop with Susan Elizabeth King and 00:57:00 it was about developing ideas for artist's books. It was a week long and I packed my car so full I couldn't see out of the rearview mirror -- everything you could ever need to make books. When I got there, it was a writing workshop. But life-altering in terms of making art too and for at that age to not to have known a bout

00:57:30 how important the writing process was of clarifying your goals. I mean, I don't know about you, but actually this is how I think. But when I write it becomes linear and she talked a lot about how to get rid of your self-editor, don't think about your handwriting and she emphasized get a twenty-nine (29) cent, spiral bound book, because of course we get attached to our materials as book artists, so that you don't get attached to the artifact and

00:58:00 process. So, it's that writing morning pages thing and it completely changed my work. It one (1) of the things that stopped me doing was going right to emphasize the importance of making prototypes. So many times, I would get an idea and I'd go right to the finish and it wasn't done. You would have spent all this time and it is that, "I wish I'd made a prototype." So,

00:58:30

I could have fixed these flow issues or transparency issues. With this one (1), one (1) of the things she talked about was the layering, part of why we make books is so that you have these layers -- you can have these multiple stories going on -- and one (1) of the things that has always interested me and sort of calmed me down -- which I was distressed to see was also a theme in the arts made by psychotic people -- that is the way of measuring 00:59:00 and cataloguing and mapping how it makes me feel comfortable. So, this was a whole book about measuring devices, ways of controlling data. But then I realized, and I called it Sources of Solace. It isn't the source of solace. Another major source of solace is birdsong for me and so then I added, if you can see these little encaustic birds within-- you

00:59:30 need a bird in your table of elements or else it just doesn't work. So, abacuses and things like that. This was another one (1), I should have put this one (1) first, this was the same sort of theme but the structure was so fun. Again measuring, charting, but that one (1) I only had the one (1) layer about the measuring without the other more esoteric, calming

01:00:00 element. Here's one (1) [where] we did a workshop at the Book Arts Roundtable where we made books in mica and then I have a letter press at home. I have a ten (10) by eighteen (18) C & P and I letter-pressed on to the mica, which was surprisingly satisfying, not one (1) piece cracked. This lung image there

01:00:30

I letter-pressed on -- I had plates made and letter-pressed on -- and what I'll do with those plates again I don't know but, it was very fun. I teach a lot of book making and it is one (1) of the most satisfying aspects for me about making books is teaching it and how I feel like a crack dealer. I have people come up to me fifteen (15) years later and say, "Oh I've 01:01:00 made ten (10) books since then." Or parents come up to me and say we have that book still on our mantle. It becomes a way, and for educators, what a great way to tie together when I would teach drawing, I would try to teach the entire semester or two (2) in the same format. Everything would be eleven (11) by seventeen (17). So, at the end of the semester they'd make their own papers and we'd make a giant coptic book out of all. I would say, well

01:01:30 my son was one (1) of the people who is an astrophysicist at UC Berkeley, when he applied to physics programs he always went with his interviews with his giant artist's books just so that they knew that he was multiple-dimensioned. I'm sure it's why he got in. So, this is a book of collagraphs, very, very simple. A great thing to do with young people. This

01:02:00 is sort of the beginning of where I am now where I haven't had the confidence in my own image-making and art-making and I noticed that I make a lot of paintings and then I bind them. Then I close the book a then a lot of times I don't do anything with them. So, I'm at a crossroads -- I'll talk more about that later --but this was basically nine (9) paintings. I

01:02:30 make a book every year on my birthday as a way of looking back. Making art, making books is my way as a non-word person of processing my world and my life and our world. So, every year -- so seven (7) cycles of seven (7) it must have been my forty-ninth (49th) birthday a long time ago and here are two (2) pages from that, these are encaustic paintings, it was a great 01:03:00 realization to find out if you have a heavy Damar varnish, I mean encaustic resin topcoat. You can stack these books and press them together and the pages don't stick, which was nice [because] if you just use beeswax it is not the case. Here's a very ugly book. I always know what I want to say before I begin.

01:03:30 I have something I want to communicate and then I do it and I was lying in bed one (1) day after school recovering from a day of hearing my own voice for six (6) and a half hours. Flipping through an Art in America and there was this huge article about an artist and her work was so ugly and she was all over the place. She was on the cover of Art in America, ArtNews, these giant shows, and she said -- basically in this

01:04:00 long article -- that she had no idea what she was doing. She just did stuff and if it worked it was OK. So, I don't have to think so much and I just went downstairs and I cut out these paste pieces of paper and I hung them from the ceiling and started attaching them and it was the first book that I did that I just said, "Fuck it." So, I'm just going to do whatever I want and it was an interesting piece. I went to show it to a friend and she put it on her head and

01:04:30 she said, "You can wear it like this and you can wear it like that." I called it This to That. The next year I made another door and the book continued onto the floor and it was all letter- pressed and it said, Not This, Not That. But that one (1) is finally done. Again, more processing of my life, this is sort of a timeline. I had a dream and processed it this way. It has thirteen (13) little books that open and they correspond to

01:05:00 the year that reflects the age that I was at. You can see on the top there's one (1) little page that turns and things drop open and there are little mica windows. I guess it's not unusual I don't write poetry -- I do, but I would never show it to anyone --but there are some beautiful poems that have inspired me and Objects and Apparitions by Octavio Paz, I have done five (5) books

01:05:30 of that poem. It resonated. Here was one (1) of the first ones using old book covers as departure points. At one (1) of the talks at the Dana Library they talked about the kind of books that I mostly make as book objects. They couldn't be included in collections because they're one-offs and they're more sculpture, but this was my first book

01:06:00 edition. It was an edition of forty-six (46) and I did letter-press, collage, digital collage and some handwork and it was very satisfying. I took photographs of my studio because the poem is very much about collecting objects and imbuing them with meaning. I went to India for a month a couple of times and 01:06:30 here you come back with this drive with eighteen hundred (1,800) photographs and what the hell do you do with all those things. So, Karen taught us a great structure and I made thirteen (13) little books and put it in a box. It is a mess, it's been in so many shows and I insist on all my books being able to be handled because that's what books are for. They're not white pages so you don't have to be careful and four (4) people over the years have told me because of those books they have gone to India. That

01:07:00 is a satisfying response. Oh, this is the one (1) I forgot to bring. We are at a phase in our lives, my husband and I, where we're doing a lot of wills and [things] about health directives and money and our families and I began to think about what about the ethical -- you know I want to hand down some money to my kids and my jewelry -- but what about

01:07:30 the things that really mean something to me, the words I live by. So, this is a series of just statements that my kids are probably sick of hearing like, "Do the work," and "Give from your abundance," and "You have to say the words." So, I made these. Cards and that's what this is. Doctrina in Latin means lessons and for some reason over the years my children have

01:08:00 started calling me -- way before this -- they call me Trina. So that was an interesting connection. This is how it's been hung in shows. Another recurring theme in my work is I use the body as a departure point. So Corporeal Non-Duality, this is a bunch of meditations about the 01:08:30 nature of non-duality. Each of these little panels open up and there are different meditations about the nature of non-duality. A very similar concept, the top and bottom lifts off of these so you can fold it up into a book. This is one (1) of the few books that I did write the words to. It's called Eve's Choice and it's when Eve chose to eat the apple and it's a bunch of stencils printed

01:09:00 and it says things like, "When she ate the apple, site became vision. Guts became courage. The road became a path." Things like that. I have made a number of editions. I give that to young women I know when they're going to college. Here's another one (1) of those birthday ruminations. This is my, as I said,

01:09:30 my son is a physicist and he talked about the idea [of] broken symmetry and how something seems completely balanced and symmetrical all you have to do is think in one (1) direction and symmetry is broken. As the pages turn in this book the book ticks. So, it's about making a decision. How every time you think -- we were trying to decide where to move to, s o

01:10:00 every time we thought about one (1) thing, it would tip in that direction and then it would go back. I think it's about ninety-six (96) pages and each of the four (4) books have the same recurring themes because what I realized in the process of making it is that anything we do is the same, just different. So, I have the same themes four (4) times handled differently so there's matters of the heart, there is 01:10:30 matters of the mind, there's about directions to take. More about directions. This was the one (1) about what do I want to go back to an urban environment. There's stuff about physical health, alignment and energies, about what kind of house we were going to live in. So, they were all repeated, stuff about aging. stuff about nature.

01:11:00 That's that. One (1) I just finished which is in the faculty show at Montclair State is called The

Month of Days. I'm sort of at a loss so [I] thought about creating art within the journalistic way of thinking a I made one (1) -- it says The Month of Days, but it's really three (3) months of every three (3) days. Things that came into my mind. I

01:11:30 made up about six (6) stencils and reuse them for all of these. Here's the last one (1) it's called

Growth for a Wholesome Personality. I found this fantastic report card from a school from nineteen forty-five (1945) and the language was

01:12:00 so beautiful. I used them as a departure point, like "showing courtesy and consideration to others." I took a workshop with Jane Davies and it's about -- this is sort of where I've been playing of layering acrylics and blotting and what you said about the masks book -- these pages have such a weight to them, they're about between five (5) and thirty (30) layers of paint that

01:12:30 I've sanded and collaged and it's the actual tactile experience gets to be really great. Here's one (1), Understands the Meaning of Numbers. I'm going to cut this page out and give it to my son. Here's a page from another book and thank you very much. KAREN MCDERMOTT: I

01:13:00 hope that we find a good place to have this so everybody can see it all day long. Thanks and our next artist, Peter Jacobs, is also from Montclair and he's worked in a lot of different mediums -- collage, photography, mixed media, for over thirty (30) years. He's

01:13:30 in many collections, he has exhibited nationally and abroad. He's had five (5) museum exhibitions and he was the recipient of the top Individual Fellowship Award from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts in nineteen ninety-one (1991). He was a featured artist on PBS

State of the Arts program -- and I think this has really been getting a lot of notoriety --his project that I'm sure he's going to tell us about. He has

01:14:00 been working for the past ten (10) and a half years on the Collage Journal and it's an ongoing project. I was looking I was looking at The New York Times article, I believe it was, talking about how every single day, without fail, he would wake up and make these collages from the pages of The New York Times. So, let's hear all about it. PETER JACOBS: Good morning

01:14:30 and thank you for having me and thank you for coming. Ten (10) and

01:15:00 a half years ago I was sitting at the kitchen table with my wife Elizabeth and she turned to me and she suggested why don't we do a daily art practice. I took some pause there. I thought about it and you know, I thought you know, I had my twenty (20) years under my belt making collages so it's a very natural, visual language for me and holding

01:15:30 the newspaper and saying, maybe because of my disenchantment with just the world politics the climate changes, that just the general disarray and chaos in the. historic times -- and we're living in historic times -- that I'd have a dialogue with the newspaper and I would kind of work from it, cut it, and redesign it to my intentions. In the first couple of years what I would do is I would pretty much have a social commentary running with it. This is a typical

01:16:00 table. Every morning I would get up --I haven't missed a day in ten (10) and a half years -- and the table the kitchen table would look like that. All I'd have is my coffee and I'd shred the paper for two (2) hours. I did that this morning as well. My tools are basically just the Xacto, the glue stick and the cutting mat that I wear out till I have to keep replacing that. I've probably gone through hundreds of cutting mats, hundreds of Xacto blades. T he

01:16:30 books themselves, they're in twelve (12) page Strathmore books and so there's at least three hundred (300) volumes of the Collage Journal that are there. Here's an example of the book and then a final piece that was done. If I'm traveling, I what I'll do is I'll go get a local newspaper and I'll have a traveling bag that I bring. My studio is basically this and in it I have everything I

01:17:00 need. So, I'll pull that out. What I found is the act of doing this -- the first couple of years -- it maybe takes you know people say three (3) weeks and you have a habit. I think it takes about three (3) months to get it in your blood to do something every day and it builds on itself. There's an evolution I think of the strength of what you see how you see and how you create it.

This is an example of how I store them. The books are obviously piled there. The

01:17:30 black linen cases are after I do thirty (30), forty (40) of them. They get put into the cases and then dated. So, I have quite a few cases as well. I'm running out of room to store these. What I wanted to do was get this video thing happening here. What I have is a little time lapse kind of showing the process. I don't

01:18:00 have a predetermined end result when I sit down with the work or with the paper. I kind of work through it and it's kind of like cooking without a recipe. I generate ideas based on what I start building upon and the layers and then as I go through the process, it suggests to me. I have a running dialogue I call a visual dialogue with the work that I do and 01:18:30 it comes out in a way that I would have never thought I would end up with. Then I realized why after I've done it the reasoning behind how I've gotten there. I have a visual logic that pervades through the process I think. Many times, I'll create the work just loosely without attaching it to the paper and then I'll completely disassemble what I've created and reassemble it in a new kind of piece. I find there's a freedom not knowing where you're going with things and I always quote a Kurt Vonnegut quote

01:19:00 of saying always know where you're going so you never get there and I believe there's a strength in that intuition of life as well. So basically, this is just over two (2) hours. I start going through it. I'll go through the paper. I'll rifle through it six (6) or seven (7) times every section. I'll cut new things out and then it just suggests to me the direction that I really feel strongly in going. I studied color theory with actually a disciple of Joseph Alber's

01:19:30 who really influenced me in terms of color. I also have a very kind of architectural kind of background of structure in the forms so they're built with some underlying structure many times. So here is an example of the early years -- I

01:20:00 consider like the first three years -- I was much more suggestive and literal commentary there was you know this was in 2005. This is one of the first pieces actually and I found was that there were more didactic narratives that I wanted to pursue with the work at that point because I felt kind of a rage with the politics and what was happening in the world. There's also a visual element that I always like to integrate regardless to

01:20:30 the to the piece. A lot of them I consider there's certain like surreal magic realism as it goes on there is it lends itself to you know again it mixes with social commentary and such. I mean here's ways of kind of layering the work so that it suggests you know that it kind of transforms where the original medium is. I believe they're successful when you're really not sure that

01:21:00 you can never identify this came from The New York Times. What I do with the work, since people might think well it's not archival and it'll fade with time, is I use archival glues and I use in archival paper that it's on. But after I finish each book I spray each one with the de- acidification spray which neutralizes the PH, and then I also varnish a UV coating over each. You know I have pieces from 15 years ago that are just as good as they were the day I made them basically.

01:21:30 Though I don't think they'll last forever. This is kind of showing as the progression of years go by. I know there are new elements that develop with the kind of the narrative as well as the visual narrative. I liked the idea of creating more abstraction almost painting with paper. These are still in a more narrative identifiable way. As time goes by I start to introduce more

01:22:00 visual kinds of magic realism that they're impossible spaces and the layers are kind of built in different kinds of relationships. There's something about silence here. Here we have troops walking by and then there's this this kind of strength of the foreground of the figure there. I liked to

01:22:30 have every everyone who looks at it to bring their own story to it. I think the power in many of the works is the ambiguity that it relates to people and that everyone can look at it and bring a different story. I guess it was about 10 years ago the New Jersey Poets Society took a number of them and different poets worked with each image and wrote a poem with regard to their vision of what they saw when looking at these. These

01:23:00 are things that are subconsciously, intuitively coming out -- as I say it's not a form of intentional involvement in what I'm doing here. It's something that I realized after I've done it I've done it and I find that an exciting kind of way to work where you discover the piece after you've done it because I'm kind of in meditation every morning. I'm still kind of dreaming and it's like six, seven, eight o'clock in the morning whenever it is it's early and the day is fresh, 01:23:30 my mind is fresh. If I did this at 5:00 in the afternoon I'd have all the baggage of the day there and I find that there's an importance It sets my day off and it really creates this just this focus discipline. Even if I'm at the kitchen table and my kids were younger then and they're screaming and my wife's making breakfast or whatever tending to getting them to the bus or whatever, I would still be entranced in what I'm doing. So, it would create this wonderful meditation I guess as it became more

01:24:00 evident as time went on. I really want to bring something new to it every time I do it. I try to really create a fresh -- and there's more obvious those metaphors here -- but I try to create a fresh view of how I'm going to pursue it. So, sometimes I'll have a visual concept that I'm going to work with based on a couple elements I've pulled out and

01:24:30 then from that I build on it and then it transforms through the process of creating it. It's the kind of thing that evolves through time as ten and a half years have gone by I feel that the work has matured in a more painterly manner. It's become, in some ways, more minimal with respect, but it's also become more evolved. I mean there's something that I enjoy not having identifiable characters

01:25:00 in the actual pieces although they still will reappear as you can see. I really like using fish. I don't know how many of the ones I put in here. What I've done here is I've taken a small like five from each year of 10 years and are kind of somewhat representative of each year. They were pulled from I had a show at the Huntington Museum from May to September and it consisted of a 10-year retrospective that

01:25:30 had 120 pieces in it and of those 120 pieces that were chosen -- 12 from each year of 10 years. I kind of again intuitively picked out 12 from each year that seemed to represent the evolution as time went by both in my mind how I would deal with the paper what I brought to it and what the paper brought to me and how it evolved. So, these you know represent the five from each of the ten years. What I was going to say about the

01:26:00 fish is I've used fish a lot in the pieces. I really have a fondness of fish because it represents, it's kind of symbolic as life, but it also has just a visual strength that I don't find with any other animal or any other amphibian. So, this is more of kind of where a lot of them were going where they were more painterly. There's more to do with the form and relationships of the space and the

01:26:30 form. Again, this is untouched just cut from the paper there's the color. When I started this in

2005 I think color was added a couple years before that. I don't think it was probably two or three years that color was in the papers. So slowly, through time, color became more prevalent which gave me obviously a better palette to work with. I

01:27:00 mean these kinds of elements --I like playing with figurative elements that are not encompassed by the body of the figure anymore that they kind of become something other than themselves. There's certain repetitive sensibilities that you'll see and then there are more didactic ones that will crop up like this and some of that is unavoidable. You have to scream every once in a while.

01:27:30

This is again a very simple one, but you know I think, I love the elegance of the simplicity of color and form. Recently the ones that actually I have the newest book with me are tending to be more about form and less about more narrative or what I called magic realism. There was a series I did

01:28:00 when I was having a show a couple of years ago I was doing a couple a day, because I needed to have originals for the show because I never sell -- I've not broken up the original set of three thousand nine hundred of them. I have that continuity, but when I have an original show I wound up doing like two a day for I don't know 12 weekends or so you know or three a day. So

I'd have enough originals for that and these this was one of 01:28:30 the additional originals that I used. Again, the fish. What I do with these actually every day for the last eight years -- I believe it's been eight years -- is I'll post them after I do them first thing in the morning. I'm usually done. I don't schedule jobs till 10:00 a.m. because I have to have that window from 7:00 to 10:00 or whatever to do this. If I'm lucky, I mean today I got up even earlier to do it, but once I'm

01:29:00 done with them I'll post them on a blog that I have for the last eight years as well as on Facebook to have kind of this immediacy of the Times like a newspaper. The art is that is present on that day of the day it's created and it's relevant I think. I think this was a 4th of

July one. I

01:29:30 like that they're kind of second glimpses that you kind of look at things it's a double take sometimes because the form kind of seduces you. That it feels whole, composition, but when you start looking at the elements in the composition you decipher that and it becomes a stronger piece to me that you can do that. It gives you some room to move around in. Again, exploring

01:30:00 new ways to work with the paper is an ever-present part of the process for me. So I kind of will say today I'm going to be monochromatic and I'll challenge myself with a new exercise of the day and you know I find that one of the big things that I use as my philosophy of art is that within the limitations you have more freedom. And I think by just having 01:30:30 the palette of the newspaper it gives me a freedom of expression that I can really build upon. It really becomes so natural to me to use the newspaper as the medium after a number of years. The only time that I don't use an Xacto, is if I'm traveling. I've done them on planes where I have to rip them, so I can't bring my exact on the plane. So, I'll take it. I'll be in New Orleans and

I'll be coming back and I'll rip you know the Picayune to

01:31:00 shreds on the plane. The guy next to me is looking at me like I'm kind of crazy, but you know it's a way to get it done that day. I like using kind of spatial relationships with color and form creating just more painterly pieces; pieces using paper as paint. This again is getting later on where the social commentary is pretty much

01:31:30 gone in most cases and there's more of this kind of surreal work that might be more literal, but more so they are more abstracted. The first year I did this I had no idea if I was going to do it for a month or five months or two days and as you go on, the strength -- and I can't encourage this enough in artists or

01:32:00 people of any you know medium - - that the use of doing something, the power of that on a regular basis, it builds on it -- it builds your character. It builds a strength of what you're doing that is just something that when you start doing it for a period of time and it becomes where you command the medium, then you can relax more with the way your sensibility will be introduced to it because you trust your intuition a lot more. There's 01:32:30 my fish again. There's just something about their form and maybe it's my childhood. I always had a fish tank when I was growing up. So, this one too, I like creating these kinds of environments that are painterly that kind of are a mixture between...there's a

01:33:00 space in there. You can kind of walk through it, but there's also the abstraction of what's there. I think as an artist to me the visual content of something is paramount. I think that the message becomes kind of secondary in certain respects or it works so well with it [that] it's hand in hand. Here again it's one of

01:33:30 those spaces that you're in that you don't quite know what that space is but it feels like it has dimension. I also consider these kind of as theatres. They're almost theatrical in their... a lot of the ones when I use form figures in them...there's a theater to the feeling. There's almost this psychological input that I'm putting in there within this theatrical space. Again, it's something

01:34:00 you have to look at and your eyes kind of start pulling out more elements in there the longer that you look at them. Part of it is working small. I'm working on a nine by twelve page so I'm very focused on this very small thing I'm working on and by creating just within that scale I have a greater kind of respect for every little element is important in it. So, everything in there is very intentional. It's 01:34:30 not arbitrary, but it's visually intentional. There's kind of again a visual and analytic knowledge that I have when I do it. This is the cover of my catalogue from the Hunterdon Museum show which actually is available if people would like a copy. It was a 28-page catalog that shows all

01:35:00 120 pieces of the show as well as a really wonderful introduction by Eric Levin, a writer [and] journalist. The beauty of doing something for so long is that the freedom gets greater, you can experiment more. You've taking chances is I think what art is about. By this length of time that you do something, the more you work within a similar constraint, the greater the chances are that you might take. It's

01:35:30 always funny to see these so large because it's a book experience. I mean their journals are all in 9 x 12 books, but again I've had shows where I haven't put the originals books in the show. I've recreated books where I've printed every page of a 12-page book, un-spiraled the Strathmore book and re-spiraled that printed pieces in there and

01:36:00 then they'd be on a wall -- like a whole year or whatever of the books -- and people could then look at the books for that intimate experience which I do think is different. It's a journal, it's a very personal thing to me that I'm involved with every day and as a visual journal it's got that strength, that closeness that you want to see it in that way. In that manner. These are 01:36:30 more recent. These are kind of like cathedrals of color and form to me and I love playing with space and breaking it down and having layers kind of come in and out. Then just kind of like simple ones like this are so evocative in a different way. Again, there's a kind of theater of that. These

01:37:00 are just some quick installation shots of the Hunterdon show that I had and they were all done; these are all originals that are in the groups of 12. So, each body of 12 kind of just shows in that installation. Do I have time to take questions now? Basically, that's

01:37:30 my story. I continue on. KAREN MCDERMOTT: Got some amazing artists here today and now I'm happy to introduce Maryann Riker. She uses mixed media

01:38:00 and for book arts and collage works and she really is doing a visual narrative which reminds us of the past and journeys through which we all travel throughout our lives. She uses Victorian iconography and other symbols. I know I have a tiny little Maryann Riker book that I just adore.

I think it's like The Domestic Goddess or something like that. She also uses

01:38:30 images in response to historical moments that changed history. The women's suffrage movement, the Holocaust, the American garment industry, and her works can be seen -- she has a website and it's called Just a Rip Press -- and she's exhibited all over the place, also nationally and internationally. Her pieces are in the Special Collection at the Brooklyn Museum, the Walker Art Center, the

01:39:00

National Museum for Women in the Arts, Lafayette College, and many other places. So, I'm more than happy to see Marianne here. She has lots of connections to Rutgers and it's great to hear about your work. I want to throw out a big thank you to Michael and Karen for inviting me.

Usually, I'm out of the country traveling

01:39:30 to some spot on my bucket list, but this year I was staying home. So, thank you. Also, a shout out to the original bar, which started back in the early '90's when I was living in Cedar Grove. Benita Wolf started a book arts group years ago. It would meet at her house and it morphed into the bar, which is now held over there. So those were the seeds that were actually starting back then. I left book arts for a long time. I really

01:40:00 did not get into the book arts until I was at Lafayette in 2000 when Curly Holton curated this great book arts show and that's all she wrote. For like the next eight years I kept the Center for

Book Arts alive and well and in the black, because any course I could take or workshop, I was there. When Karen e-mailed 01:40:30 me about doing a talk about recent work I thought, h I am screwed, because the past year I have not been making books, which is the way my life goes. So, I took a few of my favorite things from the past 10 years -- and I'll show you those -- and how I was influenced and how I got to the current point, which is starting to take me back into making more books again. This is a

01:41:00 photo of my family and I'm the grumpy looking one, but we were the typical post-World War II American family, first-born son. I was the baby. My mom thought I was change of life. So, what can I tell you and I popped and "surprise." But it was a development in Phillipsburg, New Jersey that was based on Levittown houses, prefab, and you're going to see where this shape comes in quite frequently throughout my work. This

01:41:30 was some of the earliest sculptural books I was actually making and you can tell that again this house shape was really becoming important to me. I was also enthralled with the work of

Joseph Cornell – well I'd been enthralled for years -- and also the box works of Lucas Samaras and some of the works of Nick Cave who is a performance artist, but these are earlier books. They were visual narratives. Really weren't what

01:42:00 I would consider books in a historical perspective, but this is where I actually became more interested in the book format itself. This is a small book. It's called Tie One On: A Miniature History of the Apron. It's a pop-up book and it was just something I wanted to do. I wanted to work in a miniature format. It's 3 x 3 x 3. I was a member of the Miniature Book Society and I thought I'm going to do something and let's try it. The name of

01:42:30 my press, Just a Rip Press, is a moniker because primarily, when you don't have a press, yet you need to name a press, I just said well "it's just a rip because really I don't have a press." So that's how the name of my press actually came about. So that's that one. The next one I did was actually based again on this iconography of the American housewife and World War II and

01:43:00 it was based on a show at the Cooper-Hewitt called Mechanical Bride and how advertising was bringing in new mechanical devices like the washing machine, new improved irons, new stoves, and how they actually became the housewife's lover or domestic partners in her relationship of how she approached housekeeping and cleaning. So, it was a carousel book. Sorry I have this timed. It became a carousel book that opened, very three-

01:43:30 dimensional and it had a lot of these images of nostalgia from advertising from the 40's and

50's. Fun piece. This one is called Women's Work another sculptural artist's book. Again, you can see the house shape coming in. I love old advertising. I worked as a graphic designer for years so a lot of my materials are based on what I as a graphic designer and familiar with; laser jet print that type of thing, and

01:44:00 a lot of Victorian wood cuts. Also, wood cuts from the 30's and the 40's when, in newspaper production, they would use these things called mats before they would use printing. The next one is again, a rotating cube. Are you familiar with rotating cubes and how they work? They are a great little mechanism that you can find in museum gift shops. This was a piece that again I incorporated old advertising directed

01:44:30 to women. When you're working in graphic design the primary objective is to actually take what the consumer needs are and put them into a format that will entice them to buy so that you can make money. So, a lot of what I was looking at was historical in terms of how women were being seduced into buying these labor saving mechanisms that really increased their

01:45:00 household chores and time that they spent cleaning because the standards went up. So, this is called Women's Work. Yeah, it's amazing, but in the 20's in the 30's women spent less time housecleaning. In the 50's and 60's, because the standards went up, they spent 10 percent more time. This is a fun piece. Itis called Will the Real Betty Crocker Please Stand Up. Again, 01:45:30 a great marketing coup by General Mills and Marjorie Child Husted was actually the Home

Economist who came up with the idea of Betty Crocker along with the CEO of General Mills and they named Betty Crocker after his wife. Her first name was Betty [and] his secretary's name was named Crocker and this whole image-based industry became so popular that Marjorie

Child Husted actually had to go on the road and

01:46:00 promote Betty Crocker and she had to dress as her and look like her. It was also the first time -- I call this The Altar Piece to the American Housewife -- because it was the first time that a cookbook was provided to the American woman, where everything was measured and every cake came out perfect. It was based on scientific research. They tested the recipes scientifically in these huge kitchens that G.E. put together. Not G.E., General Mills. Sorry. This

01:46:30 is again a series of sculptural books. I did these as portable altars for ancient voyagers. You could find me like once a month at least in the Byzantine section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art looking at these Byzantine icons, which I just loved and the portable altars. Being born and raised Catholic, you go in a Catholic Church and the alters are magnificent, but even back in the 12th and 13th century in

01:47:00 the early days of Catholicism or Christianity the monks would carry wooden portable altars and they would set up these altars on a rock in the countryside. So, I thought of these as pieces that would actually be carried by ancient mariners or voyagers. They really don't have any text. This was kind of the result of that whole process. My boyfriend and I were doing our bucket list of places we wanted to

01:47:30 go and one year we hit Ireland, Italy, Rome and Santa Fe. Not in that order, but we were looking at a lot of great Renaissance art and this just kind of seeped into my work without realizing it. These are a lot of celestial maps by Andreas Solarius. This is actually a piece about Emily

Dickinson. I was asked to do some books based

01:48:00 on a poet and the best poets are dead ones because you don't have to worry about getting copyright. So, I had a huge volume of her work and as a result I created Spiritual Wanderings and a whole series based on her poetry, because later in life she became an agoraphobic and she would not venture out of the house. So, a lot of her writings tended to speak to mental and spiritual journeys. At the same time that this was happening I was also curating shows

01:48:30 for Lafayette and I did a mixed media assemblage show, which you'll see later how it affected.

But people kept asking me your bookwork looks nothing like what you're curating a I said, well that's all right. I'll get there eventually. Who cares you know? Again, this is another piece called Houses of Stars and Dreams that was based on poetry by Emily Dickinson. And I do like beautiful things, I mean, I am enthralled when I can go into a Renaissance church

01:49:00 and look at the religious art and the beauty and their use of gold leaf in it and everything. It's not for everybody, that's all right. This is a little pop-up structure. This this falls completely flat. It's a class a workshop I took with Paul Johnson. If you haven't taken any pop-up workshops take his they are wonderful. Then I actually broke out and last year I decided to go back and do some more collage work. I was getting involved with a lot of collage artist

01:49:30 groups and I did this series based on The Book Thief, the novel. You have to remember that my parents were born 1912 in 1918 so my father served in World War II, so it was an important novel for me because he was actually deployed on the day of Pearl Harbor and he was scheduled to be flown to Hawaii the day Pearl Harbor occurred. So, this was really kind of an ode to him. It had been 10 years since he had passed and it was kind of

01:50:00 this collage work that was kind of working through the angst and a lot of it deals with the use of propaganda by Hitler in World War II and how he was kind of blinding the Allies to what was really occurring. Out of that came this artist's book which was done probably pretty close to a year. It's called Blinded To. I was excited about the flag book structure that Hedi Kyle had developed and this is about the Holocaust and it was actually based on a

01:50:30 news release that had occurred in London. Prime Minister Churchill had told the Allies that the concentration camps were occurring and nobody believed him. The news was coming from the Polish troops who and the Soviet troops who were actually going into northern Germany and finding these concentration camps. So, it's a simple structure, but has this overlay of different images

01:51:00 of the corpses of the concentration camps with the maps that Hitler had intended of the building of the concentration camps. This is another piece. Using the same structure called The

Underground Railroad and it was just it was tough to work through some of these pieces when you're reading a lot of the history and what happened. This

01:51:30 is some new work again that came out of the collages. This is again the rotating cube and it's called Blinded to GMOs. We were involved with the Easton Farmer's Market which is very much a local initiative what they call farm-to-table. So, everything is fresh, organically grown and locally produced. So, I did this piece for a show in Easton and it turned out to be a fun little work. The

01:52:00 next one is called Tiny Shrinies. This is fun. What had happened is, after the clashes had occurred, I started to build up this inventory of things that I wanted to use in assemblages. Finally, five years after the fact, I curated a like an assemblage show with altered books and everything it was starting to catch up with me, because I had looked at thousands of slides at Lafayette. I should mention that Lafayette College is such a great resource for me it's only five minutes from where

01:52:30 I live and I'm there all the time. But I started to collect these vintage, brass lettering stencils and when I got them home I started looking at them and I thought God they're like small shrines. So I made these pieces called Tiny Shrinies and they're actually really fun. I started titling them and if you have any friends who are writers, ask them about the six-word memoir because these ended up being titled with

01:53:00 only six words like the one on the left is Mr. Y Searches for Pen Pal or Vixen Vicki Measures

Twice, Cuts Once, and there's this kind of subtle implication but these are all small. I call them "flash fiction for your wall" or "wall jewelry" you know and they're fun. They're really fun. So, there was this great sense of liberation because I started. really using what I love or old and vintage

01:53:30 materials. I was out of the beautiful phase, because everybody was saying, "You know Maryanne your work is so beautiful," but yet what you buy -- or what I collect as an artist -- and what I always gravitate towards is more this altered assemblage, rustic type of feel with a lot of wax and caustic and rust. So, I'm getting closer. This was a piece again, I literally had

01:54:00 no books at home to even send to this exhibit. So, I'm sorry Karen, but I said, "All right get your act together here Maryanne," and I started collecting these cabinet cards -- again for use in assemblages -- and I started embroidering them and these are embroidered with just 100 percent cotton Mercer's cloth. It's a carpeting thread, so it's very thick and the Loose Threads series is actually going to be dealing with women and

01:54:30 men in the Victorian age, particularly women in the garment industry. The one piece that is outside is kind of like an artist's model. None of these books have actually materialized, but there's a receptacle behind each one for a small book. The books may actually be comprised of vintage fabrics that these women worked with. I'm not really sure. They might have pattern pieces because Diane Pam gave me these beautiful enclosures that you can actually purchase from ArchivalProducts.com that

01:55:00 will wrap these and that could actually be part of the piece. But these all hang. The great thing too is that locally I've been having a lot of people approach me for doing exhibits, but they're called collage or fiber exhibits so I want to engage the local community because most of what I do is outside of Easton and Phillipsburg. It is mostly in other parts of the country, which is a good thing. So, I don't know where these are going, but at

01:55:30 least the holders of the books are ready. So, if you have any ideas please e-mail me. I'm more than open to anything. Again, this is a series of book sculptures that I'm doing that are works in progress. I tend to work backwards. I tend to do the structures first. I really get an idea and I get so excited that I run home at lunchtime and I'm like working away and I'll go back with like glue bits all over me. The case

01:56:00 managers -- because I work in a Special Ed. department for a public school district -- they're like looking at me like, why do you have like glitter on your butt or like blue bits all over you? Oh, I was just pasting! So, these are these again house-like structures. The one on the left is called Master of the House. They kind of have like this steampunk edge but these are all vintage cabinet cards that I'm using and the one on the right is called Mistress of the House. They all have

01:56:30 a cabinet cards on all four sides. But again, it's going to embody text about what each of these roles by each gender were demanded of in society on the piece itself as well as little books that will slot in the bottom. You can't see in the back but there's actually a little space for a book to be incorporated. Then last are my assemblages which were just finished like last week and the one on the right is called Weighted Heart. The one on the left is called

01:57:00 Bound Heart. Here you can see where, even though I'm doing assemblages per say, they have a narrative quality to them. You never know where things will take you or where the path will lead, but eventually it will lead me back into making more artist's books and hopefully not being so beautiful and embellished. Thank you. MICHAEL JOSEPH: Well

01:57:30 we're actually on time today so let's delay for a bit and have a little chat about the art that we saw this morning. We have three artists still here. They haven't left yet. [Let's have] those

01:58:00 questions and we have the art from Lafayette still here and Diane is still here and you're all still here. Lunch will wait. So, let's have questions first and then answers. Okay. Pam

01:58:30 is saying she's curious. Audience Member #1: What the three artists would say to each other as a kind of intermediate step what your reaction is to each other cause you're working with common elements in different ways. You guys

01:59:00 come up here and let the questioners you have your mike. Please. All right

01:59:30 let me repeat the question. Pam asked what you guys would say to each other. PETER JACOBS: I'm not that familiar with your books really. I've seen your sculptures through the years so this is more of a fresh vision for me. They're very sculptural like your sculptures. LYNN BUSHMAN: And I am so impressed with the

02:00:00 tenacity of your endeavor. I mean the discipline involved in doing what you do is just. And the evolution from the more pictoral to the painter is fantastic. MARYANNE RIKER: Lynn. I'm winter encaustic. I'm going to come over and steal your wax.

02:00:30 Beautiful surface. Beautiful surface. One of the questions I would like to ask is where do you see yourself going, sculpturally, with your pieces? LYNN BUSHMAN: I have to say I am really glad you asked that question. I went over and I didn't get to talk about where I am with my work. I am at a crossroads where I can't keep making these books. That one took more than one hundred hours of

02:01:00 course and I have to start using the idea, the overarching theme, which would normally be a book, but now they have to start being a series. I delivered two books to Montclair State to the show and each one was more than one hundred hours. There are these two books you plunk down on the table, but if I frame them I would fill two rooms in a gallery and,

02:01:30 oh my God I might sell one. I mean I can't, you can't sell that. There's no price, so that's I will always make books, but I have to start thinking in terms. Like people say, I would love this but it's a page in a book and there's something on the back. So I say, you know you're right I might have to rethink a little. Thank you for that question. MICHAEL JOSPEH: Is there another question? KAREN MCDERMOTT: We want it recorded. Audience Member #2: Do you ever read 02:02:00 the newspaper anymore? PETER JACOBS: I've become more distinguishing in what I read. If there are headlines that might attract me, I'll read the headline and maybe the first paragraph and then I depend on my wife to tell me the rest of the story. MARYANN RIKER: You

02:02:30 had mentioned when this started that your wife said why don't we do a daily practice. Does she also make work? PETER JACOBS: I will meet you halfway. I feel like I should stand up. Yeah.

She's a sculptor and it became kind of was untenable for her to continue the process, after a day or so because it's more involved than

02:03:00 just a two-hour time kind of frame. So, not that she didn't have the will and drive it's more of the medium was kind of an obstacle. MARYANN RIKER: But does she get a chance to read the paper? PETER JACOBS: Does she get a chance to read the paper? She usually gets a good 15- minute head-start before I get up in the morning. So, she might read some of it and then I start cutting, so she starts getting a completely warped idea of the news because it's seeing through

02:03:30 the pages. Yeah, the layers. Audience Member #3: Hi. I'm interested in just the discipline of doing something every day and I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about some of the biggest challenges or some of the emotional stuff you go through or some of the physical what, you know, just some of the issues because it's quite an amazing thing to do something every 02:04:00 day for I don't know how many years. PETER JACOBS: Ten and a half. Well I mean the discipline as I say I think after a certain period of time it's like brushing your teeth. I mean you do it every morning and it takes a longer than brushing your teeth, but I guess the biggest obstacles are when I have -- I mean I own my own business so I could plan jobs at 10:00 we're starting at

10:00, so I have a good window in the morning unless other things happen. I get up earlier to do it because I know I'm

02:04:30 obsessive as well as discipline so the obsession of doing it kind of overrides the not wanting to do it or putting it off. I really don't like doing the work in the afternoon, there is a completely different experience than first thing in the morning. Audience Member #3: But do you ever get sick? PETER JACOBS: Yeah, I get sick. Knock on wood. I mean I might have been hung over a couple mornings, but you know even that I'll do it in bed. For the

02:05:00 most part I've done it in when you know my wife was in surgery I did it at the hospital. There's there are times that I'll do it because it's meditative too and it helps get you through certain things, but for the most part you know I find that I don't get tired of doing it. I sometimes start and I'll say look I don't know where I'm going to go today. Monday papers suck. There there's nothing in them. They are thin. There's not much color and you know I'll start working with it and it builds. I get excited because something

02:05:30 new comes out of it if I plow through. [Unintelligible audience question] PETER JACOBS: No, it's purely just the newspaper. Audience Member #4: This is

02:06:00 for Peter too. Are you anxious about the possible demise of the printed newspaper? PETER JACOBS: You know I used to have a joke at the end of when I've spoken or I've done articles that you know I'm going to outlast the newspapers. I mean I do think the newspapers have a limited prospect here. The Times is still pretty solvent, but I've gone to places where that paper doesn't exist anymore and it's definitely an issue. For now, the biggest obstacles actually are if there's a blizzard because

02:06:30 I get the paper delivered every morning and if there's a blizzard and there's no paper delivery what I've done -- and it's happened maybe twice -- is that I'll go online I have newsprint paper and I'll go on to the Times website and I'll generate images from there and colors and whatever ads and I'll work from the newspaper I print out. The newsprint. Well there was no delivery on uncertain blizzard days. CVS doesn't have the paper does it? Audience Member #5: I saw your show at Hunterdon and I

02:07:00 wasn't sure whether what I was seeing always were the actual collages or prints of them. Scans. PETER JACOBS: I took a different liberty with those where I've never shown the originals from the books. In that case I actually cut out every collage from the original book and 02:07:30 put it on a new page of Strathmore squarely on each page and all 120 are the original collages.

Like the ones that are here, there's four from that show here. Because I wanted them to be consistent. I have I have a book that has the originals in the original book and there's dirt and crap I mean, which is part of them in a way, but for the museum show I wanted them to have a consistency but they are clean. So, I wanted that and they're all they were originals. Yes. Audience Member #5: Are you going to pop them back in the holes? PETER JACOBS: I

02:08:00 got to figure that out. I have another show coming up next year so I'm keeping them out. Audience Member #6: I guess this question is for all of you. When you do a collage, have you ever had issues with copyright or any legal issues with collages or assemblages? Just curious. PETER JACOBS: Well I know I have talked to some copyright lawyers just about that concept particularly since I'm extracting from the newspapers. What

02:08:30 I found. I'd never take the entire paper or the entire image or photograph. It is dissected it enough so there's laws that kind of govern where you use a certain percentage of an image and then you also transcend the original intent of the image as well is also a law. However, what they said most overrides that is that I'm just taking the newspaper the physical newspaper, I'm not like copying the newspaper and then printing

02:09:00 it unless of course I'm taking it from The New York Times site. So, it's actually my possession, the newspaper I own. So, they say the physical newspaper, that's what one of them had said, that is actually my property and I could do what I want with it. So, I'm not sure. I've never run across that issue. I mean The New York Times was going to have a show of the work and they never talked about it. So. You know. I guess. LYNN BUSHMAN: I look forward to a day when my work is seen by enough people that there's an issue. MARYANN RIKER:

02:09:30 I would say to you that most of the work that I'm doing most of the images are under the protection of the public domain. They're old enough that I don't have to worry about it or everybody who would know and could claim ownership has passed on. I mean it's you know it becomes almost like what Liz said, that I hope enough people do see it so that maybe somebody will come up with an issue. So, I

02:10:00 don't worry about it too much. Audience Member #6: I'm just going to interject something because I'm a photographer and recently I did work for the first time that used other images, archival images, and I used a very small amount of it. But it was going to be reproduced in a catalog and I was told by the curator you actually have to get permission to use these images because it has happened to us in the past that once we show the work then it becomes a problem. So, I

02:10:30 was curious about if anything happened to you, but I'm just also throwing that out. MARYANN

RIKER: No and that's actually for protection for the institution who's doing the publication, because when I worked for the corporate art program at AT&T we were very conscious that whenever artists used other images that we had some type of copyright protection and it was always at the discretion of the artist to get that. We were not Responsible for it. They had to get it. So, you're right, but

02:11:00 there are some contemporary artists who are using other images and it is appropriation and they're giving credit where credit is due. So, I think it's a gray area and it's one that's being contested hotly. KAREN MCDERMOTT: And there have been some famous lessons too. MARYANN RIKER: Absolutely. Absolutely. Audience Member #7: It's not a question, but I just wanted to thank you for all the historical facts that you gave us with your artwork that was really

02:11:30 great. MARYANN RIKER: Thank you. Thank you. LYNN BUSHMAN: I've been doing collages myself a lot and I had this issue, because at one point I was going to try to become an illustrator. But unless you're making money, doesn't matter what you use. They can't sue you if you're not making any money so. Since I'm not...right. MARYANN RIKER: How many artists in the audience are making over $25,000.00 a year off their art. That's what I thought! Audience Member #7: This

02:12:00 is a question for Lynn and it's kind of the chicken and the egg. The lovely piece that is outside with the rulers about measuring. When did you think of it? When you had accumulated enough materials related to it that you could make

02:12:30 the assemblage or did you seek the materials, you had the vision of the book or combination? LYNN BUSHMAN: I love that question and I talk about this a lot. I think that there's two kinds of art that you see traditionally made from found art and I'm going to put myself in the category that works. When you get the idea, you know what you want to say and the materials you're using the

02:13:00 same way you would use paint or pastel. Then there are the people who find something and say, oh this is cool I'm going to make art from this. So, it's either from the outside in or inside out and I work from the inside out. I think about what I want to say and I find the stuff. I would like to invite you to my studio to see that there's very little that I would want to say that I don't have the materials for. Audience Member #7: Like Cornell.

02:13:30

Cornell would collect things and he categorize them and filed them and knew what he had. Essentially a catalog of bits and pieces and parts in his basement and is your studio some would like that? LYNN BUSHMAN: It's crazy. But my husband hired -- once for my birthday, s nice of him --hired an organizer and she walked in and she took one look at my studio and said, you're 02:14:00 messy but you're totally organized. You don't need me. I know where everything is and if it's not there, then I have no idea where it is. So, when you have a lot of stuff you have to put it away or at least close or else you'll never find it again. But I really find that there's a superficial quality to work where you work the other way. Where do you find a plastic fish and say, "Oh my

God this is great. I'm going to make something from this." It's back-assward. It's

02:14:30 not it's not coming from inside then, it's coming from outside. So, I have a lot of junk in there and a lot of the things that look like they're found in my pieces are not. They are made and made to look found. I have a lot of have plastic toys that I've painted with this stuff with iron particles in it and then it dries and then you paint another thing on so that it rusts. So, they look old. Or there

02:15:00 are things that I bury in the backyard or I leave outside. I have a fish tank, almost the size of half of this table, where when I find things in nature I just throw them into this tank and if they rot, they're not usable and if they are still there 10 years later I could use them. So, it's a process, but thank you. That's a good question. KAREN MCDERMOTT: It seems like we have quite a great theme here with all the

02:15:30 artists, myself included, who have lots of things to make art with. Are we done? We want to remind everybody about what happens after lunch as far as the open mike. MICHAEL JOSEPH: We're going to make a change to the schedule in terms of the time, because we're not breaking at twelve o'clock. We're breaking it 12:15. So come to the

02:16:00 artists' reading at 1:15 - 1:20 in here. Lunch is waiting for you and then we'll recommence this afternoon with open mike, announcements from the floor, and then the three artists that are going to speak this afternoon. That will be at 2:20. So, lunch now. Oh, and thank you very much Peter, and Lynn and Maryann.