Book/Print Artist/Scholar Of Color Collective panel Friday

Hosted By The Bibliographical Society Of America, the third and final Book/Print Artist/Scholar of Color Collective Panel discussion, featuring Tia Blassingame, Ashley Hairston Dougherty, Kinohi Nishikawa, Curtis Small, Irene Chan, Devin Fitzgerald, Colette Fu, and Radha Pandey, starts Friday, January 22, 2021 at 12:30 PM EST.

Registration: https://www.memberplanet.com/events/bsa/book-print-artists-roundtable

Book artist Tia Blassingame founded the Book/Print Artist/Scholar of Color Collective to build community and collaborations with BIPOC book/print practitioners and scholars. The Collective represents a growing community of more than thirty book artists, scholars, librarians, papermakers, letterpress printers, printmakers, and curators. All are passionate about book history, print culture, and the endless potential of artists’ books as vehicles of social change and cultural conveyors that uplift our communities, and tell our stories, histories.

This is the third in a series of three events generously funded by David Solo featuring presentations and discussions by Collective members. In this session, all eight members of the collective will gather for a roundtable discussion of and reflection on the previous panels.

You can watch the recordings of the previous sessions on the BSA YouTube Channel:

October 23, 2020: Tia Blassingame, Ashley Hairston Doughty, Kinohi Nishikawa, & Curtis Small https://youtu.be/Iw4w4kLmE8M

November 20, 2020: Irene Chan, Devin Fitzgerald, Colette Fu, Radha Pandey https://youtu.be/pqnIwqBibzY

Participants
Tia Blassingame is a book artist and printmaker exploring the intersection of race, history, and perception, Blassingame often incorporates archival research and her own poetry in her artist’s book projects for nuanced discussions of racism in the United States. Her artist’s books are held in library and museum collections including Library of Congress, Stanford University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, and State Library of Queensland. Blassingame is an Assistant Professor of Art at Scripps College and serves as the Director of Scripps College Press. In 2019, she founded the Book/Print Artist/Scholar Of Color Collective.

Ashley Hairston Dougherty is a visual storyteller, explaining personal experiences through verbal and visual language. Much of her practice deals with socio-economic, racial, and gender-based issues, particularly those relating to cultural misconceptions and the development of personal identity. Although trained as a graphic designer, Doughty’s artwork often crosses multiple media, including typography, illustration, writing, fiber and materials, and book arts. She shares and encourages such art-making as an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and through her design studio, Design Kettle. Doughty’s work is included in the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection in Chicago and has received awards from the Caxton Club, the College Book Arts Association, and Arion Press.

Irene Chan is a multidisciplinary artist who works conceptually in print media, papermaking, installation, storytelling performance, and book arts. She is an Associate Professor of Visual Arts (Founder and Head of Print Media) and Affiliate Faculty of Asian Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, U.S.A. Her books and works on paper have been exhibited internationally and held in 80 public collections including the Walker Art Center, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Tate Modern, Victoria & Albert Museum, and British Library in London. Chan established Ch’An (ch’ ahn) Press through which she has self-published prints and 35 artist books to date. She is the recipient of grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Arts Council, Maryland State Arts Council, Washington D.C. Commission of the Arts and Humanities, of fellowships to 23 artist residencies, and has exhibited and performed in 55 venues in the last ten years.

Devin Fitzgerald is the Curator of Rare Books and the History of Printing at UCLA Library Special Collections. A specialist in Western and East Asian book history and a bibliographer, Devin researches the global circulation of East Asian books. Devin was a 2015 Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Critical Bibliography and received additional training at both the University of Virginia and California Rare Book Schools. He obtained his PhD in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University.

Colette Fu received her MFA in Fine Art Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2003, and soon after began devising complex compositions that incorporate photography and pop-up paper engineering. She has designed for award-winning stop motion animation commercials and free-lanced for clients including Greenpeace, Vogue China, Canon Asia, and the Delaware Disaster Research Center. Fu’s numerous awards include the 2018 Meggendorfer Prize for best paper engineered artist book, a 2008 Fulbright Research Fellowship to China, and grants from the Independence Foundation, Leeway Foundation, En Foco, and the Puffin Foundation. Her photo-based pop-up books are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Library of Congress, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and many private and rare archive collections. She has attended many fully-funded artist residencies including those at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Swatch Art Peace Hotel, Yaddo, Macdowell Colony, Sacatar, Vermont Studio Center, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and the Alden B. Dow Center for Creativity. Her solo show “Wanderer/Wonderer: The Pop-ups of Colette Fu” was presented at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in 2016/17. In 2017, Fu created the world’s largest pop-up book at the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center measuring 14×21 feet. Visitors were invited to enter the book. A passionate educator, Fu also teaches artmaking as a way to give voice to communities through pop-up paper engineered projects. She teaches pop-up courses and community workshops to marginalized populations at art centers, universities and institutions internationally.

Kinohi Nishikawa is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University. His book Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018. He is currently at work on Black Paratext, a study of how book design has shaped modern African American literature.

Radha Pandey is a papermaker and letterpress printer. She earned her MFA in Book Arts from the University of Iowa Center for the Book where she was a recipient of the Iowa Arts Fellowship. She practices European, Eastern and Indo-Islamic Papermaking techniques and teaches book arts classes in India, Europe and the US. Her book Anatomia Botanica won the MICA Book Award in 2014, and received an Honorable Mention at the 15th Carl Hertzog Award for Excellence in Book Design. In 2018, her book Deep Time won the Joshua Heller Memorial Award. Her artist books are held in over 40 public collections internationally, including the Library of Congress and Yale University. Currently, Radha is working on an artist book inspired by Mughal floral portraiture from the 17th century, for which all the paper will be hand made in the traditional Indo-Islamic style.York Arts Council, Maryland State Arts Council, Washington D.C. Commission of the Arts and Humanities, of fellowships to 23 artist residencies, and has exhibited and performed in 55 venues in the last ten years.

Curtis Small is a Librarian and Coordinator of Public Services for the Special Collections department at the University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press. In this position, he coordinates the reference, instruction and exhibition programs, and also serves as a curator for the rare book collections. In 2017, Curtis curated the exhibition Issues and Debates in African American Literature at UD Library. In 2019, he was a co-organizer of the Black Bibliographia conference, also at the University of Delaware. As a proud team member of the Colored Conventions Project, Curtis works on permissions and outreach. He has also done scholarly research on the print history of the Colored Conventions Movement and the importance of Haiti within the movement. Curtis also works to increase racial diversity among professionals in the fields of archives and Special Collections. He holds a PhD in French from New York University and an MLIS degree from the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University.

Image Credit: Procreation: Push+Pull. Photo courtesy of Ashley Hairston Doughty.

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