Beauty out of the Ashes

Aaron Douglas. Cover Illustration for Fire!!  Devoted to Younger Negro Artists, ed. Wallace Thurman. New York, 1926..

March 1, 2023.

Professors Ronald D. Patkus, Eve Dunbar, and Caroline Culp discuss their current exhibition in the Thompson Memorial Library, Beauty out of the Ashes: Printed Works of the Harlem Renaissance, 1923-1936, on view through June 15, 2023.

A key focus of the exhibition is the literary production of the Harlem Renaissance. Works of thirteen different authors are presented. Together they provide a window into some of the key aspects of authorship during the Harlem Renaissance. At the same time, it’s also important to note that the exhibition considers not only texts, but also art, since the first editions of these works often included artwork on the dust jackets or within the book itself. By studying not just texts but also physical books, we gain a sense of the visual nature of published works, and thus a wider understanding for how works of the Harlem Renaissance were presented to their reading audience.

 

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Robert Kipniss

Robert Kipniss. Without Within, 1978. Color Lithograph, 24 x 18 inches. 

SEASON OPENER September 15, 2021.

The painter, printmaker, and writer Robert Kipniss talks about his memoir Robert Kipniss: A Working Artist's Life (University Press of New England, 2011).

"A painter's life is a solitary one, alone in the studio, combining intelligence and imagination with technical skills to create a unique vision. Robert Kipniss's elegiac and mysterious landscapes and still lifes convey none of this process of invention. Few great painters are great writers, but Kipniss is an exception. In his sensitive and personal memoir we discover his passionate struggle to achieve his artistic goals, balancing the obligations of his personal life with the great demands of his art."  -- E.John Bullard, Director Emeritus, New Orleans Museum of Art

“Robert Kipniss’s A Working Artist’s Life is the rarest of literary achievements: a personal memoir, cultural history, and textbook of craft and market. I was enlightened, entertained, and frequently moved by this portrait of the artist composed with a touch of the poet.” -- Sidney Offit, author of Memoir of the Bookie’s Son; curator emeritus, George Polk Journalism Awards; and president, Authors Guild Foundation.

"Kipniss’ compulsion to express and communicate what he sees carries him over the decades through economic hardship and added instances of the occasional cruelties of the world to further successes with the New York gallery establishment, through marriage and fatherhood, a stint in the army, and later in life through his further creative development as a consummate printmaker and to his present life with his second wife, the author Laurie Lisle. This is recounted in the book with an informative and clear-eyed recollection, often tinged with irony, in the urbane and genial voice of a human being who has, within the precincts of the city that fostered and challenged him, molded himself into a profoundly eloquent, perceptive, and charismatic individual. As a visual artist and poet whose art might be described as the rendering of perceived reality into worlds reflected on the surface of a tranquil and attentive eye, Kipniss’ mindful recollection of a life in which nothing is held back introduces us in this book to his path to a visionary and intelligent apprehension of the whole of the world that dreams of itself through our senses." -- T. E. Hill, Vassar College.

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Amitava Kumar

January 29, 2020.

Vassar Professor of English on the Helen D. Lockwood Chair Amitava Kumar returns to the program to talk about his acclaimed novel Immigrant, Montana (Knopf, 2018). The novel was named one of the Best Books of 2018 by the New Yorker, was on the New York Times 100 Most Notable Books list of 2018, and on President Obama's Favorite Books list of the same year.  

"This is a deeply American novel, one that delves into the messiness of love (and sex!), and the meeting point between identity, character, place, and the constant cultural stuff floating around. . . . Kumar's novel is uproariously funny and deeply moving."
—David Means, author of Hystopia

"Amitava Kumar's Immigrant, Montana is a beguiling meditation on memory and migration, sex and politics, ideas and art, and race and ambiguity. Part novel, part memoir, this book is as sly, charming, and deceptive as its passionate protagonist, a writer writing himself into being."
—Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer

Michael Joyce

September 18, 2019 (SEASON OPENER).

Michael Joyce, acclaimed novelist, poet, critic, media wayfinder,  and Professor of English at Vassar College, talks about his most recent novel, Remedia: A Picaresque (Steerage, 2018), and about creative writing, teaching, hypermedia and other conceptual wormholes, and about his relationship with media and literature. 

Count on Michael Joyce to reinvent the genre of the picaresque novel in a mode suited to the 21st century! With a light touch and sure sense of prose rhythm, he introduces a leitmotif of randomly appearing doorways, thresholds into and out of the world, to puncture the narrative space of this engaging novel. Scenes appear within scenes as the tales unfold in true keeping with the genre that recounts a hero’s progress. The sequence of events is made to make sense by sheer deftness of Joyce’s skill as a narrator and his willingness to use the unexpected as a structuring device, as well as an excuse to delight. Making sense of the past through the telling of his tales, Joyce offers his readers a fresh experience of a classic form filled with contemporary references. — Johanna Drucker

H. Daniel Peck

Thomas Cole.  Detail from View on the Catskill--Early Autumn, 1836–37. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY

May 15, 2019 (SEASON FINALE).

H. Daniel Peck, Professor Emeritus of English at Vassar College, discusses his monograph and exhibition,  on view at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill May 4 - November 3, 2019 entitled: Thomas Cole's Refrain: The Paintings of Catskill Creek.

Thomas Cole's Refrain shows how Cole's Catskill Creek paintings, while reflecting concepts such as the stages of life, opened a more capacious vision of experience than his narrative-driven series, such as The Voyage of Life. Relying on rich visual evidence provided by paintings, topographic maps, and contemporary photographs, Peck argues that human experience is conveyed through Cole's embedding into a stable, recurring landscape key motifs that tell stories of their own. The motifs include enigmatic human figures, mysterious architectural forms, and particular trees and plants. Peck finds significant continuities—personal and conceptual—running throughout the Catskill Creek paintings, continuities that cast new light on familiar works and bring significance to ones never before seen by many viewers.

Thomas Cole Historic Site in Catskill, NY.

Explore Thomas Cole website.

Wendy N. E. Ikemoto

April 11, 2018.

Wendy N. E. Ikemoto, Associate Curator of American Art at the New York Historical Society and former Vassar professor, talks about her new book Antebellum American Pendant Paintings: New Ways of Looking (Routledge, 2017).

Antebellum American Pendant Paintings: New Ways of Looking marks the first sustained study of pendant paintings: discrete images designed as a pair. It opens with a broad overview that anchors the form in the medieval diptych, religious history, and aesthetic theory and explores its cultural and historical resonance in the 19th-century United States. Three case studies examine how antebellum American artists used the pendant format in ways revelatory of their historical moment and the aesthetic and cultural developments in which they partook. The case studies on John Quidor’s Rip Van Winkle and His Companions at the Inn Door of Nicholas Vedder (1839) and The Return of Rip Van Winkle (1849) and Thomas Cole’s Departure and Return (1837) shed new light on canonical antebellum American artists and their practices. The chapter on Titian Ramsay Peale’s Kilauea by Day and Kilauea by Night (1842) presents new material that pushes the geographical boundaries of American art studies toward the Pacific Rim. The book contributes to American art history the study of a characteristic but as yet overlooked format and models for the discipline a new and productive framework of analysis focused on the fundamental yet complex way images work back and forth with one another.

 

Holly Peppe

February 8, 2017.   

Holly Peppe, scholar, editor, and literary executor for the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, discusses Millay's life, her work, the new edition of Millay's Selected Poems (Yale, 2016), and the exhibition "Treasures from Steepletop" on view in the Main Library, Art Library, and Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center from January 22 through June 11, 2017, in celebration of the centennial of Millay's graduation from Vassar College.

"Yale University Press’s edition of the Selected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay, superbly edited by Timothy Jackson, and with a brilliant introduction by Millay scholar Holly Peppe, constitutes a significant addition both to our understanding of Twentieth-Century American Poetry as well as to a fuller, more complex and balanced portrait of who the extraordinary poet Edna St. Vincent Millay was and—more importantly—is to readers searching for a more accurate picture of what made Modern Poetry modern. If she has been too often overlooked in the last half century and more, this edition will undoubtedly help restore Millay’s brilliant, witty, and tragic feminine voice to her rightful place among the company of Hart Crane, Frost, Williams, Pound, Eliot and Stevens."— Paul Mariani, Boston College

58:58 minutes.

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Edna St. Vincent Millay Society: http://millay.org 

Maureen Millea Smith

Rosemary Furtak and Maureen Millea Smith

February 1, 2017.

Minnesota writer and librarian Maureen Millea Smith, talks about her book of short stories, The Enigma of Iris Murphy (Livingson, 2016).

“Astonishing and original, these stories draw us into the singular world of Omaha public defender Iris Murphy and the interconnected relationships she shares with family, lovers and friends. Characters from all phases of her life serve as disparate lenses through which Iris and her fearless, compassionate vision is revealed. Iris is a force of love and sacrifice, guiding those around her to transform and redeem their lives.  Maureen Millea Smith gives us an unforgettable character who forever changes her corner of the world." -- Marianne Herrman, Signaling for Rescue.

“In her collection of linked stories, The Enigma of Iris Murphy, winner of the Tartt First Fiction Award, Edina author Maureen Millea Smith unpacks the enigma that is Iris by delving into the lives and the psyches of her friends, family members and lovers. The title story, for example, introduces us to Iris's confidant Paul Simmons, a gay recovering alcoholic ‘shoved out of the closet' by his ex-wife, newly in love with a man from his investment club. 'Life would have been far easier for him if he had married and divorced Iris Murphy,' he reflects over dinner, although he is not blind to her more irritating qualities. (‘It is the Irish in Iris that tends to make her a good girl martyr,' he observes, both annoyed and impressed.)" -- Rachel Sugar,  Minneapolis Star Tribune

57:56 minutes.

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Gloria Kury

November 9, 2016.

Art historian, editor, and publisher Gloria Kury (VC '65) talks about art history, literature, education, and the fabrication of the Renaissance in the 19th century and her book When Giorgione Died: A Rebuildungsroman in Two Volumes (Periscope, 2016).

"A memory book with a fierce verve for piercing the false enchantments of memory, its dangerous nostalgias, its zombies and composite monsters, its necrophilia and kitsch. Exuberantly in love with art, Gloria Kury works to disentangle the blind-paths of connoisseurship and historical scholarship, what so often gets forgotten there - and what hides in plain sight. A brilliant story teller herself, she trusts other storytellers - Shakespeare, Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Gaddis, Cindy Sherman among others - to lay bear the strangeness of things, even as she invites the wild-eyed prophets, the crystal gazers, the code breakers, the hypnotists, the psychics, the psychologists, the parapsychologists, the time travelers, the explorers of the fourth dimension to say their part. Seeded within this complex slide show is a sharp, cohesive, often comic and sometimes chilling meditation on how any life is lived and remembered, how smoke gets in your eyes." --  Kenneth Gross, author of The Dream of the Moving Statue and Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life

59:30 minutes.

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Rebecca Rego Barry

April 6, 2016.

Rebecca Rego Barry, editor of Fine Books & Collections magazine, discusses her book Rare Books Uncovered: True Stories of Fantastic Finds in Unlikely Places (Voyageur, 2015).

"Anyone who loves used and rare books has stories to tell about discovering gems in unlikely places. These tales become badges of honor for bibliophiles and no-one has more stories of literary discoveries than booksellers."   

-- Richard Davies,  Abebooks Reading Copy

57z;44 minutes

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Laurence McGilvery

September 24, 2014. SPECIAL PROGRAM FOR BANNED BOOKS WEEK :

La Jolla Bookseller Laurence McGilvery talks about his role in one of the Twentieth Century's most important literary censorship battles, the attempt on the part of a coalition of conservative groups to censor Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and McGilvery's own arrest and trial (People v. McGilvery, No. M-11466 San Diego Municipal Court, 1962) for selling a copy of the novel to an undercover San Diego police officer. His acquittal preceded by two years the U.S. Supreme court decision (Grove Press vs. Gerstein, 1964) that effectively put an end to the censorship of literary works on obscenity grounds.

This is a Twainesque story of epic strife, rife with humor and a remarkable cast of characters. For reasons that become clear in the telling, it may also be "the most remarkable censorship case that has ever been tried," as McGilvery and his lawyer turn the courtroom into a classroom and make close readers and discerning critics of the jury.

1:11:23 minutes.

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Eve Dunbar

October 9, 2013.

Vassar Associate Professor of English Eve Dunbar discusses African American writers abroad and her book Black Regions of the Imagination: African American Writers Between the Nation and the World, published this year by Temple University Press.

Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Chester Himes were all pressured by critics and publishers to enlighten mainstream (white) audiences about race and African American culture. Focusing on fiction and non-fiction they produced between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, Eve Dunbar's important book, Black Regions of the Imagination, examines how these African American writers—who lived and traveled outside the United States—both document and re-imagine their "homegrown" racial experiences within a worldly framework. 

53.30 min.

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Jennifer Phegley

May 13, 2008.

Jennifer Phegley, literary historian and professor of English at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, discusses her book: Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation, published by the Ohio State University Press.

43:35 min.

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Joshua Harmon

November 6, 2007

Vassar author Joshua Harmon talks about his first novel, Quinnehtukqut, described as a "magical postmodern epic [that] ranges across time, threading fragments of oral history, diaries, and news accounts into parallel tales of mystery, wonder, and tragedy."

60:26 min.

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