Wendy N. E. Ikemoto

John Frederick Kensett (1816–1872), View from Cozzens’ Hotel, near West Point, N.Y., 1863 [detail]
Oil on canvas

November 27, 2019.

Wendy Ikemoto, Associate Curator of American Art at the New-York Historical Society Museum & Library, discusses her exhibition: Panoramas: The Big Picture, on view at the Society through December 8, 2019.

Panoramas: The Big Picture explores the history and continued impact of panoramas from the 17th to the 21st century, as they were used to create spatial illusions, map places, and tell stories. Highlights include John Trumbull’s sweeping double vistas of Niagara Falls (1808), sections of Richard Haas’ nearly 200-foot long trompe l’oeil panorama of Manhattan (1982), and Eadweard Muybridge’s 17-foot photographic panorama of San Francisco before the city’s devastating 1906 earthquake (1878). The exhibition examines and reveals the impact that these and other panoramas had on everything from mass entertainment to nationalism to imperial expansion.

Ronald D. Patkus

The Twelve Apostles, Stamperia del Santuccio, 1965 (Image courtesy of Bridwell Library Special Collections, Perkins School of Theology, S.M.U.)

April 25, 2018.

Historian Ronald D. Patkus, Associate Director of the Library for Special Collections at Vassar College, talks about his recent book The Privately Printed Bible: Private and Fine Press Editions of Biblical Texts in the British Isles and North America 1892-2000 (Oak Knoll 2017).

The Privately Printed Bible is the first book to offer a broad survey of the history of private and fine press printings of biblical texts. Author Ronald Patkus focuses on English-language examples from the United Kingdom, Ireland, and North America, and includes more than 500 works in his study. He begins with the late nineteenth century revival of printing which took place in England under the influence of William Morris, and continues on through the twentieth century. Along the way he describes key texts, such as the Doves Bible, the Oxford Lectern Bible, the Golden Cockerel Four Gospels, the Spiral Press Ecclesiastes, the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible, and the Arion Press Bible. He also discusses lesser-known works that are part of the story.

Patricia Phagan and Peter van Alfen

February 15, 2017.

Patricia Phagan, Philip and Lynn Strauss Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center and Peter van Alfen, Margaret Thompson Curator of Ancient Greek Coins at the American Numismatic Society in New York, discuss their exhibition: The Art of Devastation: Medals and Posters of the Great War, on view at the Loeb Center January 27 - April 9, 2017.


39:41 minutes.

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Adam Michaels and Jeffrey T. Schnapp

October 26, 2016.

In a new installment of our series on the role of liberal arts education in contemporary society, c0-authors Adam Michaels, principle designer at Project Projects and founder of Inventory Press, and Jeffrey T. Schnapp (VC'75), Co-director of the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society and Faculty Director of the Harvard Graduate School of Design's knowledge design studio metaLAB, talk about their reissue of Blueprint for Counter Education (Inventory, 2016).

"Perhaps one of the most extraordinary books ever issued by an American commercial publisher.” —Richard Kostelanetz

"Blueprint for Counter Education is one of the defining (but neglected) works of radical pedagogy of the Vietnam War era. Originally published in 1970 and integrated into the design of the Critical Studies curriculum at CalArts, the book was accompanied by large graphic posters that could serve as a portable learning environment for a new process-based model of education, and a bibliography and checklist that map patterns and relationships between radical thought and artistic practices—from the avant-gardes to postmodernism—with Marcuse and McLuhan serving as points of anchorage."

Blueprint Archive

43:22 minutes.

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Mindell Dubansky

February 24, 2015.  

Mindell Dubansky, Preservation Librarian at the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, talks about her collection of "blooks" -- objects disguised as books -- on view at the Grolier Club in New York through March 12 entitled "Blooks -- The Art of Books That Aren't."

58:26 minutes.

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About Blooks:  http://aboutblooks.blogspot.com/

Grolier Club:  http://www.grolierclub.org/

Jeffrey T. Schnapp

February 4, 2015.

Harvard cultural historian and media theorist Jeffrey T. Schnapp (VC'75), Co-director of the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society and founding Faculty Director of the Harvard Graduate School of Design's knowledge design studio metaLAB, talks about his new book, co-authored with Matthew Battles, entitled The Library Beyond the Book (Harvard, 2014), as well as about the Library Test Kitchen and experiments in library interfaces for the digital age.  

"With textbook readers and digital downloads proliferating, it is easy to imagine a time when printed books will vanish. Such forecasts miss the mark, argue Jeffrey Schnapp and Matthew Battles. Future bookshelves will not be wholly virtual, and libraries will thrive, although in a variety of new social, cultural, and architectural forms. Schnapp and Battles combine deep study of the library's history with a record of institutional and technical innovation at metaLAB, a research group at the forefront of the digital humanities. They gather these currents in The Library Beyond the Book, exploring what libraries have been in the past to speculate on what they will become: hybrid places that intermingle books and ebooks, analog and digital formats, paper and pixels."

56.34 minutes.

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Johanna Drucker

October 29, 2014.

Scholar, artist, printer, and visual theorist Johanna Drucker, Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, discusses her book Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Harvard 2014).

"Information graphics bear tell-tale signs of the disciplines in which they originated: statistics, business, and the empirical sciences. Drucker makes the case for studying visuality from a humanistic perspective, exploring how graphic languages can serve fields where qualitative judgments take priority over quantitative statements of fact. Graphesis offers a new epistemology of the ways we process information, embracing the full potential of visual forms and formats of knowledge production."

48:20  minutes

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