Jessica D. Brier

September 21, 2022.

Jessica D. Brier, Deknatel Curatorial Fellow in Photography at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, talks about her exhibition and takes us on a tour through the galleries of On the Grid: Ways of Seeing in Print, on view at the Center from August 20 through December 22, 2022.

The grid often hides in plain sight, from notepads and spreadsheets to halftone photographic reproductions. It dominates the organization, perception, and representation of the modern world, especially in print. Deeply embedded in a Western worldview, the grid visualizes control, mastery, and order. As an invisible framing device, it has become so pervasive that we habitually ignore it. Yet when artists call our attention to the grid, its layered meanings come fully into view. On the Grid: Ways of Seeing in Print surveys photographs, prints, artist’s books, and printed sculptures from the dynamic permanent collection of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College. From 19th-century scientific and portrait photography to avant-garde and conceptual photography; from mid- 20th-century Minimalist, Pop Art, and Op Art printmaking to experimental bookmaking and photography in the 21st century, this richly illustrated volume explores how artists have embraced, rejected, and reclaimed the grid. By altering and challenging perception, they offer new ways of seeing the world. 

Listen

Hester Blum

March 30, 2022.

Hester Blum, Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, discusses her book, The News at the Ends of the Earth: The Print Culture of Polar Exploration (Duke UP, 2019). 

"From Sir John Franklin's doomed 1845 search for the Northwest Passage to early twentieth-century sprints to the South Pole, polar expeditions produced an extravagant archive of documents that are as varied as they are engaging. As the polar ice sheets melt, fragments of this archive are newly emergent. In The News at the Ends of the Earth Hester Blum examines the rich, offbeat collection of printed ephemera created by polar explorers. Ranging from ship newspapers and messages left in bottles to menus and playbills, polar writing reveals the seamen wrestling with questions of time, space, community, and the environment. Whether chronicling weather patterns or satirically reporting on penguin mischief, this writing provided expedition members with a set of practices to help them survive the perpetual darkness and harshness of polar winters. The extreme climates these explorers experienced is continuous with climate change today. Polar exploration writing, Blum contends, offers strategies for confronting and reckoning with the extreme environment of the present."

Free e-text.

Listen

Changing Forms

Willem van Meiris, Portrait of Dina Margareta de Bye, 1705 o/c, The Leiden Collection, New York

November 17, 2021.

Elizabeth Nogrady (VC'99), Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Academic Programs at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar, Lara Yeager-Crasselt (VC'06) Curator of The Leiden Collection, and Ronald Patkus,  Associate Director of the Libraries for Special Collections and Associate Professor of History at Vassar on the Frederic Weyerhauser Chair, discuss the exhibition on view at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center entitled Changing Forms: Metamorphosis in Myth, Art, and Nature 1650-1700, on view September 28 - December 19, 2021 at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center.

This Focus Gallery exhibition explores the rich concept of metamorphosis—with links to art, myth, science, and the exchange of knowledge—in the late seventeenth-century Netherlands. The paintings, drawings, prints, and illustrated books on view include artists’ renderings of Ovid’s Metamorphoses from around 1600 by Virgil Solis, Abraham Bloemaert, and Hendrick Goudt. This tradition contributed to a dynamic moment later in the 1600s, when painters such as Godefridus Schalcken, Willem van Mieris, and Samuel van Hoogstraten created their own mythological imagery. Meanwhile, the book market for Ovid kept pace and contemporaries explored biological metamorphosis in lavishly illustrated insect studies like those by Johannes Goedaert, Jan Swammerdam, and Maria Sibylla Merian. Works in the exhibition come from Vassar collections and include significant loans from Cornell University, Bard College, Lehigh University, and The Leiden Collection—the preeminent private collection of Dutch art in the United States.

Listen

Celebrating Dante at Vassar

October 27, 2021.

Nancy Bisaha, Simona Bondavalli, Alberto Gelmi, Emma Iadanza, Elizabeth Nogrady and Ronald D. Patkus discuss the teaching of Dante at Vassar through the College's history, and the opening of a series of three simultaneous exhibitions  on view through December 4, 2021 in the Thompson Memorial Library and the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center under the collective title Celebrating Dante at Vassar, commemorating the 700th anniversary of Dante Aligheri's death on September 14, 1321. 

"Celebrating Dante at Vassar represents one way that the college is taking part in Dante activities this year. It is not meant to be a comprehensive study of interactions with Dante at the college; instead it aims to present essays that investigate key moments and aspects, written from several perspectives. Simona Bondavalli discusses the Dante Pilgrimage of 1921 and the early history of teaching Italian. Nancy Bisaha reflects on the interest in Dante among historians at Vassar and beyond. Ron Patkus presents highlights of the rare book collection in the Archives & Special Collections Library that relate to Dante, and Elizabeth Nogrady shares some resources in the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center." -- Andrew Ashton, Director of Libraries, Vassar College

Listen

Rachel Friedman and Ronald D. Patkus

May 9, 2018.

 Rachel Friedman, Associate Professor of Greek and Roman Studies  and Ronald D. Patkus, Associate Director of the Library for Special Collections at Vassar College, discuss their exhibition Homer's Odyssey: A Sampling of Editions in English 1616-2017, on view in the Frederick Thompson Library of Vassar College through June 16, 2018.

Homer’s Odyssey: A Sampling of Editions in English, 1616–2017,  explores key works housed in Vassar’s Archives & Special Collections Library and Main Library. Nineteen books, about a third of the total number of English translations, are on display. They include some high points in printing and Homeric studies. The first work is George Chapman’s edition of Homer, made famous by the poem about it that was penned by the Romantic John Keats “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” The most recent example in the exhibition is University of Pennsylvania Professor Emily Wilson’s translation, the first by a woman. In between are books notable for their literary qualities and/or aesthetic aspects: John Ogilby’s folio with large engraved illustrations; early editions by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes and by Alexander Pope; several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English offerings by writers such as William Cowper and William Morris; the first American translation, by William Cullen Bryant; a number of fine press editions, including the beautiful book designed by Bruce Rogers; and several mid and late twentieth-century examples, which have reached wide audiences. Together these works indicate an ongoing interest in the poem, while at the same time showing very different presentations.

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.

Michael Witmore

December 14, 2016.

Michael Witmore (VC '89), Shakespeare scholar and Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, talks about the Folger's mission, history, and public programs, and about Shakespeare as an educational force in American life on the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death. 

38:53 minutes

Listen

Alix Christie

February 18, 2015.  

Writer, journalist, and printer Alix Christie, (VC'80) talks about her historical novel, Gutenberg's Apprentice (Harper Collins, 2014).

"If ever there were a historical novel with up-to-the-minute resonance, this is it. As we go through another information revolution, Christie’s novel takes us back in brilliantly-observed detail to the first – the invention of the printing press. Her characters are engaging, the world as beautifully crafted as one of Gutenberg’s hot-metal letters, and the themes more relevant now than ever."

51:42 minutes

Listen

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.

Listen 

Lisa Gitelman

September 17, 2014. (SEASON OPENER):

Lisa Gitelman, Professor of English and of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, will discuss her book Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Duke University Press, 2014).

"Paper Knowledge is a remarkable book about the mundane: the library card, the promissory note, the movie ticket, the PDF (Portable Document Format). It is a media history of the document. Drawing examples from the 1870s, the 1930s, the 1960s, and today, Lisa Gitelman thinks across the media that the document form has come to inhabit over the last 150 years, including letterpress printing, typing and carbon paper, mimeograph, microfilm, offset printing, photocopying, and scanning. Whether examining late nineteenth century commercial, or "job" printing, or the Xerox machine and the role of reproduction in our understanding of the document, Gitelman reveals a keen eye for vernacular uses of technology. She tells nuanced, anecdote-filled stories of the waning of old technologies and the emergence of new. Along the way, she discusses documentary matters such as the relation between twentieth-century technological innovation and the management of paper, and the interdependence of computer programming and documentation. Paper Knowledge is destined to set a new agenda for media studies."

42:10 minutes.

Listen 

Elizabeth Eisenstein

May 28, 2014. (SEASON FINALE):

Elizabeth Eisenstein (VC'45), author of the massively influential history on the impact of the introduction of printing on Western society, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (2 vols., Cambridge 1979), will discuss her book Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West (U Penn, 2011).

"Eisenstein's research is impressive, reaching far and wide across languages and centuries. Her knowledge of the history of publication engages the wealth of recent scholarship and extends as far back as Roman copyists. . . . Her breadth enables her to identify topoi and their mutations; to observe long-term trends, diminishing ripples, and delayed reactions; and to distinguish what is new or newly dressed in authors' concerns and readers' complaints."— Journal of Scholarly Publishing

45:57 minutes.

Listen