Jen Library Archives and Special Collections

When we find new and interesting things in the Don Bluth Collection of Animation, we are always excited to share them. During spring break our graduate student assistant, Ryan Long, worked tirelessly to process boxes upon boxes of merchandise, only stopping when she ran out of archival boxes. With Ryan’s help, we selected several items from Anastasia to display, including books, a press kit, and even a bubble-bath bottle. You can see these items through our windows or as always, please come in to take a better look!

We love Alphabet books! They come in such a vast array of subject matters and formats. The Alphabet book got its start teaching children their ABCs while providing cute and memorable examples of words beginning with each letter. Often, there are engaging pictures or cute rhymes. We have a small display of some of our favorites Alphabet books out in Special Collections. Our small exhibit contains mostly artists’ books, with a few pop-up books and one or two others. Most of our books are not really written for children, but are just taking advantage of the genre to make a beautiful or interesting book. Come in and take a look. Here is a preview of a few titles:

White Alphabet, X, Y, and Z

The White Alphabet, by Ronald King at the Circle Press, is one of the most intricately crafted of our books. It is a double-sided concertina alphabet book, without text. Each fold opens up to reveal a pop-up letter, exquisitely crafted of RWS hand-made paper and sandwiched between inlaid wooden boards.

The Gorey Alphabet, front cover.

The Gorey Alphabet by Edward Gorey is an entire alphabet of terrible occupations and pastimes, such as Fetishist or Xenophobe. There is nothing like Gorey’s macabre sense of humor. No cute and cuddly animal friends or bright colorful illustrations grace these pages. This is an alphabet book for only the most fearless of children, and of course, all who appreciate such things.

Jungle Alphabet, Queen.

Michael Roberts is an artist for The New Yorker magazine, a photographer, filmmaker, and fashion writer. His Jungle ABC is a colorful, beautifully conceived, collaged alphabet book using imagery from Africa. Perhaps the average child might not appreciate the beauty of this world as much as the adults, but we love the vibrant energy of this alphabet. With its exotic words to learn and fascinating images to decipher, it is definitely an entertaining book. The book is forwarded by model, Iman, who talks about inspiration found in the mystery and power of the jungle.

ABC-3D, I and J.

ABC–3D, by Marion Bataille, is another pop-up book that won awards for being the best children’s book of the year. It has a lenticular cover that changes letters as you shift the book. The color scheme is graphically interesting in red, white, and black. The book does more than just pop-up. Some of the pages have movement, such as the pinwheel S. Robert Sabuda called it “One of the most delightful and innovative pop-up books I have ever seen.”

Tool Alphabet, L is for Level.

A Tool Alphabet, by Laura Davidson is an artists’ book we like a lot. Beautiful printed tools and letters are on each page. The book is offset printed, with an embossed cover and held together with copper grommets. Some of the tools are not ones I recognize, but then, my experience with hardware may be somewhat limited.

Come and join us for another fun open house, this time focusing on library materials that support programs in the School of Building Arts. Everyone is welcome to attend, though, regardless of your area of interest. We will have on display a collection of architectural drawings from the Central of Georgia Railway, as well as books and periodicals relating to building arts. Additionally, items related to historic Savannah’s architecture, landscape, history, business, and culture will be available for viewing in display cases on the first floor.

The Building Arts Open House is this Wednesday, September 29, 3-7 pm.

If you have a chance to travel to our Atlanta Campus before April 16th, be sure to visit the Trois Gallery to see “No Translation Required: Artists’ Books in Germany and Georgia.” The exhibition includes 60 wonderful Artists’ Books from the collections of the Klingspor Museum and the ACA Library of SCAD, as well as student work from SCAD and the University of the Arts, Braunschweig. If you can’t make it there, visit the ACA Library of SCAD’s blog for lots of great images and more information.

During the summer of 2009, a three week collaborative project was begun between SCAD and the University of Arts in Braunschweig, Germany. With funding provided by the Halle Foundation, nine SCAD students and two professors traveled to Germany to create artists’ books with students and faculty of the University of the Arts. The Halle Foundation facilitates programs that promote understanding, knowledge, and friendship between Germany and the United States through exchanges of art, culture, and other initiatives.

The opening of the exhibit coincided with “Variant Hues: Art, Design and Teaching with Artists’ Books,” on March 12-13. This was SCAD’s third Annual Artists’ Book Symposium of workshops, lectures, and a juried competition of student artist’s book entries.  An awards ceremony took place on March 12. Guest artist Macy Chadwick, Professor at the Academy of Art University and San Francisco Art Institute and publisher of artists’ books and limited-edition prints, lectured on March 13.

In October, the exhibition will travel to Germany to the Klingspor Museum in Offenbach am Main. Read the Press Release.

Zbigniew Jozwik, Autumn, Linoleum Cut International Grafik, Volume 7, number 3

For all of you print and engraving aficionados, we have a new mini exhibit in the Reading Room. We put several books and periodicals with beautiful examples of wood engraving and other printing processes on display. Several of the books were from a series on wood engravers called Engraver’s Cut, published by the Primrose Academy (Primrose Hill Press) in London. The press is dedicated to the publication and promotion of the art of engraving on wood for use as book illustration and as an art form.
Other examples are from International Grafik, a Danish art revue, edited between 1969 and 1980 by Helmer Fogedgaard and Klaus Rödel. It published in a numbered edition of 1000 copies and concentrated almost exclusively woodcuts, wood engravings, and linocuts, printed from the original blocks or plates. The text in was in English, Danish, German and French. International Grafik is new to our collection and each issue contains up to 30 original prints as well as articles. We have almost a complete run of this wonderful, but lesser known periodical. To see more on International Grafik, see the Adventures in the Print Trade blog. There you will find an article about Czech printers and some inspiring examples of wood engravings and linocuts exhibited as well.
Wood cuts and wood engraving differ in that the wood cut utilizes the soft side grain and the wood engraving is cut in to the end grain of the wood. The end grain allows for more precise, detailed images to be created. Both processes could be used in conjunction with printing presses, a great commercial asset in the 19th century. The linoleum cut or linocut utilizes a similar technique to wood engraving, but the process is much simpler and the materials less costly. It was originally thought to be a poor man’s or amateur’s engraving technique, but the results can be far different than wood, however, and when artists such as Matisse or Picasso created prints using linocuts, the medium gained popularity.
Some full text books on wood engraving are also available on a site about woodblock printing utilizing Japanese methods: David Bull’s Encyclopedia of Woodblock Printing

Fall Quarter sneaked in so fast that before we knew it, we were already in the 3^rd week ! If you missed Behind the Cels: Selections from SCAD’s Don Bluth Collection in Atlanta over the summer, you can see an abbreviated version at Poetter Hall, in the second floor gallery. It only has art from Banjo, Secret of NIMH, and Dragon’s Lair, but if you find yourself near Poetter Hall, take a few minutes to go in and see it. We are very pleased to be able to share the collection with the Savannah Campus!

We have resumed evening hours—we are here until 8:00 PM on Monday evenings. So if our daytime hours don’t suit your busy schedule, come and see us on Monday evening. Remember that if you have a very difficult schedule, we can always work out an alternate way for you to use Special Collections materials. Just contact us and let us know!

We have a small display of new books in the Special Collections Reading Room. They cover a wide variety of topics and formats, and include Artists’ Books, facsimiles of Medieval manuscripts, fine press books, books on fashion, architecture, and limited editions sequential titles. Stop in and take a look.

Mrs. Brisby, Color Model, The Secret of NIMH

We are so excited here in Special Collections! 88 items from the Don Bluth Collection of Animation are at the Frame Shop getting matted and framed and then are traveling on to Atlanta to be exhibited in Gallery See at the SCAD Atlanta Campus from July 7-31. We have been working on selection of the materials for the exhibition for months. The exhibition is being held in conjunction with the Society for Animation Studies Annual Conference. Please join us for opening reception from 6-8 PM on July 9th in Gallery See. Part of the exhibit will be in the Artist’s Book Room of the Library. There is even a rumor that Gary Goldman might attend.

This is the first time we have exhibited the Bluth Collection since it arrived at SCAD in 2005. Donated by Gary Goldman and Don Bluth, the collection is huge and will take years to process completely, but what is processed is available to researchers now. The collection was given to the college to be used as a teaching tool for students and faculty. Classes in Animation, Sequential Arts, Cinema Studies, and Illustration have found inspiration in the many drawings, backgrounds, cels, model sheets, and other materials from the collection. This spring, in addition to Professors bringing in classes, a group of students from Weston Hall came with their RA to view selections from the collection. We are happy to have an ever increasing number of people interested in this amazing resource!

The Society for Animation Studies Annual Conference will be from July 10-12. All the information you may need about the conference, including details on registration, is on their very exhaustive conference blog. If you are a SCAD student or faculty member with a current ID, registration is at the door and is free.

We have posted some of our favorites for a little preview of the exhibition, or for those who cannot make it.

Jen Library’s Special Collections recently acquired one of the foremost resources in Color Theory of our day. Formulation: Articulation, by Josef Albers, in collaboration with Ives-Sillman, a team of Albers’ ex-students, and publisher Harry N. Abrams in 1972 arrived in two large gray fabric covered slipcases this month.  The set of two large folios each contain 33 folders, 127 prints in all, silk screened on white wove Mohawk Superfine paper that demonstrate the tenets of Albers’ theory of color interaction.  It took nearly two years to produce the new prints.  Albers chose the order of the 127 prints carefully so that their visual interactions could be studied and understood.  They appear alone or in groups of two or more together. Works were selected from a forty year exploration of color, form, and interaction. However, the images do not appear in chronological order.  Albers wrote Statements of Content for each folder to further explain his studies and observations.  The publication is considered to be the culmination of Albers work and ideas on the relationship between color and environment.  But, the prints can also be appreciated as beautiful works of art.

We have a few of the scans of the prints available on our Albers exhibit page and there a few more available on the Visual Resources Database.  If you want to see more of Albers’ work, Artstor, available from the library’s research databases, recently announced that they now have the collection of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in their database.   According to the Artstor blog, over 2,100 images in this collection, including photographs, paintings, prints, objects, and furniture design by Albers and textiles by his wife, Anni Albers.

Josef Albers was born on March 19, 1888 in born Bottrop, Ruhr District, Germany.  He trained as a teacher and began his career after completing teaching college in 1908.  Around that time, he began to travel to museums in Munich and Berlin and saw the works of Cezanne, Matisse, and others.  In 1915, he moved to Berlin to study to become an art teacher.  He studied painting and printmaking processes and received his first commissioned work in 1918.  He went on to study in Munich at the Royal Bavarian Art Academy, and in 1920, enrolled in the Bauhaus and took the Preliminary Course in materials and design.  The course was taught by Johannes Itten, a Swiss Expressionist and an innovator in Color Theory.  While at the Bauhaus, Itten formulated his ideas to define and identify strategies and methodologies for coordinating colors for successful color combinations. Albers completed the Preliminary Course and an independent study in stained glass.  In 1922, he was appointed a “journeyman” and placed in charge of the Bauhaus glass workshop.  It was around this time that he met Anneliese Fleischmann, a student in textile design. In 1925, the couple married.

Johannes Itten left the Bauhaus in 1923 and Albers, together with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, taught the Preliminary Course in material and design. He designed stained glass, furniture, household objects, and even a typeface.   He also began writing articles and presenting papers.  He and Anni traveled and photographed their travels.  Albers published his work on his educational method and philosophy, “Werklicher Formunterricht,” in the journal Bauhaus.  In 1930, when Mies van der Rohe becomes director of the Bauhaus, Albers became assistant director.  His works continued in glass and furniture design and he resumed printmaking as well.

After the Bauhaus was closed by the Nazi government in 1933, Albers was invited to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.  He was recommended by Philip Johnson, then director of the department of architecture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Though Albers did not speak English and did not know where North Carolina was, he accepted. He became one of America’s most important and original teachers of art.  At Black Mountain, his students included Robert Rauschenberg, Ray Johnson, Ruth Asawa, Kenneth Noland, and Susan Weil. Other faculty members included Walter Gropius, John Cage, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Ilya Bolotowsky.  It was said of Albers that as a teacher, he was “his own academy.” Albers stayed at Black Mountain until 1949, when internal problems came to a head and several faculty members resigned.  He then went on to become the head of the Department of Design at Yale University School of Art, remaining in that position until 1958, when he assumed the position of Visiting Professor until 1960.  In 1963, Yale University Press published Josef Albers’ Interactions of Color, the definitive work on color theory and a masterwork in twentieth-century art education. Albers conceived the book as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students.  It presented Albers’ unique ideas of color experimentation as a limited silkscreen edition with 150 color plates.

After Albers retired from teaching, he continued to work, designing murals, building facades, and sculptures, painting, and writing.  He received several honorary degrees and awards.  A number of museums hosted major retrospective exhibits of his work. In 1971, he was the first living artist ever to be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.   In 1972, he published Formulation: Articulation in collaboration with Ives-Sillman and publisher Harry N. Abrams.  It consisted of two portfolios each with 33 folders of prints.  It is considered not an exhibition of his art, but an embodiment of his teaching philosophy and documentation of the visual exercises accompanying his instruction.

Albers’s color studies demonstrated that color is the most relative medium in art. He based his teachings on his own experiences.  Albers found it necessary to invent a new vocabulary to present his ideas and to develop experimental problems to challenge his students and to facilitate understanding of the concepts. He utilized laboratory assignments to provide students with the tools to gain an understanding of how colors work together or in opposition.   He thought that people usually do not perceive what color is physically.  He urged his students to question their vision and to rethink what they saw.  He thought that each color had its own properties, ambiguities, and densities, offering uncertainties.  Colors could be manipulated by changing their color environments and can appear to be translucent when opaque and vice versa.   He referred to the mutual influencing of colors as interaction.

Such color deceptions prove that we see colors almost never unrelated to each other and therefore unchanged; that color is changing continually: with changing light, with changing shape and placement, and with quantity which denotes either amount (a real extension) or number (recurrence). And just as influential are changes in perception depending on changes of mood, and consequently of receptiveness. “Words of a Painter”, 1970.

Albers died in Connecticut at the age of 88 in 1976.

While at the Black Mountain College Summer Institute in 1945, student Margaret Williams Peterson took careful notes and preserved her assignments from her class with Albers.  Her notes and assignments can be found at the Black Mountain College Project’s website: Joseph Albers Color and Joseph Albers Design.

Sources:

Albers, Josef.  “Words of a Painter.”Art Education, Vol. 23, No. 9 (Dec., 1970), pp. 34-35

Black Mountain Project: http://www.bmcproject.org/BMC%20PROJECT/mission.htm

The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation

http://www.albersfoundation.org/Home.php

Josef Albers Biography

http://www.kunstwissen.de/fach/f-kuns/b_mod/albers.htm

Josef Albers, photograph by Arnold Newman, 1948. Retrieved document.write(mm[new Date().getMonth()][1]); November  document.write(new Date().getDate()); 17,  document.write(new Date().getFullYear()); 2008, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online: http://0-www.search.eb.com.library.scad.edu:80/eb/art-8245

Yale University Press

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300115956

The Savannah College of Art and Design has been a strong champion for Historic Preservation in the city of Savannah. Their first project, the National Guard Armory, begun in March, 1979, provided classroom, administrative, and studio space for the school when it opened its doors in September, 1979. This begun a tradition that continues into the present of restoring some of the architectural treasures of the city and adapting them for use by the College. More than 60 buildings have been restored and the positive impact on Savannah is apparent everywhere.

Special Collections houses a collection of postcards of Savannah and environs, the Savannah Postcard Collection, MS 016. A number of these postcards depict buildings that were later purchased and refurbished by SCAD into classroom, residence, or other usable space for the College. The exhibit showcases a number of these buildings. We also offer a brief background for each. We are continually looking for postcards of Savannah that depict SCAD buildings in their former life and will gratefully accept donations.

For more information on the history of postcards, go to our Postcard Collection page.  Take a look at our exhibit at Before They Were SCAD Buildings: An Exhibit of Postcards.

Special Collections is making use of its small but prime exhibit space by exhibiting a group of books from our collection that represent the Art of the Book. The exhibit includes artists’ books, art press books, and pop-up books. It would be a pleasure to be able to provide a definitive definition of what constitutes an artists’ book, but it seems that even the experts don’t agree. If you are interested in an online discussion on the topic, the Book Arts Web has a lively debate taken from their listserv.

Special Collections takes a fairly conservative view that an artist book is a book made by an artist (or possibly just an artistic person) and follows many of the conventions of book publishing. These conventions include paper crafts such as paper-making, paper arts, cutting, folding, and marbling; binding techniques; typography; and various printing techniques. While the edition is often quite limited in number, it must be in an edition of more than one copy. Otherwise, the book could be described as a work of art that resembles a book. We have included pop-up books in our exhibit because they employ a level of paper craft that is very much a part of the artists’ book tradition. We have also included art press books. The difference between an artists’ book and an art press book may be very hard to discern. An art press book may also use unusual paper crafting, bookbinding techniques, and typography. They may also be in fairly limited editions. The difference is that the art of the artists’ book is from the artist, where the art of the art press book is from the printer or publisher.

There are many opportunities for internships, residencies, grants, etc. through various programs and many of these programs also sell artists’ books on their site.  One such site, the Women’s Studio Workshop, offers classes and also rents studio space as well.  There are numerous other opportunities, as well.

If you cannot come to Special Collections to see our exhibit, we brought a bit of it to you. Our online exhibit includes a list of books with images of the covers and some of the insides as well to be added in the next few days.