Collins Unbound

*EXHIBITS: We are pleased to host the following exhibit in the Collins Link:
Louder Than Words: A Portrait of the Black Panther Movement: (February 1-May 15, 2018)
Full list of library exhibits (past, present and future)

FEBRUARY

• Exhibit: “Louder Than Words: A Portrait of the Black Panther Movement”, (February 1-May 15, 2018)  The Link, Collins Library.
  Curated by Black Panther Party Archivist and Historian Bill Jennings, Louder than Words: A Portrait of the Black Panther Movement focuses on the Party’s social justice and community programs. The exhibit features a broad range of artifacts, including original pamphlets, newspapers, memorabilia and books on the Black Panther reading list. The Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland, California, by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton while they attended college. Motivated by the Civil Rights Movement, the assassination of Malcolm X, and riots in Los Angeles, the initial impetus for the party was to protect local African American neighborhoods against police brutality. However, the party was more than armed patrols. It also established free breakfast programs, health clinics, and some of the first drug education programs. Billy Jennings grew up in San Diego and moved to Oakland in June 1968. He was a member of the Black Panther Party from 1968 to 1974. He currently works to maintain the legacy of the Black Panther Party, running the website It’s About Time which was started by former members of the Black Panther Party in Sacramento in 1995.
• Monday, Feb. 12:  A Conversation with Bill Jennings, 4:00-6:00pm, Trimble Forum.
  

MARCH

Frankenweek! Celebrating the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. Proudly presented by the STS program and Collins Memorial Library:

• Monday, March 26, discussion of the novel’s literary and film history, and its connections to science and society. 12:00-1:30pm, Thompson 193.
• Wednesday, March 28, Shelley and Frankenstein: In the Makerspace,
  3:00-5:00pm, Collins Library, Makerspace.
• Thursday, March 29, Frankie, the Safety-pins Keeper: In the Makerspace, 5:00-6:00pm, Collins Library, Makerspace.

APRIL

• Thursday, April 5:  Letterpress Printing: Jennifer Farrell, Starshaped Press, 4:00-6:00pm, Archives & Special Collections Seminar Room, Collins Library.  Since 1999, Jennifer Farrell has operated Starshaped Press in Chicago, focusing on printing everything from business cards to posters, as well as custom commissions, wholesale ephemera and limited edition prints & books. All work in the studio is done with metal and wood type, making Starshaped one of the few presses in the country producing commercial work while preserving antique type and related print materials. Jennifer’s work has been repeatedly recognized both in print and design blogs, and has appeared in poster shows throughout the USA and Europe. Work can be viewed at www.starshaped.com.
• Thursday, April 12:  Booklyn: Supporting Artists’ Books and Social Justice, 11:30am-12:30pm, Archives & Special Collections Seminar Room, Collins Library. Marshall Weber, founder of Booklyn, will be sharing examples of the most recent work of artists. Booklyn’s mission is to promote artists’ books as art and research material and to assist artists and organizations in documenting, exhibiting, and distributing their artworks and archives. Booklyn helps artists document, exhibit, and distribute their artwork and provides the general public and educational institutions with services and programs involving contemporary artists’ publications and works on paper. Booklyn assists artists in inventorying and cataloging their archives and collections and finds institutions to acquire, conserve, and provide access to these resources. Booklyn has created a global network connecting hundreds of artists and educational organizations.Marshall Weber lives in New York City. He has significant bodies of work in the media of: artists’ books, collage, drawing, printing, video, and public endurance performances. He has curated 100’s of exhibitions around the world since the 1980’s and he is known for his outspoken advocacy for artists and cultural organizations that work outside of the conventional academic and commercial art world. Weber received his MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1981, and went on to co-found Artists Television Access, one of the longest (still) running alternative media art centers in the US. Weber was an Interdisciplinary Arts Fellow of both the New York Foundation for the Arts and the McKnight Foundation. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Art Matters. In 1999 he was co-founder and is now Curator of the Booklyn Artists Alliance, where he has recently organized several innovative funding projects for activist arts organizations, including co-producing a fine art print portfolio to benefit the Occuprint Project of the Occupy Wall Street movement and working on arts projects with: Bulletspace, EZLN (Zapatistas), Food Not Bombs, IVAW (Iraq Veterans Against the War), Justseeds, World War Three Illustrated and many other organizations. He designed Booklyn’s international archive program which helps underrepresented artists and organizations catalog and place their archives in appropriate educational institutions. In 2012 he and Xu Bing curated the acclaimed Diamond Leaves exhibit which was the first major museum exhibition of artists’ books in China. It has since become a Triennial event. In 2017 Weber was the keynote speaker at the Codex Foundation Symposium.
  (source: http://booklyn.org/archive/index.php/Detail/Entity/Show/entity_id/792)
• Thursday, April 12: A Poetry Reading by Local Poet, Glenna Cook, 4:00-5:00pm, Archives & Special Collections Seminar Room, Collins Library.
  April is National Poetry Month! To celebrate, the Library will host a poetry reading by Puget Sound alumna, Glenna Cook. She holds a B.A. in English Literature and, while at Puget Sound, she won the Hearst Essay Prize for the Humanities and the Nixeon Civille Handy Prize for Poetry. Glenna will be reading from her first full-length poetry collection, Thresholds, which was published in 2017. Thresholds features over 100 poems that explore family narratives and life’s complex events, infused with a unique sense of language. Q & A to follow.

Past events blog: Fall 2017 | Summer 2017 | Spring 2017 | Spring 2018 | Summer/Fall 2018 | Fall 2018

Colette Fu received her M.F.A. 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 Vogue China, Canon Asia, Moët Hennessy–Louis Vuitton, and the Delaware Disaster Research Center. Her pop-up books are included in the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Library of Congress, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the West Collection, and many private and rare archive collections. In 2014, Fu attended a 6-month artist residency at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai, where she continued her We are Tiger Dragon project, an extensive visual exploration of China’s ethnic minorities. There she also designed China’s largest (single-spread) pop-up book, measuring 2.5 x 5 x 1.7 meters high.

In her own words: “Pop-up and flap books originally illustrated ideas about astronomy, fortune telling, navigation, anatomy of the body, and other scientific principles. This history prompted me to construct my own books reflecting ideas on how our selves relate to society today. My pop-ups are a way for me to speak and inform; the real and implied motion in the pop-ups link to a temporal element and an inevitable corollary is to awe and unsettle. Constructing pop-ups allows me to combine intuitive design and technical acuity with my love of traveling as I try to understand the world around me. With pop-up books I want to eliminate the boundaries between people, book, installation, photography, craft, sculpture.”