The Book is Culture

Clif Meador
September 22, 2012
7:00pm
Scripps College Humanities Auditorium

It is obvious that the book plays an important role in cultural identity. The technologies of the book, i.e., the ways books are made, are also culturally significant. This lecture will present two very different approaches to making books: traditional Tibetan books, and Ethiopian hand-made manuscripts, as examples of how cultural identity is indelibly embedded in technology.

Clifton Meador combines writing, photography, printmaking, and design to make books that explore how the narratives of culture, history, and place are the basis for identity. His work is in many major collections of book art, including the Library of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Yale Art of the Book collection. He recently collaborated on a three-year project, funded by the Rubin Foundations, to document the Derge Parkhang, an eighteenth-century Tibetan Printing temple in Ganze Autonomous Prefecture in China. He has been twice the recipient of a NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts) fellowship and was a Fulbright Scholar to the Republic of Georgia. He is the chair of the Interdisciplinary Arts Department at Columbia College Chicago, home to the Interdisciplinary MFA in Book and Paper, a graduate program that considers the book arts and papermaking as sites for interdisciplinary investigation.

Please note that Frederic W. Goudy Lectures are free and open to the public.

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