Scripps College will host a panel of noted book arts scholars and artists at the Frederic W. Goudy Symposium on Saturday, January 27. The day-long symposium will examine the lasting impact that the 19th-century French poet Mallarmé has had on book artists throughout the 20th century. For symposium registration information, please contact the Scripps College Press at (909) 607-3866.
The symposium, Mallarmé’s Coup d’Etat: The Rise of the Artists’ Book, was organized by Professor Kitty Maryatt ’66, a book artist and director of the Press, who has brought together a group of noted scholars and book artists to explore the thesis that the writings of Mallarmé about the nature of the book and the space of the page instigated the artists’ book movement.
Betty Bright, Johanna Drucker, Judd Hubert, Clifton Meador, and Buzz Spector will discuss the graphic work of the Italian and Russian Futurists, the ground-breaking Sonia Delaunay/Blaise Cendrars publication La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France, the work of the Russian Iliazd, the rise of concrete poetry, the 1960s shift to democratic multiples, fine press artists’ books, and the rise of the sculptural bookwork.
Exhibitions at Scripps College ‘s Clark Humanities Museum and Scripps’ Denison Library on the relationship between image and text are on view concurrently with the symposium.
Scripps College’s Clark Humanities Museum’s exhibition A Throw of the Dice: Variations on Mallarmé’s Visual Poem first appeared as A Throw of the Dice: Artists Inspired by a Visual Text, at the University of California-Irvine Langson Library in 2003-04. The exhibition honors co-curators Renée Riese Hubert, who died in 2005, and Judd D. Hubert, both of whom published prolifically on image-text inquiry and who were instrumental in establishing it as a field of scholarly investigation.
Judd Hubert curated, in collaboration with Judy Harvey Sahak ’64, the Sally Preston Swan Librarian at Scripps’ Denison Library, a second exhibition at Denison Library titled A Poetic Coup d’Etat: Mallarmé’s Influence on Artists’ Books. The exhibit includes materials from Denison’s Rare Book Room that were selected for their affinity with the Mallarméan aesthetic.
The exhibitions and symposium fit within a distinguished Scripps tradition of events related to book arts, as well as to the College’s long-standing commitment to inter- and cross-disciplinary studies. An accompanying catalog, which includes an essay by Judd Hubert on Mallarmé’s influence on contemporary artists’ books, will be available at the symposium.
The exhibition catalog was funded by a grant from the Book Club of California and further funding was provided by the Scripps College Press and a generous gift from former Scripps trustee MaryLou Boones and George Boone.