Everyday Poems for City Sidewalk

The city of Saint Paul’s Public Artist in Residence, Marcus Young, is working in tandem with the city’s sidewalk maintenance program to install poetry where sidewalks are replaced. The project is called Everyday Poems for City Sidewalk and in its first year has the goal of one hundred stampings of twenty poems written by Saint Paul residents. Young says:

Sidewalks are the blank pages of our city as a book. If you look closely, however, you see traces of text, such as Knutson Construction or Standard Sidewalk, stamped discreetly into some of the panels. I wondered if we could borrow this simple stamping idea, enlarge the stamp to a prominent size, and give our poets this everyday public space for writing.

We held a poetry contest open to all residents of Saint Paul and received more than 2000 original poems. The outpouring of verse was unexpected and heartwarming. Poems about spring and winter, mothers and fathers, love, and many other things imaginable reassured us that in Saint Paul we lead poetic lives. Through an anonymous judging process, our thoughtful panel chose twenty winners and fourteen honorable mentions. We made large stamps of the winning poems and teamed up with the city’s sidewalk maintenance program with the goal of one-hundred stampings this construction season.

First seen here. The website for the project is here and includes pictures of the plates they made, the poems, like the one below, and more.

Everyday Poems for City Sidewalk

Ampersands for Haiti

The Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA) recently released “Coming Together,” a font entirely of ampersands, created to benefit the victims of the recent earthquake in Haiti. The ampersands represent the idea of people coming together to help one another. The font is for sale for $20US from Veer, Ascender Fonts, Fontshop and MyFonts , with all sales going to Doctors Without Borders. This is the fourth project of Font Aid, an initiative started by Swedish designer Claes Källarsson to facilitate the creation of collaborative fonts to raise funds for those affected by natural disasters, war and other tragedies. More info, including the list of various font designers who contributed as well as more pictures of larger ampersands, here.

manyampersands.png

V&A Pattern Series

I’ve been looking around for inspiration for collage-making. Twenty years ago, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London put out a series of four books with a curated sampling from their collection of pattern designs. Each book in the set has 65 patterns from diverse holdings such as wallpapers, designs and textiles and grouped around a different theme. Last October they reissued the books with a bonus: each volume — The Fifties, Digital Pioneers, William Morris, and Indian Florals — comes with a CD of all the images from the book tucked into the back cover. Soon they are releasing a second set with the titles Novelty Patterns, Owen Jones, Secret Garden, and Kimono.

The boxed set is currently sold out, but I’m going to order The Fifties, see sample images below.

The Fifties, VA Pattern Series

Kineographs

Princeton Library flipbookThe Princeton Library blog has a nice post on the kineographs (flipbooks) in their collection. About the book to the left, they say “The Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company (better known as L&M) produced a brand of Turkish cigarettes under the name Fatima… In 1914, L&M released ten flipbooks under the theme of modern dance. ‘These moving picture booklets on the Dances of to-day … make it possible for all to know what the latest accepted dances are and how to dance them.'”
See more pictures of this and their other flipbooks here. They also have a link to the large collection at flipbook.info.

The Word Snag

Obstacles & ImpedimentsThe other day, I saw a mention of an artist’s book called “Mappings” by Mary Ann Sampson of the OEOCO Press (One-Eye Opera Company) and, intrigued by the title, set off to see if I could find pictures of it. While I didn’t find that book, I found some lovely broadsides. The one to the left is called “Obstacles & Impediments” and the illustration is of a “word snag” eating letters and words (see a larger version where you can read the poem here).

Journal Project

JournalI brought what I think of as a “craft box” with me to New Mexico — paper, small cutting mat, ruler, my tool rool up. My hope is that I’ll make collages in the evenings while we get the house ready during the day to move my shop. So far I’ve been overwhelmed with house projects, figuring out where to shop for groceries, and just generally getting my bearings.
Then last Friday I looked up the Santa Fe Book Arts Group on the web, and was happy to see that they had their monthly meeting the next day! They were starting a “journal project” that day — much like the 1000 Journals exhibit I wrote about here, except the journals would be rotated among the members rather than left for just anyone to write in. I didn’t have time to get to an art store before the meeting to buy a pre-made book, but remembered my “craft box” had several blank moleskines, including the one to the left, with a haiku from one of my calendars pasted on the front.
Off I went to the meeting. It was quite a large group — I counted over 60 people! Those participating in the journal project were divided into groups of 8 or so. Every 15 days I’m supposed to receive a journal in the mail. The journal owner might have specified a theme for the book (or not), and I am to fill in as many pages as I wish. After 15 days, I send the journal on to the next person on the list, and repeat with the next journal I receive in the mail. I’ve got my first journal already — and the theme is “spangled.” As we’re all just getting organized and some people didn’t have journals finished yet, I have until March 15th to finish my first entry.
This is just what I need to nudge me into making those collages!