The Book/Print Collective’s Inaugural Print Portfolio

FOREWORD: Black & brown hands in Book Arts/Histories & Print Making/Cultures

Participating collective members: Aimee Lee, Ben Blount, Tamar Evangelestia-Dougherty, Tia Blassingame

Year: 2023

Media: handset and polymer letterpress, screenprinting, relief printing, hand papermaking, dyeing, poetry

Dimensions: 10.5 x 15.75 inches

Edition size: 48 copies available for sale (60 copies plus 6 artist’s proofs)

Order: Email tia at bookprintcollective.com

Set in a laser-engraved container, the Foreword print suite includes three prints which incorporate a range of processes from hand paper- making to letterpress printing, screenprinting, and relief printing. The accompanying booklet features background by Tia Blassingame, reflections by Tamar Evangelestia-Dougherty, artist statements with progress photographs, and artist biographies.

FOREWORD: Black & brown hands in Book Arts/Histories & Print Making/Cultures represents the first in the series and serves as an ongoing conversation between the over forty Book/Print Artist/ Scholar of Color Collective (aka Book/Print Collective) members in celebration of the historical and contemporary book arts, print artistry, and traditions in diasporic and global majority communities within the United States and around the world.

Show Me Your Hands by Ben Blount

Letterpress from wood type and polymer plates

Black and Brown Hands by Tia Blassingame

Handset and polymer letterpress, pressure printing, original poetry

Foreword takes its inspiration by Book/Print Collective founder Tia Blassingame's comment on the significance of seeing and documenting Black and brown hands making. In that case Blassingame spoke in terms of her own teaching of Book Arts students despite the digital divide of pandemic and remote learning. It was a concept expanded upon by Tamar Evangelestia-Dougherty in the 2022 Charles W. Mann Jr. lecture Book Arts Advocacy: A Conversation with Members of the Book/Print Artist/Scholar of Color Collective with letterpress printer Ben Blount and Blassingame, which was sponsored by the Eberly Family Special Collections Library, Penn State University Libraries, who would later commissioned the Foreword print suite.

The three lecturers, all members of the Book/Print Collective, partnered with a fourth collective member, Hanji maker Aimee Lee to create Foreword. In conversation, collaboration, and prints, each artist considered the history of erasure and discounting of Black and brown artistry, craftsmanship in terms of printmaking, bookmaking, and papermaking in addition to commenting on the political, personal, and cultural urgency of documenting and witnessing the hands of diasporic and indigenous artists, craftspeople at work.

To order a copy, email tia at bookprintcollective.com.

Collections: Baylor University, Brown University, Harvard University, Los Angeles Public Library, New York University, Newberry Library, Pennsylvania State University, Rijksmuseum, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, Swarthmore College, University of California at Berkeley, University of California at Los Angeles, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Illinois, private collections.