Poetry & Collaboration: Letterpress at Scripps College Press
Video presentation is allowed to be used for educational purposes.
The Spring 2020 semester saw undergraduate Letterpress students at Scripps College Press gaining confidence in typesetting, in creating original content, and building complexity within a scaffolded learning environment. Students prepared their portfolios to present to our outside collaborator, poet Tonya Foster, as a way of building trust and introducing themselves. After familiarizing themselves with her writing, students meet Foster, enjoyed her recite poems and spoke with her about her work and her questions, concerns about the collaboration. Student groups selected excerpts of her poetry to typeset and started planning their letterpress prints. Mid-March Scripps College with the other Claremont Colleges closed to in-person classes and students were scattered across the country and globe. The resulting collaborative prints centered process, feedback from collaborator, instructor and classmates, and combined digital and relief printing with at times surprising outcomes.
This presentation will explore building skills and complexity, editioning, and collaborating in a scaffolded learning environment. The effect of the coronavirus pandemic on that skill building and scaffolding will be examined through the collaborative letterpress project and how it may have shifted and deepened the participants engagement with the poetry, their collaborators, and the project itself.
A book artist and printmaker exploring the intersection of race, history, and perception, Tia Blassingame often incorporates archival research and her own poetry in her artist’s book projects for nuanced discussions of racism and legacy in the United States. Her artist's books are held in library and museum collections including Library of Congress, Stanford University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, and State Library of Queensland. Blassingame is an Assistant Professor of Art at Scripps College and serves as the Director of Scripps College Press, a student letterpress and bookbinding laboratory.
