This is an interesting piece, printed slowly and patiently via letterpress by a friend, Greg Robison. The point is that you might like to essentially be a letterpress printer to produce something similar for some event you are involved with. You don’t have to be an excellent letterpress printer, but just good enough to hang in there with most others who are likely a lot better than you. You only need a good idea and enough technical skill to pull it off.
Looking back on my career (mainly as a teacher), it has been a driving force to be a creative person who is seen as a creative person by creative people. I often build into the project some element that would be extreme when compared to others doing “similar” work. Here are a few without much trouble, except to make sure I have a photograph to illustrate them.
Taking two New York field trips each semester would get 80 students into almost all important shows or talks, adding an equivalent creative experience to at least one additional class or maybe even two.
From the first moment Apple Computer started weaving itself into the visual production of ideas, there was a clear need to teach our students to use the computer, especially in the design world, which was the world we worked in. We taught the maximum number of creative classes that the BFA degree allowed. Honestly, there was no way I would drop any creative-focused classes. Also, there was no way to increase anyone’s teaching load among the small number of faculty we had.
As the highest-ranking faculty member, increasing my teaching load was more manageable, and no one would be the wiser. It’s worth mentioning that the students would also not be wiser. So, I took on teaching InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator to all of our sophomore juniors and seniors. I can no longer remember all of the details. Still, it added about 4 hours a week to all of those students’ class load, which probably went relatively unnoticed given the stressful workload they were already doing.
At some time during the middle 1980s, it also became clear that one of the things that I felt helped VC at the University of Delaware versus the School of Visual Arts (a seriously major competition for our students as they had the best faculty on the planet and they were already in New York where I wanted my students to work) was a “sense of family.” How about a class where every student in VC (sophomores, juniors, and seniors)? We started offering a class on Thursday nights where everyone met. All 80 of our students. It ended up moving to Friday afternoon when we called them Friday Sessions. I had met twice with the dean of Arts and Sciences about the legality of manipulating our class structure. I was assured that I would be okay if I didn’t violate any rules and didn’t generate a noticeable number of complaints. So, how do you catch up to other schools with more money, likely better faculty, and access to more resources? I don’t know, but I can try to close the gap.
So, we just had an exhibition at the Newark Arts Alliance. We included 77 pieces in the show. Too many? It’s probably too many for a reasonable person to go through. But is someone going to have a show there with more? I doubt it. Does it make our show better? I don’t know, but I don’t think it hurt anyone who looked and read and thought about what they were looking at.
So, back to the piece at the top of this blog post. One of the many wonderful things Jill and I love about letterpress is the ability to produce, often without an immense amount of work. This lovely keepsake says to people who have been involved with us, “Thank you for being involved.” Letterpress does that automatically and magically. It is like the sentiment was “carved” in stone. And you can do it for others and not just yourself.
We did two books (the second one shown above) for a friend who offered a tour of his incredible collection of Victorian books and memorabilia as an auction prize to the Center for the Book in New York. The winner would attend Newark, Delaware, for the grand tour—afterward, a nice, slow, talkative dinner at one of Newark’s best Main Street restaurants. We produced a book keepsake twice to thank you for being included in dinners. One for each person attending, which we would all sign. A nice way to say thank you to our host. Including Lead Graffiti’s name in a day of talking about books is a friendly reminder to the auction winners of a good day with good new friends and great books.