Fans of Willa Cather, as well as those that have not yet had an introduction, will find inspiration in “The Slow Read,” an exhibit featuring several selected pages from “My Antonia” every day, from May 30 to Aug. 13, 2018. There are plans for several exhibits installed across the country, one of which will be at the Adele Coryell Hall Learning Commons.
Behind the project is Barbara Tetenbaum, an
internationally-recognized artist, professor and head of the Book Arts
department at the Oregon College of Art and Craft in Portland, Oregon. She is best known for exploring the relationships
between text and images in printed books and installations. Tetenbaum
is the recipient of two Fulbright awards to teach in Leipzig, Germany and Usti,
Labem, Czech Republic. Her books are held in public collections in the United
States, Canada, England, France, Germany and the Netherlands. We
asked Tetenbaum about her project and the process behind it.
Explain your personal connection to My Ántonia.
What drew you to the novel and how did you choose it for the project?
In 2010, I
was offered a gallery show at Reed College. I had this idea based on the fact
that when I doodle while listening to someone talk, the image captures the
content in some kind of way. I thought: What if I listened to something
lengthy, like a novel, and responded in the space of the gallery (walls, floor,
ceiling, etc.) as a doodler would to a conversation on a phone? Would the
images and shapes in the gallery somehow capture the content of that novel? I fairly
randomly selected ‘My Antonia’ as an audio book partly because I had never read
it and my mentor, Walter Hamady, had always spoken highly of Willa Cather. I
didn’t know if my relatively experimental art idea would work with a
homespun-Americana novel (I imagined) but upon hearing the first sentences of
My Ántonia, I found my head open up as a wide dome of space.
What I did
not expect was that her sentences would ensnare me with their beauty. Rather
than draw on walls, I felt driven to put her words in front of anyone who would
enter that gallery. I didn’t know that she has the following that she does, she
is such a special writer. How fortunate that I found her through this art
experiment! That first project, titled ‘A Close Read’ led to invitations to
exhibit at two more galleries and to create an elaborate artist book.
How did you come up with the idea for
the project?
After
creating these installation and book projects I thought ‘ok, I don’t need to
continue with this particular book any more’. But then I encountered
‘projection mapping’; a way of throwing large images or animations onto outdoor
walls and floors. I pondered what I, as a text-based artist, could do with this
technology? Projecting onto a building a piece of text…? What text? Then it
came to me: projecting an image of turning pages to allow reading in public,
slowly over time. AND that the centenary of My Ántonia was coming up in a few
years.
What was the process for coming up with
the project?
While my
third installation was up at Constellation Studios in Lincoln, I met so many
‘Cather’ people! While in conversation at the opening, I brought up this idea
for a way to honor the upcoming 100-year anniversary of the novel. The response
from everyone was so positive and encouraging that I felt buoyed to go forward,
although this was WAY outside of my comfort zone.
The key
parts of the process were: finding a project manager in Portland to help me
organize my activities and create a timeline, securing the interest and
participation of a few key organizations, applying for grants, traveling to
Nebraska to meet with key collaborators, securing the talents of a designer and
a web-design firm, and creating the Kickstarter campaign to both advertise the
project and raise the final funds. So many things fell into place along the way
that I knew the project would happen. I also benefited from many enthusiastic
students and friends who were willing to put their heads together with mine and
offer me feedback on grant writing or help on technology. It’s true that it
takes a village!
What do you want readers of the project
to take away from it-- both first-time readers, as well as those that have read
the book before?
There are
numerous motivations for this project. At the core is a desire to get people to
SLOW DOWN and experience art/literature without the need for ‘spectacle’. To
find community unexpectedly or to see it grow within an existing group (such as
the Cather friends). To be encouraged to focus on smaller amounts of writing
which may lead to deeper understanding or appreciation. To encourage discussion
of the issues that are as important to us in 2018 as they were to Cather 100
years ago. To discover for the first time, to reread for the second time, to
read again for the umpteenth time this gorgeous novel, bumping into friends or
strangers in the process.
And to
discover the work I’ve created these past 8 years in response to a single piece
of literature. The website that runs the Slow Read will have a gallery of
images of my projects plus links to Cather events, discussions, lectures around
the country.
- Barb
Tetenbaum / The Slow Read
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