Gillie, Courtney Marie

Collective Voices Virtual Tour (Part 2) Transcript

Catherine Armbrust

George Caleb Bingham Gallery

2020

Taken from: Collective Voices Virtual Tour Part 2

Fifield-Perez, John (co-curator)

Johnston, Nicole (co-curator)

PDF

Catherine Armbrust: Welcome, welcome to the now recorded version of this so let me get started here we go all right so I'm going to shrink me and John down into oblivion and then I’ll bring us back up for any like chat back after the slides but we've got about 40 or so slides to, to roll through because this is essentially I'm giving you really an actual walkthrough like a- a still shot walkthrough of the gallery [John nods] so that you're getting to see the gallery as a whole with the Collective Voices pieces and then also kind of zooming in on some of the individual pieces for us to talk about in more detail. So, let me get my own thing notes going here. Let's get ready to rumble okay so if you missed last time or you've been in a hole and haven't heard me talk about this the Collective Voices exhibit is up at the Bingham Gallery right now in real life. It includes art, archival, and textile objects from three campus collections and that includes the Missouri Historic Costume and Textile Collection, the Special Collections where John works and then also University Archives where we have a guest featured in the audience, Anselm Huelsbergen, and probably family tonight. Hi y'all and Anselm was really important in helping us round out the exhibit with a lot of wonderful archival objects from their collection so what we were looking at right were objects within campus collections that tended to have these persistent narratives so they were these historically repeating themes that we felt like were very, very relevant to today and included an enormous amount of things but essentially like you're going to hear about different marginalized voices Mizzou student activism we talked about Civil rights last time everything is fraught with political tension. We talked about colonialism last time and tonight we're going to be talking specifically about LGBTQ+ issues, climate and environmental concerns, and feminist voices. So tonight this is kind of the overview of if you're standing if you've been in the gallery before and you kind of understand what that space looks like you are going to see on the right hand back side of the gallery an array of objects including quite a few textile objects on this side that connect to the themes of climate and or artists talking about environmental issues and it was sort of interesting when we were digging more into the show especially after it was up right because as curators you can think about what your ideas are and start to understand how things fit together but once all of those objects are in one place together it's becomes so much more rich and exciting at least to me. I love sitting in that space and starting to see all the threads that connect to each other and what- what I see and especially in this side with these textiles is a real level of like personal, personal intimacy especially because of the textiles and how they're connected to the body so let's zoom in on a few things so one of the first kind of like lovely views that I really enjoy are the image that you see on the left here which is an artist's book that John's gonna talk about called “The Mollusk” and then this gorgeous log cabin quilts that we'll talk about a little bit more too that is so funny because I did not even- like it was like a secret, these designs were secret to me until they came into the gallery and we got to see it as a whole and somebody said “oh look at the diamonds,” and I was like what diamonds, and then suddenly all I could see were diamonds so maybe that's all you'll be able to see now too but John why don't you talk to us a little bit about this amazing book that really was kind of one of the first things that you pulled out of the collection for us to look at and we were kind of going back and forth on if we would be able to include it but I feel like both of us loved it so much that we really wanted to ensure that we were able to have this on display in this specific exhibition.

John Fifield-Perez: [4:58] Yes, absolutely thank you, Catherine and thank you everybody for joining our zoom call this evening as well. This is a lot of fun so this item on its own it's just a really beautiful amazing object it's all handmade paper the artist Amy Richard she lives down in Gainesville Florida and is primarily a paper maker, but also a book binder and printer and she's highlighting a lot of different techniques in this one work and sort of making this hyper realistic although enlarged version of like a little pen shell that she had found when she was sort of waiting out in seaweed not too far from- from where she lives and in the process of sort of dissecting this bivalve she it turned this meditation on sort of herself and this sort of understanding that comes at the end of life and not necessarily knowing oneself or knowing one's environment until much later in life or at the very, very end so you have what- what we would consider traditionally the covers are the shell and mantle of this of this mollusk and so the outer shell is made of cast... Laminated cast paper so that's sort of like sprayed overbeaten paper that then she's laminating onto more and more sort of layers of this of this really rough paper and then you're gonna see there's some- it's actually very hard to see in here. The light blue that you see sort of through the red is some pulp painting so that's where you're pigmenting the paper pulps and designing we'll see a couple other examples of this throughout the evening but using the pulp itself as both substrate and image and then the, the light sort of lacy blue that's sticking up that's what we call kozo bark lace, and so that's where you've taken mulberry bark and inner bark and you've cooked it and sort of started to beat it until it begins to pull apart a little bit and start using that for it's for its sort of innate textures and then the small little book that you can see nested in the shell is, is sort of the artist book itself or the text and so that's a small letterpress printed book on handmade mulberry paper that is again this meditation that the artist has, has had on sort of life and death and connection to one's natural resources and then the- the clamshell box that is housed in this little box has sort of the artist's statement about it and also this built-in little cradle so it's this really just amazing sort of art object yeah as Catherine said we- we both just sort of cooed over [Catherine laughs] I feel like, and then and it was also th- I was really glad we could feature it in this show because it's a new acquisition and, and due to COVID restrictions we have not been doing in-person instruction in the library which is normally sort of our bread and butter up in Special Collections and so it's been really nice for people to be able to experience this this really fantastic work.

Catherine Armbrust: [8:20] Yeah, and actually, just to remind folks that like a lot of the things in this show are actually new acquisitions by you all in Special Collections and by Nicole from the Textile Collection and this was a really wonderful way... There's like there's a, you know, a big backstory for sort of how we started developing this exhibit, but this was a wonderful way for both of you all to provide a really public location for a lot of these new things that otherwise might not have been able to be- been shown for quite some time. So let's keep moving then to... This gorgeous log cabin quilt Nicole, Nicole that's our other curator gave us a couple of quilts to choose from which we kind of hemmed and hawed about and then, once I realized how large this quilt really was and I started to see some really good digital images of it because I had not seen it in person yet I was like no we have we have to have this one like those little red squares are so gorgeous and then the, the what are now not so subtle but I think are you know can be subtle diamond shapes alternating in the background so this is in the collection, right? Of the Missouri Historic Costume and Textile Collection it's a pieced quilt that features a really popular log cabin pattern that's made of strips of a variety of fabrics so one of the reasons we chose this to fit into this area is because the fabrics that it's made with include repurposed linens shirts and suits and so this piece itself was made from about 1907 to 1910 so it's over 100 years old it was made in Missouri it was pieced and sewn by the donor's great-grandmother with the assistance of the donor's father who helped cut out the fabric strips so there's this like beautiful familial legacy happening with this object. And then part of what we were interested in besides how gorgeous it was right but one of the reasons that we could include it in with the idea of environmental or climate concerns is because of that repurposing or upcycling of materials so at this time right it was most often done for economic purposes, but I do think it could also be considered a really early form of environmentally conscious craft. This is not a great shot that I may have taken, but we're gonna see it anyway because you've got like this stunning quilt in the back of the gallery and one of the reasons we placed it where it is right is because your eye as you wander into the gallery your eye is like drawn into that space but just to the left of that is this really subtle area with these two like the two most kind of gentle pieces in the show I think like visually gentle and subtle pieces in the show and so there's this great kind of conversation that's going on between this somewhat like bombastic quilt and then these little bitty pieces of handmade paper that we're going to show you here and John's going to tell us about the collection they came from and then about the pieces in general.

John Fifield-Perez: [11:55] Yes, so in as having just spoken about Amy Richards’ mollusk piece and hand papermaking I realized everything we're going to see in the environment and listen section of this exhibit from Special Collections is all geared towards hand paper makers and which I think is actually quite appropriate. I mean there's a there's oftentimes a very strong connection between paper makers and their local botanicals that they're working with or growing the plants and harvesting them to then produce paper from them for using them for pulp and we'll see that sort of throughout a number of these different items but the rest of the items that we'll see from Special Collections are all from various editions of the hand paper making portfolios and so hand paper making is a journal for paper makers. it's sort of the major journal and they every two or three years roughly they'll release a large portfolio a jury portfolio of all sorts of different paper artists from around the world most of them in the united states but represented from, from all over and around some sort of theme and so one of the more recent portfolios was based on inter-generationality and so it was pairing both a young paper maker sort of hitting their stride in their career and a well-established paper maker and this is from that collection so which actually we, we realized that I am familiar with one of the artists and Catherine actually knows the other artist [Catherine laughs] so there was a funny... Funny connection to this work but so Catherine Nash and Radha Pandey collaborated on this work and the discussions that they were having as they were making it were a lot about land ownership and you'll see this is so the image depicted here is the eclipse from what was that 2017 so-

Catherine Armbrust: 2016, I think.

John Fifield-Perez: [13:58] 2016. So yeah, but that obviously I came here after that so I missed the totality here but I know that was a big deal here in Columbia and looking at both from sort of the, the technical side of the collaboration involved in making a work and in in sort of problem solving and discussing these issues and then in the actual depiction of, of the land and sort of how they were exploring these different ideas of fibers that are being used so in this case they're using Gampi which is a traditional short Japanese paper making fiber that often just sort of grows in ditches it's- it's- it's something that's like this really high quality material that is found in sort of unexpected places and, and then looking at yeah looking at boundaries and just who is allowed on what land and so you have there's a lot of play of like voids where you have the negative space in the paper as well as waxing so you're having translucency and, and opacity all playing together in this work.

Catherine Armbrust: [15:08] They're also using that red Sedona soil and I know Catherine Nash actually lives in Tucson I'm not sure where Radha lives but-

John Fifield-Perez: [15:15] Radha now lives in Norway, so, far, far away.

Catherine Armbrust: wonderful, and I'm sorry I think you were right I was looking at the date of this piece, but I think our eclipse here in Columbia was in 2017, 2018...

John Fifield-Perez: I think it was right before I got here which was in 2018.

Catherine Armbrust: okay time, time-

John Fifield-Perez: I think that was it.

Catherine Armbrust: [15:33] -time still has no meaning for me right now. [John laughs] I also love that we have a lot of collaborative projects in especially in the paper making I know we're gonna see a few more of those but I was thinking as we were kind of starting to talk about these kind of team made projects about the idea of collaboration especially within the areas across the gallery in the Civil Rights area and how important community is in regards to creating a movement like a sustained movement even in regards to either Civil Rights or the Climate, right, because artists can kind of work on their own in their studios but really like when we start to come together with other artists or the rest of our community that's like when we can really start to- to make a difference and get our voices louder too. let's see, let's go to the one, so, directly below “Eclipse” is this one which is a tough one to get a picture of I gotta say but yeah John, John break this down for us a little bit please.

John Fifield-Perez: [16:42] So, this is another collaborative paper piece from one of the portfolios. in this case it's from an earlier portfolio about based around calligraphy and so the two artists Jessica White and Cheryl Jacobson they- Jessica White is primarily a printer she does letterpress and screen printing as well as hand paper making and Cheryl is one of the top calligraphers in the country and so they were- they were- in this case Jessica was doing the watermarked paper and then Cheryl was providing the calligraphy but it's very hard to see in this image it's sort of the- the watermarks themselves end up looking somewhat like the crinkled paper the sort of console paper but you can Catherine's pointing out you can see there.

Catherine Armbrust: You can see that? To circle the birds, or the little- the little person.

John Fifield-Perez: [17:34] Yeah, and then there are figures down below with strings attached. it sort of looks like the birds are on- on leashes or like a kite and it's speaking about sort of like, as we see something beautiful this human impulse to control or harness it and instead sort of this this statement about letting the- letting the beautiful sort of run free but technically I think it's a really fascinating work where again you're playing with substrate and image similar to the pulp painting that we were talking about earlier in this case using watermarks. So that's where you have a slightly raised area sometimes using wires or you can use a little like strips of adhesive foam but raised areas on the paper making mold that is being used at the vat when you have the pulp in the water and so what ends up happening is you get just minutely thinner areas in the paper where- where it's laying atop those slightly raised areas of wire or whatever other material and that that means that it's going to be just like a little bit more translucent transparent when you have light behind it so you can see it really well if you see it in the exhibition and then having this opacity of the calligraphy on top. So, it's playing with light it's playing with color where the calligraphy is a lighter shade than the paper it's on but yeah again just sort of looking at it's taking into consideration sort of humans' responsibility and sort of duty within their natural environments and also just their relationship to it.

Catherine Armbrust: Thank you. Yeah I really love this piece and y'all I want you to understand too that like John actually has experience physically making handmade paper, he also does weaving, and so I can't like over- over suggest- I don't know that's one thing that I love when people are involved with either like art history or collection collections of art objects like this is that, like, understanding the materials in the mediums and how things are made really enriches your ability to understand the concepts behind the work too so I- I always love talking to John about this stuff because he's so well versed in these things.

John Fifield-Perez: Well, and that's actually something we discovered in all of us talking the three of us all have our own personal practices of making things, and I think that is something that sort of united us in in how we approach this.

Catherine Armbrust: [20:14] Yeah, y'all Nicole- Nicole is not here but our other curator is, you know, obviously knows about fashion and stuff, but she's also started to design this and make these amazing like fresh flower jewelry pieces that she just in like last maybe six months it's been pretty an amazing thing to watch. Okay so here we have on the left here's an image of kind of our, our pollinators area we ended up I think that I am very obsessed with bees I don't know who else here is, maybe John is, I don't know [John laughs] but I was very excited that we had two pieces to include to talk about bees and kind of the plight of bees right I had seen actually this “Laser Cut Honeycomb Skirt” by Amanda Lee. She was a former student in the textile apparel management program and this piece was featured in the visual arts and design showcase either last year or the year before I can't quite remember- but it's this laser-cut imitation leather piece that she did about that it actually had a jacket go with it too and something happened to the jacket she, she took it, but I think she left a skirt for the collection, but it was part of an ensemble titled “save our pollinators” that was part of a class project that she did but it was also featured in the textile collections 2019 exhibition called “Flora and Fashion” so the quote by the artist Amanda Lee says; “pollinators such as bees and butterflies contribute a great amount to our ecosystem unfortunately there's been a worldwide decline in pollinators. This decline can lead to the death of all of our plants and agricultural systems. So these designs represent what will be lost when our pollinators die off without bees there's no more honey produced.” But I love that she's using this very contemporary material like what I'm gonna just call it pleather but also this laser cut technique to talk about something to do with the natural world and essentially the crux of our ecosystem and if you saw or if you've if you saw the last talk or you've been in the gallery we have a really beautiful laser-cut book on the other side of the gallery so it was fun to kind of compare that technology and how it was being used in different types of materials within the exhibition and then right next to the skirt which does make really lovely shadows on the wall it's not like a great image from far away of the skirt but that's a great detail of the of the laser cut but right next to it is the sweet little bee book that and I was really excited that we were able to able to bring into the show too. John, you want to talk about this one? And it's another collaborative piece!

John Fifield-Perez: [23:18] It is, and also another handmade paper piece so this is this is a collaboration between Michelle Bayer and Kyle Olmon and it's, it's from the hand paper making portfolio called “Paper in Motion” which we have another item coming up pretty quick from the same portfolio and so this one actually began as a sealed little card it's pretty small it's about this big when you get it and there's this little bee on a string and so the idea there there's some interaction involved where to access the actual pop-up element you have to pull the bee which has its embedded string that that sort of runs a perimeter around the flower so you're pulling that string up through the handmade paper that's embedded in and then you open it and this marigold pops out and you have a little bee that's, that's got a little leeway to run around and the so part of this is looking at it's- it's again sort of as we've seen a number of other the paper making elements bring an environmental issue to light and in this case looking at colony collapse and the role of pollinators in our both urban and rural environments and the paper itself is so you have a marigold depicted and sort of engineered to pop up but then you also have marigold seeds that are actually integrated into the paper so they were included in the vat and the when the artist was pulling the sheets of paper and so- so while this one won't likely ever be put in the ground, in theory one could place this in the ground [Catherine laughs] and grow marigolds right out of the paper so you have this sort of cyclical element of harvesting plants to produce the paper and then reincorporating the ground to produce more plants but yeah it's a- it's a lovely little pop-up.

Catherine Armbrust: [25:07] Yeah, and then she also says how the plants will then attract bees right so...

John Fifield-Perez: Mhm.

Catherine Armbrust: that's part of the cycle as well I know this, this piece is just really precious let's see okay so next to that we this is kind of our like water issue area right here we've got three very different handmade books and one of them I'm gonna put books in air quotes and we'll- we'll talk about that but let's talk about this first one that's just really stunning to me so if if you've ever heard me talk about containers before one of the like obsessions I had with wanting to show with John is that a lot of these books come housed in these beautifully crafted cases or containers and this one to me is very special. So, John will you tell us about this one please?

John Fifield-Perez: [26:02] yeah, happily. So, this is another collaborative book. this is from a married couple who worked together extensively, Peter and Donna Thomas, they're they- they live out in California but have this sort of sort of wagon that they travel the country in and do workshops out of and it's- it's- it's pretty amazing but they were here a couple of years ago they stopped through Columbia and- which is when we were- so they came and spoke to some classes came into Special Collections and then we ended up actually purchasing this work from them while they were here but it's another really great example of all sorts of different techniques so it's all handmade paper and then hand- sort of hand bound into this cover within a scroll element worked into it and the image on the left so this is the poem is “Piute Creek” by Gary Snyder. Piute creek is this little creek that runs near Yosemite national park and so you have a depiction of the creek on the left-hand side with- with the mountains behind and that's all done through pulp painting and pulp printing. So, you have the elements of it are, are again made sort of while it while the paper is still wet out of pigmented pulps and then after that you have some stenciling that's been done... Using, using a spray bottle and some other, other pigmented pulps and so it's sort of all these different techniques but it's all integrated again looking at that substrate becoming the image itself and a mixture of linoleum cut relief prints and pulp painting throughout the scroll itself with letterpress printed text but the behind the scroll, which we- when you're there you can kind of see it through the window and in the incline of the scroll. There's a little text behind on that's on the on the blue paper that's actually printed with ink that was made from mud from Piute creek so it's sort of integrating this subject matter into the actual work and then that color the brown that they sort of achieved with that was then matched with other inks and sort of that became part of the design element that was sort of taken for further throughout the entire piece and determine the entire color scheme of what they're working with but yeah it's a- it's also just a great example of sort of a really creative structure of using a scroll structure within what we think of it as- as a more typical book opening with two covers but yeah really lovely and so it can be read sort of... You can wheel through it within the book, or you can remove it and sort of extend it to its full length and- and see the whole poem at once.

Catherine Armbrust: I love that piece, love it. okay this one, y'all are going to be like what this is [John laughs] this is paper? Okay just bear with us this I'm actually totally in love with this piece and when John showed it to me, I was like, no we have to have it in the show because it's amazing and weird, so yeah. Go ahead, John.

John Fifield-Perez: [29:21] so this is- this is what's called flood- “Flood Paper” it's collected by Winifred Lutz who- she teaches out in Philadelphia she's actually one of the instructors for our- for University of Missouri's fibers professor Pazia Mannella, so there's sort of a nice connection there also from another hand papermaking portfolio this time it's, it's one called “fibers exposed” where it's all featuring sort of the fibers in their natural state within a paper setting and this is sort of a really unique item from that collection where Winifred has collected this, what she's calling “Flood Paper,” it's, it's sort of these algal blooms after a 500 year flood up in South Dakota and she was looking to see if, if there's any sort of natural way that paper occurs apart from humans and so when we're talking about paper at its most basic level we're talking about cellulose fibers. so plant fibers that are suspended in water and then and then dried on some sort of mesh, or, I mean, there's some other arguments about sort of aspects of that but in this case it's looking at this plant life that spread and then the water recedes it sort of dries and is all enmeshed in itself and sort of existing and she talks about in her artist statement about how if you look closely you'll find little teeny tiny snail shells it's like all these sort of living creatures that were captured within this paper-like material but both looking at as a- a type of non-human paper but then as a record of these major events that are happening more and more from climate change and so the increased flooding sort of hitting these landmark weather events that, that are happening in a frequency beyond what is expected of them. So that was that one what I thought was just yeah really fascinating it's more of a study as opposed to sort of something that one has made, but she really did some- some interesting work with that one.

Catherine Armbrust: [31:39] I love it, plus it's really hard to say it's siphon- siphonoclades pith- pithophora pithophora.

John Fifield-Perez: Mhm.

Catherine Armbrust: love it, and then our last little water related handmade book is this sweet precious frog.

John Fifield-Perez: [31:25] yes, and so this is this is from the same portfolio as the bee so from “Paper in Motion” looking at pop-ups and paper engineering and this is a very sort of well-known paper engineer in the world of books, which is very small, but he his name is Shawn Sheehy and he's looking at the frog as a deity sort of throughout all sorts of different human civilizations and in this case also looking at the effects of pollution on frogs especially from like manufacturing plants and- and causing mutations and all those sorts of things and so trying to capture that as this sort of small frog goddess with wings who's- who's leaping out and you can see the shadow it's this is this one is designed to sort of go from a flat position to them a jumping position and it's a very, very dynamic piece but really great so again all engineered out of paper.

Catherine Armbrust: and I love too how this is handmade paper, but it looks it has like such a different aesthetic and feel from all the other my paper that we've seen.

John Fifield: Yeah, absolutely.

Catherine Armbrust: [33:12] So next to so this is the- kind of the next view in the gallery, you can see on the left the three books or papers that we just looked at and that talk about water leads us to this cotton dress that I love. It actually has been shown quite often by the Textile Collection because it's so gorgeous. It's like beautifully made, but one of the things that we were interested in and you can see to the right of it the label we- that's actually on the dress. It was kind of torn up so Nicole made this wonderful, tweaked image of it and then we had it blown up but that's actually the “Cotton Can Save” is actually the label that's still attached to the dress and it's from 1976 so we've got this gorgeous “Yellow Sundress” that has some quilted features up on the top of the kind of tunic area and this garment alludes to, you know, we've got- we're moving into the like late mid-20th century the... The world, the united states is starting to develop a different kind of environmental consciousness at this time it turns out that the us celebrated its first Earth Day on August 22nd of 1970 so that date is often considered to be the birth of the modern environmental movement. Now we know the cotton is the fabric of our lives we cry at the television commercials or like, I used to, but and so it does remain one of the world's most popular natural fibers but it's also one of the most en- environmentally damaging of those that are used in the apparel industry. So, in relation to water cotton actually uses an enormous amount of water to grow effectively and a massive amount of pesticides in order to protect it so that pests- the pesticides that are used actually ends up having a pretty damaging effect on groundwater and the surrounding watersheds. So, there's this really complicated relationship between “the fabric of our lives” and sort of how its production affects the world around us. This is Anselm's area, cheers again to you Anselm! We've got with that cotton dress we mentioned the beginning of earth day, and the environmental movement in the united states. So, what we have here are some wonderful copies of flyers from the Archives of student events here on the MU campus. Mostly in the 90s but having to do with earth days and earth- earth-related actions at that time so these are from the collection of the University Archives I had a little bit of a like flashback because I was definitely here on campus probably for that state of mind earth day in 1992. Especially- we did have a band in town called “State of Mind” so I'm wondering if they were playing at that show as well but these are the student-made flyers and this brings us back to one of the grounding elements of the show and you're going to also see below and I’ll have a little detail shot of this but below the flyers you see MU Savitar yearbook and so part of what brought this exhibition kind of full circle were these images and documents that the University Archives found for us and then the Savitars that we got from John and the Special Collection because that ties all these really big sort of global and national ideas back into what's happening on the MU campus to bring those ideas locally and talk about how it was affecting students on campus and I don't know if you can see it but this is sort of what I geeked out on. Now, these are- we couldn't get the original flyers, they're at University Archives, but I had color copies made and I really nerded out over these because like- right here and right here you- you can see like the staple holes and the pinholes that were used so these posters, these flyers were used like around campus put up on cork boards and bulletin boards, seen by students. so, these are not just pieces of paper with empty history. Students from those eras saw them and used them to communicate these events to each other and bring people out and so I love the fact that you can kind of see part of that physical history related to those objects. And then this is a- a detail of the Savitar that's right below, and John's been kind of our Savitar guy, it's a little bit self-explanatory, but John would you just talk a little bit more about the Savitars in general and kind of like how we've been using them throughout the exhibit?

John Fifield-Perez: [38:39] Absolutely. So, yeah, as- as Catherine said this spread is pretty self-explanatory. It's obviously Earth Day from 1991 but the- the Savitars sort of became so they were the yearbook for the for the University of Missouri and ran up until the 2000s, but I think our latest one that we have represented in in this exhibition is 1999. But far more in the exhibition earlier from, from the first half that they were talking that we are not talking about today from the late 60s, early 70s and all sorts of different political movements and representations of those. And so what we sort of realized especially as we were installing I feel like it was like it was a late dawning on us was that these are really sort of the glue of the entire exhibition these are what really ground all of these issues in Mizzou's history and just having a visual connection to times when students, faculty, staff and community have all engaged in these issues and rallied around them or against them and just sort of the- the human movements that have that have come through on this front. so we have both a representation of our physical collections on campus the things that live here that are available to our community and the community itself which I think are both very important and sort of critical elements of the- the material culture collections that we have on campus in this case we have University Archives, Special Collections, and the Historical Costume and Textile Collections.

Catherine Armbrust: [40:23] That was really beautiful, thank you. I'm also like, loving as we're looking through the yearbooks to the documentation of the clothing that's worn at the time which then ties back into the clothing that we're also seeing in the gallery too so like these rips these ripped jeans in the middle, I think I just now became aware of those. they're kind of hilarious. so okay so that then we're leaving the climate issue and we're moving into the front right part of the gallery and this is our Queer Voices section which again we're also going to see student activism from a couple of Savitars to connect these issues back to MU and then the rest of the objects are part of objects in the Special Collections. So, and this is so this is all John here pretty much.

John Fifield-Perez: Yep. So, this one again, it's- I don't have a lot of commentary on these two, they're sort of it's more something to experience as you come in just sort of reading the text around them and looking at these images but looking at a couple decades of sort of Queer visibility on campus so we have from 1978 on the right and then also from 1999 on 2000 on the left and just sort of how depictions of the queer community have changed over time and sort of I mean you have on one side people marching and then the other it's more just sort of existing. Obviously, still issues at play today and specially back in the 90s that would have been mobilized around but uh these were again we this is one of those times where we were looking at what we called our Queer corner. It's a little corner of the gallery that has all of our LGBTQ plus materials and feeling like there was just sort of a lack and we realized that it was the Savitars that what we needed was again sort of grounding in the imagery of here and Sort of what, what has happened here in throughout the past so these are they're just some interesting spreads to just sort of experience and, and read through when you get there.

Catherine Armbrust: [42:39] Yeah, love these. Okay this this piece is really special because I again am obsessed with little containers contain spaces this one I I love too and I'm so glad we kind of we're still looking right because you were talking about kind of the lack of some of the voices in the collection and remembered this one later and I'm so glad we were able to bring it in.

John Fifield-Perez: yeah, absolutely. So, this is this work as you can see called “Saw Palmettos.” It's another collaborative work where you have a fabrication studio called Container based out of Baltimore and they every year they put out a call for writers and for proposals for artists books that they will sort of help fabricate in collaboration with the with the authors and so this particular one is a collaboration with Charles Theonia who is a poet based out of Brooklyn and it's looking at Theonia's experience of going through hormone replacement therapy and so each- each tincture bottle has- has a small poem and it's on the sort of translucent parchment paper that you can so it's printed on there and you can kind of read between the lines the way that it's been formatted but they're all essentially meditations on this process of using a Saw palmetto tincture, too, that the author would put on their head, in their- in their scalp as they're going through hormone replacement therapy to try and stave off hair loss while going through this process and so there are these very personal little meditations. some are a little bit more in depth, and others are just like a sort of a simple mantra for the day, but using this sort of 15 minute period to compose a text and then collecting them all together in a series of 21 bottles but it's also a really interesting example of a book object where it's not, again, sort of a typical, what we call codex, where you have a bound book with two covers and pages in between, but absolutely still a part like part of the book tradition in this case and using the tick, yeah, using the- here's a better view, you can- using the tincture bottles themselves as part of the presentation of the text which I think is really incredible and then on each bottle you also have an engraved number it's not really- they're sort of pushed back for visibility's sake in the exhibit but again looking at that we sort of have those three items throughout the collection as well of laser engraved items the “The Square” which was in the first presentation by Islam Aly and then the “Honeycomb skirt” and then and then this, the saw palmetto bottles.

Catherine Armbrust: [45:33] lovely. this is another wonderful piece that- you know some of these books it's really a bummer that we can't just go through, like flip through the pages constantly, but John picked this page for us specifically, so this is what you're actually going to see when you're in the gallery from this piece.

John Fifield-Perez: and so this, this book is from an artist who will see a few works from in the Feminism area as well Emily Martin and she's been doing a series of works of sort of treatments of Shakespeare and so it began with Romeo and Juliet where she was looking at sort of the role of a chorus within there and then moved into a fellow which we have we'll see a little bit after this and this is her treatment of the comedies which she was originally sort of doing research trying to figure out which comedy to explore individually and then ended up sort of confusing them in her head all the time so she just said well like because of that I'm going to sort of look at them more generally and so this work is called “Funny Haha / Funny Peculiar.” The structure of the book which you can't really see here but is very clear when you're in the gallery is what we call a dosa dough and so that is two books that share the same back cover so from one side you can open it and look at it this way you flip it over and then you have that back cover in the middle and you open and see another book and so on one side you have this is “Funny Haha” which is looking at essentially the- the playing of gender or playing with gender that Shakespeare does throughout many of the comedies and sort of mistaken identities, and drag, and where sometimes you'll have like, women dressing up as men, dressing up as women, or it's all getting confused and so it's just sort of celebrating this enjoying like the messiness of gender and how you can play with it. so what you can see in here are the- the slices between the areas so it's what we call a slice book and that's you a lot of us would have maybe had those as kids, that's where I I’ve found that the structure is most often encountered, where you have like two or three panels that you can exchange from the top and bottom and, and so this is playing with sort of male and female genitalia and also male and female dress and, and mixing and matching all of these things together on the press but yeah and then the other side which is not on display is “Funny Peculiar” and that's looking at some of the problematic elements of the comedies looking at racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and all of these sort of elements that that sort of bubble up and- and are far more sinister within- within the sensible comedies

Catherine Armbrust: nice. Yeah, that's and that's the problem with trying to figure out how to display objects that are actually meant to be like looked through right is that there- there was a lot we had to sacrifice for some of these objects unfortunately to for them to- to be in the to be in the gallery but

John Fifield-Perez: yeah.

Catherine Armbrust: Emily Martin was like- yeah, we have three pieces of her she's wonderful.

John Fifield-Perez: [48:51] I’ll add- I mean, sort of what I mentioned earlier talking about “The Mollusk” at the very beginning of this talk, and how we tend to focus a lot on instruction in Special Collections and that's been a really challenging thing with covid because it's just been so limited but most of, I mean something that we pride ourselves on and really advocate for is hands-on learning so in this in this case it's like not hands-on in the gallery but in the classroom we're always having students working through these, these and it's very much about experiential learning and interacting with the items and sort of immersing themselves in them or in the reading room as an individual researcher

Catherine Armbrust: yeah, I that's one of my favorite places to go on campus is the Special collections and have them talk to me about stuff okay last in this area are the “Dykes to Watch Out For” series.

John Fifield-Perez: [49:49] so, this, I actually have a shout out for somebody who I think is in the audience this evening, John Henry Adams, and then also our colleague, Courtney Gillie, put together an online exhibit which is available on the Special Collections website called “Leaders and Heroes” and it's looking at a lot of the marginalized communities represented within Special Collections and was part of the impetus for this entire show. We talked about this a bit a couple weeks ago in in our first half of the of the gallery walk through, but these are two of the six works that are in the gallery from that online exhibition with text that they pulled together so just want to say thank you to, to both of them-

Catherine Armbrust: me too, thank you.

John Fifield-Perez: for prefacing all the work that then went into this and for providing some of the labor that that we are very appreciative and able to take advantage of in here. So, these two works are books from our comic collection in Special Collections they're by Alison Bechdel who is a- a really prominent cartoonist. she is, so she's she does a lot of sort of memoir work these particular ones likes to watch out for based on her community of lesbians and sort of as she's coming of age and sort of navigating love and identity and all these things and it was a really important and still remains a very important documentation of sort of just lesbian communities and daily day-to-day life from this is from more the late 20th century but the an early 21st but the she also is really well known for her memoir sort of tragicomic “Fun Home” and “Are you my mother?” “Fun Home,” which then became a big major Broadway musical and she's since been- been named the MacArthur Genius so it's like she's got- she's sort of really like in the peak of her career and and this is from earlier on. Some underground comics that that also became sort of collected into these books but they're, they're really fantastic to look through, and again it's not really feasible to look through them in the in the gallery setting but absolutely up in the reading room and Special Collections once these are back and ready for for use again.

Catherine Armbrust: [52:14] Nice, thank you. so we've got one more section to go through hopefully everybody can still hang out for that we're gonna move from Queer Voices to Feminist voices and to kind of start out this section we've got our Savitar from 1970 and actually I was very happy to discover this because the person featured here is actually the only female law school professor at the time in the 70s and she's talking about the difficulties in moving up in the professional world and I love that they included this in this student publication, right? That this conversation about faculty and professionalism was important enough to include in this and this is actually pretty close to my heart too because my mom was an up-and-coming lawyer in the early 70s and dealt with a lot of probably similar things that this woman dealt with and really kicked a lot of butt in her field down in Arkansas so shout out shout out to her and you can see as we're moving this is the image on the left is kind of essentially like the front wall of the gallery. so, it's rounding out our circular experience of the space, but the Savitar is placed kind of in front of these first three objects that are going to lead us into this discussion.

John Fifield-Perez: so, this is this is an artist's book. A lot of the ones that we've been seeing have been sort of more from the 21st century. Especially the- the second decade, and so the one that we're I’ve just finished but this is- this is an earlier 1990s artist book, so slightly different stylistically from a lot of the others and so this this artist Sandy Wascher-James is- she made a carousel book which is one where you the book closes like again we talked about earlier the codex with covers and pages in between but you can extend it all the way around and then it has ties so you tie it and it makes this whole circular structure so it's more of a sculptural look and in this case it's all digitally printed on paper and she's looking at essentially the unrecognized and under recognized women of history and sort of how so often their stories are glossed over or forgotten, so it's taking both images of women like unidentified women and also pairing them with with really important sort of recognized political figures and social figures in the history of the united states and then accompanying them are these little sort of mylar stars with images printed on them between each of them yep perfect between each of the segments and yeah so just sort of considering the vastly unrepresented contribution of women in the history of the country and in the arts and politics

Catherine Armbrust: [55:24] yeah, I love- I love that one let's see and then that leads us to another student work, so we've got actually are featuring what two- two student pieces in this show which is kind of exciting.

John Fifield-Perez: so, this is a work by a former student who graduated in the psychology program but within a fibers class and so this is a book that came out of that class that then Special Collections acquired at the end of the semester so the student Summer Ritchie was looking at the cycle of violence and sort of the gradual escalation of violence against women and actually it so this one also it's tied in this case but it it is also a carousel book like the Sandy Wascher-James book that we just talked about and was actually structurally inspired by that through special collections so this is a class where we were doing a lot of collaborative work between the library and the classroom and so it's it within you can see in the close-up shot on the right just the edges of some cyanotypes but it's a combination of cyanotypes showing this escalating violence sexual violence against women and then accompanied by an altered text so it's a text where the letters spelling out repeatedly throughout the entire book “Boys will be boys,” “Boys will be boys,” “boys will be boys” and just this excuse used over and over to, to let off boys and men for violent acts against women and sort of explaining away toxic behavior.

Catherine Armbrust: will you talk will you just talk real quick about collecting student works too, because you all do have a few in the collection.

John Fifield-Perez: [57:11] yeah, we do and that was that was part of that semester in particular we've done it a few times with the fibers class. Where so at the beginning of the semester they'll come up to Special Collections and we're looking at sort of a survey of artists books in the collection and then throughout the semester, Pazia, who I mentioned before, the head of fibers, we would then do critiques with the students work and sort of talk to them while they're In Progress on on various projects and then eventually the end, acquiring some of those items for Special Collections and then we had an exhibition that year in the library of both items from that initial survey and then sort of the structures and the books from the students that you're seeing a lot of dialogue back and forth and how they're interpreting some of the things that they've seen and bringing their own experiences to the table. It was really fantastic and so we did another one of these just this this last year as well another- another class and acquired a few works from students but they- yeah, they always rise to the occasion it's really remarkable just the the things that they end up coming up with.

Catherine Armbrust: didn't she make an addition of five of these two like three or five.

John Fifield-Perez: three of them yeah it was so all the students were doing an edition of three so it was a lot of work with the erasure involved throughout the text the cyanotypes and then the binding as well and so part of, part of the appeal, this one as well is that as you approach it when it's closed like this you see the satin ribbons and the sort of like fluffy faux fur and there's a lot of glitter on the top edge so it has this sort of like what is what would be considered like a sort of socially expected like, very feminine look to it and then you open it and it's really it's full of these like really violent experiences and just trying to sort of pull those two elements together into one object.

Catherine Armbrust: yeah, and this was actually shown at the visual arts and design showcase too I think in 2019 as well so both of the student works have been featured around campus for being kind of exemplary projects so the last, this is our last handmade paper piece from one of some of those little like- like project collection…

John Fifield-Perez: Mhm.

Catherine Armbrust: that you all have?

John Fifield-Perez: [59:48] so this one is this is from the, the same collection as the bird one we looked at earlier, the “Calligraphy” collection portfolio and so the artist in this case Miriam Londoño. She is taking paper pulp mixing it with wood glue and then, using the pulp itself out of a squeeze bottle to write the names of women in her life and she's looking at this idea of the name is one of the most intimate things that we hold as individual humans and so it's it's a series of names and sort of these gradients of colors where it's all, it's full of negative space and so you can see it's sort of hung slightly off the wall so you get that shadow behind it going through this this calligraphy but this is one that's always sort of I think a standout from that collection it's a really remarkable use of paper and just the sturdiness of facilitating all this negative space within what would be expected to be a very fragile material.

Catherine Armbrust: yeah, it's really stunning. So the last three pieces that we're going to talk about kind of finish of the the main wall the kind of like front or back I don't know what you want to call it I called the front wall of the gallery and I do just want to say that the very last piece that we're going to talk about and I’ll remind you when we get close to it but there is like a content or trigger warning with that because it is about sexual assault which I forgot to talk about in regards to Summer's book but we're going to be looking at this one on the right a little more closely towards the end so I just wanted to tell people about that before we get into that but the first thing we're going to talk about is another Emily Martin piece who did the “Funny Haha” book

John Fifield-Perez: yep, and this one actually this is I forgot that we had this one coming up. this is actually our last one from the paper making portfolios this one's from the “Paper in Motion” portfolio that we also saw the frog and, and the bee from and so it's this is a collaborative work between Emily Martin and Bridget O'Malley who- she's a well she's retired now but it was a major paper maker and up in the Twin Cities and so they put together it's it's very sort of expansive and dynamic coming out but it lays flat and so you just have this sort of what you see the rust colored paper pulp ring the lid covers that and it's- it's looking at “Pandora's Box” and this idea of sort of blaming the woman for a conflict among men and that the text that's printed within the between the snakes and the folds are sort of goes into that you can you can make out the text pretty well when you're in the gallery and taking a look at it but yeah so again, sort of just this very typical experience that and bringing that sort of presenting that to a more a more public audience through this really fantastically engineered piece there's so much going on inside of it and it just ends up being looking like just a very thin sheet when it's all folded back together

Catherine Armbrust: [63:02] plus that card to Pandora from Zeus, yes, “do not open ever,” every time I see that it cracks me up. So that leads us to another Emily Martin piece which I am obsessed with and when you're in the gallery and you're starting to like… part of what's important to me when I'm curating shows is like starting to see visual and conceptual connections between works in the show and once we- you know before we get into this like what was really interesting to us visually was like the dresses that this character is wearing in relation to some of the other textile clothing apparel pieces that we had in the show and then also her… John'll talk about this but like the posture of the figure with the hands raised also made me kind of connect back to some of the raised fists that we saw in the Civil Rights section of the gallery as well so this piece is really charming especially up close there's a lot of texture to it

John Fifield-Perez: So these are… within this is sort of the main Emily Martin work that we have on display in the exhibit and as you can see we're both big fans of her work to show it but so these are there are actually two projects in one here and there's a third iteration that is not represented but as I mentioned before with the “Funny Haha” treatment of Shakespeare's comedies this is Emily Martin, her second Shakespeare project where she was looking at a “Othello” and in her reading of the text she talks about how she was just very frustrated with the character Desdemona and how Shakespeare wrote her where she just has zero agency. She's sort of this objectified woman who's acted upon by the men around here and ultimately is a casualty where when spoiler alert she dies at the end and the the so she's what she's done is she's taken all of Desdemona's lines and she cut all the words out and then began rearranging them and giving her something more pithy to say and to respond to these men around here and so she talks about being this sort of object moved among men or asking about the validity of the love that her husband has for her if it's so easy for him to kill her in the end and all of these, sort of holding the men around her accountable and speaking her own mind and and so in this case we have we're looking at the broad sides where you have seven broadsides and

Catherine Armbrust: sorry.

John Fifield-Perez: the- That's okay. Uh, so each one has its own statement and those are they began as the mobius strips that you see above which are trace monoprints so the mobius strip being a ring with a twist in it and the act of doing a trace monoprint is where you have say a an inked up like piece of plexi on a table and then you're putting the paper on top of it and using a stylus writing backwards to if you want text or making a drawing and wherever the stylus is hitting you're going to pick up that ink off the plexi and so it's to do this on both sides of the paper is very challenging technically but you also end up with this sort of like cloud of- of ink that surrounds the letters where it gets a little bit closer to the plexi and so she this is sort of where she initially presents those lines she did five of them and then she expanded at seven when she began the broadsides and the broadsides are really fascinating technically and sort of compositionally I think the the imagery the depiction of the human form is very typical of how of her style of work but what she did in here was a mixture of all sorts of different techniques, so you have letter press text you have pressure prints for some of the textures and the in the dresses like the one in the middle where you get the sort of layer it feels very like there's some dimension to it both dark and light but all sort of in one texture and then she was also using foam blocks or some of the like the hair and the lips areas but then the outlines were all wire so she had a magnetic plate on the press bed that she would bend a wire and snap it into place on the press bed and then as she's printing she can sort of compose of that and change things so these are all sort of rooted in the same figure and then reconfiguring those arms and the- or lifting it up and snapping in the opposite direction so you get these, sort of, different postures that that the character is displaying all coming out of one initial sort of figure that she's playing with and then the third version which you can find through the artist's website if you look for Emily Martin, book artist, is a there's a video a stop-motion video that she did using puppets and so it's the in this case Desdemona's hair is full of words that are all epithets that are thrown at her throughout the play and she's speaking these lines at the at the other characters

Catherine Armbrust: [68:26] nice. I love this piece. we'll roll through the mobius strips too. so the last piece again this has the content warning or the trigger warning because this piece does deal directly with the idea of sexual assault but and I want you to see the array of smaller books that come out of this gorgeous collection the container once again lovin’ on the container at the top is this beautiful red linen container but I also want you to note if if you're in the gallery or if you saw the other lecture that the very first piece in the exhibit that we talk about is by Sonia Farmer and then we circle back to her and this is a collaborative piece by Sonia Farmer and another artist Shivanee Ramlachan, I think if I'm saying that correctly.

John Fifield-Perez: Yeah.

Catherine Armbrust: and it was kind of exciting for us to realize that it started with her and also ended with her if you're looking at it in that way. So, and this was also I think one of our displays that maybe John and I felt most proud of in the way that we decided to put the work out and pull the books apart so I'm gonna we're gonna get some detail shots of most of these books too while John talks about it.

John Fifield-Perez: so, yeah, so, as Catherine said this is a work, it's I think fitting as a culminating work. It's a collaboration between the poet Trinidadian poet Shivanee Ramlachan and Sonia Farmer who is also poet but in this case is working as the fabricator as the book artist and who is Bahamian. So it's looking at Caribbean identity and the same in a similar way that she was looking at that exploring that in the “True and Exact History” of the island of Barbados, the very first work that we looked at two weeks ago but in this case it's using Shivanee's poems and which are expressing her own experience of rape and sexual assault while living in Trinidad and and sort of this as a common experience of women within the Caribbean and so each poem has its own book its own book structure and no two structures are the same either. so you have all sorts of different a lot of them are what we call single sheet structures where it's- you're printing on one sheet and then cutting different designs into it where then you can fold it into all these different shapes and a lot of engineering going into these and then it's using various techniques, so letterpress printing again using pressure prints like what Emily Martin was using in some of those dress forms, and then linoleum blocks and photopolymer plates so all sorts of different types of relief printing techniques represented in here. A lot of sort of like hidden- hidden rooms within the books where you have slots that if you sort of you can pull the paper apart and sort of find text masks behind other text and it's the box up at the very top of this sort of pyramid structure is designed to be so it's supposed to represent essentially a rape kit and so within each, within the kit you have a Tyvek envelope for each book and sort of moving through it as though you're moving through this sort of archival file or just like a series of documents in a very which is often a very sort of sterilized treatment of these really intense traumatic experiences and, and so in addition to the books you also have then a there's a flash drive with an audio recording of the author reading her poems that you can listen to as you go along, which is also really interesting because a number of them don't move in necessarily a linear fashion throughout the structure, so it helps you to sort of navigate some of these, but using this sort of red stain as a as a through component on each of these items and, and as the title suggests “The Red Thread Cycle” so like that is the through line that that connects all the works. You'll see some of the really dynamic typography in here where you have along the creases in the in the folds type set so that it sits just within those or ones where, as you unfold them, you're going to reveal more and more text and sort of navigating through these in in a really different way than you might be used to with a typical book of poetry. So yeah, this is, I, I would agree with Catherine this is definitely the- I think one of the best sort of displays of the works within the exhibit we we spent a lot of time just trying to sort of figure out how we could would- could configure all of them to be shown and I will say- so this is another really recent acquisition we've never been able to use this in a class before so I was really excited to be able to display this and have people experience it but part of the impetus for acquiring this was those classes that I spoke about earlier that Summer Richie was in, who did “Boys will be boys,” where these structures while very dynamic are generally very simple to make as well so it's, it's finding an example of work that is very technically approachable but also really intensely personal and sort of the potential that you have within the book arts for telling your own story and sort of how finding structures that that students can adopt and adapt very easily to their own work was an important part of the decision to acquire this. Most of them use one two maybe three sheets of paper and then it's just that process of folding them and adhering them to each other, cutting them that that really gives them these incredibly dynamic shapes.

Catherine Armbrust: [74:35] yeah, they look like I'm going to just go back to the full display real quick before we wrap up because they look like sort of technical marvels some of them and in the way that they've folded and cut but also like how she how they're getting the the text in those really specific areas.

John Fifield-Perez: but yeah, absolutely and I would it's like just like I think only one book within the entire series actually has any stitching in it so any, any sewing. Everything else is just done through folding so it's very it's like both really exciting structurally but also very approachable technologically that you don't have to have a lot of skill coming into this to be able to sort of fabricate some of these structures.

Catherine Armbrust: yeah, they're really, they're those books are fun to make too, and they make you look really fancy. So that is this is a shot from the back of the gallery to kind of like give you an overview of the last few things that we talked about but that was I- I like to talk John likes to talk we had a lot of things to say tonight because we're so excited about this show and we really appreciate you participating in this evening with us. I'm going to stop sharing the screen and see if anyone's left, they are hooray, and if anyone has a question about anything. I just want to thank John again I want to thank Nicole again, and Anselm and Gary again and John Henry Adams is here, thank you John Henry Adams for the work you did for us. Anselm says, “thank you both for all the insights.” This was- we really like that “Heroes and Leaders” exhibition that they had started that virtual exhibition was a really important part of getting us started because we had a lot of things, we were thinking about for the show that helped us focus in on some really important aspects that we were able to include so I'm really happy that we were able to do that. But yeah, I don't see any questions. Omai says, “thank you. Gorgeous and thought-provoking, thank you for taking so much care with the collection.” Yeah, y'all this is, these collections that we have on campus are really I think kind of hidden resources but they're very, very exciting and part of what Nicole and John and I were talking about too and we talked about that a lot more in the first half of the virtual tour and I probably should have brought that back into this one but you know we're talking about these persistent narratives and we're talking about these objects that we're caring for here on campus, but what we're also doing is recognizing the lack in a lot of marginalized voices that are not part of the collection, yet which means that there's parts of the conversation in history that are missing and John and the folks at the Special Collections have some new directives for their acquisitions and they also do have like timely response guidelines now and the textile collection as well to kind of start to cover that lack. John would you just like talk a little bit about what y'all are doing in Special Collections to kind of bring in more voices as kind of as we wrap up here?

John Fifield-Perez: [78:26] yeah, absolutely so one of our main initiatives that we did in the last couple years was we completely revamped our collection development guidelines. So that is our policy for sort of what our collecting priorities are and it's, it's the document that we use in making decisions on what we're going to collect and a lot of it was- a lot of the changes that we were making were built around acknowledging the massive voids of representation that we have in so much of the collections because, as is typical of most Special Collections, it's a lot of wealthy straight white men who are donating materials or who were writing these materials or who were the subjects of materials and that ended up being most heavily represented in our collection so making very specific priorities around rectifying some of these missed representations that that we have and also in in sort of in doing going through that process we've refocused and found a lot of materials that are in our collections that also were just not well described or underutilized and, or difficult to find and so, so those were that it was a really important process for us and is ongoing so that's a lot of the materials that we've seen in the in the exhibit from Special Collections many of those are- are sort of new acquisitions that reflect those sort of change priorities as well.

Catherine Armbrust: and that is part of like us as art purveyors, I don't know, object purveyors, curators of material objects, like that's part of us putting our money where our mouth is, right, because like we can't like- cultural institutions can't keep saying “diversity is important” right like you have to take action and that's what's happening here with these collections on campus is action is being taken it's not just like lip service and I really, really appreciate that about you all so much because I think that that is we got we got to make those changes from within and it's happening for us here so thank you. Bella said, “thank you for presenting them,” she wants to visit the collection in person. FYI, I’ll be taking my class to the gallery if anyone's in town and wants to go on a field trip next Wednesday evening John is there- can students not quite visit the Special Collections yet or is there a way to do that? How can they do that?

John Fifield-Perez: so, they absolutely can. If you go to the Special Collections website, just search Mizzou Special Collections you'll find us you can make a research appointment. So normally we are sort of much more open for people just to walk in and check things out- by check things out I mean look at things it's a non-circulating collection, but it's all geared toward access to the community so we while we have limits on our instruction for this semester we are still taking research individual research appointments it's just in a much more limited basis so we're doing sort of two slots every day a morning slot or an afternoon slot and if you go through our website you'll see on the sidebar it'll say schedule a research appointment and you can go through and find an available spot and come in and when you make that appointment you can ask to see something and we're happy to facilitate that and one of us will meet you in the reading room and get everything that you need

Catherine Armbrust: [81:59] and I mean y'all and they have amazing stuff anywhere from like the earliest little like, cuneiform tablets is that how you pronounce it.

John Fifield-Perez: yeah.

Catherine Armbrust: like some of the earliest text-based kind of printing to an amazing comic book collection so it's sort of and everything else you can think of it's a really special place and especially these like amazing artist books that's kind of my favorite part of it.

John Fifield-Perez: I have a soft spot in my heart.

Catherine Armbrust: I know well thank you everybody I don't see any other questions in the chat. Thank you so much John for being here and being a part of this exhibition that we worked out of, we had a very small amount of time to plan it and it became a really big exhibition, so I so appreciate you being a part of it and making it so special because it really is like it's embedded in my soul now this exhibition.

John Fifield-Perez: thank you for facilitating Catherine. I mean this is all, this is- Catherine is the crux of all of us. She- she made all this happen so thank you to you.

Catherine Armbrust: well, it was sort I’ve been telling people like it was kind of my dream I had been wanting to do something with John and wanting to do something with Nicole and suddenly we had this hole in the schedule opened up and that then became this, so dreams really do come true even during COVID times so thanks everybody for being here I'm gonna stop recording but if any of my students need to stay after to ask me any questions please feel free so I’ll just kind of wait for everybody to leave or if people want to chat not on the recording that's cool too whatever you want but yeah thanks everyone for participating we really appreciate you and please go in and see the show. It's open until November 19th and this is a rare opportunity to see all of these things in one place. So, get in there.