Seventh Annual New Jersey International Book Arts Symposium
Photos: Morning Presentations
Ilse Schreiber-Noll, a German born painter/print-maker, who studied under Antonio Frasconi and now teaches alongside him at SUNY Purchase, talked about her collaborations with poets, including Joseph Brodsky, Octavio Paz, and, most recently, Galway Kinnell. Her setting of Kinnell's newly published translation of The Duino Elegies, by Rainer Maria Rilke, provided the context for the evening's musical afterpiece. Schreiber-Noll divides her work into two categories: one-of-a-kind books, or books of extremely limited editions, which she tends to construct with collage technique and layers of thick, lurid, paint, applied in abstract patterns, and books in larger limited editions, intended for a wider audience, employing woodcuts. Schreiber-Noll is herself a poet of considerable force, as she demonstrated by reciting a poem[PDF] she penned for Joseph Brodsky. ) The morning presentations concluded with Lynne Allen, a printmaker/book artist (Center For Innovative Print and Paper)--although not before Dane delivered an introduction so superlative, that it may have been the only time in the Symposium's history that an introduction cried out for an encore. Allen talked about the importance of content. Mixing images of her work with photographs of her Native American grandmother and great-grandmother, she sought to demonstrate the connectedness of her early social protest art to her recent autobiographical art, which is centered on the lost lifeways of her Native American ancestry. Allen experiments freely with mediums and materials (see, for example her moccasin books), a technical sophistication and versatility matched by a predilection for subtlety and nuance: in her prints, books, and sculptural models, vivacious playfulness and ironic fetishism invariably modulate into lucid views of injustice and menacing social conditions that imperil our survival, both as individuals and as a community.
