Shawn Sheehy to Speak on Tuesday, May 14, on “Concept to (Political) Action: Pop-Up Artists’ Books”

Please join us on Tuesday, May 14, 12:00–1:30 pm, for an artist talk by Shawn Sheehy: “Concept to (Political) Action: Pop-Up Artists’ Books. The talk, in 126 Memorial Library, 728 State Street, is one in a series of events surrounding the multi-venue “Text Support: A Library Exhibit About Paper.”

This intricate example of Sheehy’s paper engineering, currently on exhibit in Special Collections as part of “Text Support,” hails from the large artists’ book collection in Kohler Art Library.

An earlier exhibit in Special Collections, “Lothar Meggendorfer and Movable Books” (2006), showcased color lithographic proof sheets of movable children’s books from the Lothar Meggendorfer Collection. Meggendorfer (1847-1925) created more than 100 children’s books over the course of his career, many in multiple editions and translations. To set Meggendorfer’s own paper engineering in context, this earlier exhibit also contained books with movable parts from the Renaissance through the 21st century, including treatises on cosmography, geometry, landscape design, and the automobile, as shown here:

This multi-part illustration of the Daimler automobile comes from Les transformateurs d’énergie: Générateurs, accumulateurs, moteurs, avec les plus récentes applications à la navigation aérienne, assembled by a committee of engineers and published in Paris in 1910.