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ILHS Speaker Series • Kathleen Walkup

Sunday, November 22nd @ 5:00 pm

LadyEmerDeviceKathleen Walkup, Professor of Book Art, Mills College, Oakland presents a talk titled: Pulling the Devil by the Tail: Cuala Press, Elizabeth Corbet Yeats and the Ghost of Albert Bender on Sunday November 22 2015, UICC at 5pm

One of the more iconic images in the history of printing is that of Elizabeth Corbet Yeats, dressed in a long smock, printing at an Albion handpress. Behind her a woman is preparing to ink the press; in front of her another woman sits at a table reading proofs. The image is often seen as an example of the genteel art of amateur printing by the ‘ladies’, part of the move toward finding ways for the privileged women of the Arts & Crafts era to keep themselves occupied. In fact that reading could not be further from the truth.

In 1902 Elizabeth became a printer and proprietor of what would become Cuala Press, an Irish private press whose editor was her brother, William Butler Yeats. In 1922, Elizabeth began a correspondence with the Irish-American collector Albert Bender. This correspondence lasted until her death in 1940. Some fifty-five letters from Elizabeth to Bender have survived and are housed at Mills College. This talk will examine the history and legacy of Elizabeth Corbet Yeats and Cuala Press, with a particular focus on her correspondence with Bender. The paper will also draw on research at the National Library of Ireland, Trinity College Dublin and Boston College.

Kathleen Walkup is Professor of Book Art and Director of the Book Art Program at Mills College, where she teaches typography and letterpress printing, artists’ bookmaking and seminar/studio courses that combine print culture and book history with studio projects. She is also Book Art Director for the MFA in Book Art & Creative Writing, the first such program in the country. Her research interests include the history of women in print culture and conceptual practice in artists’ books. Her most recent curatorial project is Hand, Voice & Vision: Artists’ Books from Women’s Studio Workshop (Grolier Club, New York, 2010; it is still travelling). Her talk, The Book is a Public Place, will be published in the anthology Threads in 2016. In 2015 she was a Stephen Botein Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. She is a co-founder of College Book Art Association. For the past seven years she has written a seasonal blog, New Irish Journal.

Details

Date:
Sunday, November 22nd
Time:
5:00 pm
Event Categories:
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84xmWB3P_normal     CALENDAR SPONSORED IN PART BY THE CONSULATE GENERAL OF IRELAND, SAN FRANCISCO