Visiting Artist Lecture: Helen Frederick – Investigating Cultural Literacy
@ Center for Book and Paper Arts
1104 S. Wabash, 2nd Floor
Opening Thursday, June 7th, from 6PM -
On view through Tuesday, November 5th
What is an indigenous vocabulary? The lecture will approach the relationship of natural materials and their prowess to be made by hand into other transformed useful materials as a lesson in daily life, industry, art, politics and science. It will examine two very different papemaking areas in the Sichuan area of China to enable a further understanding of how hand papermaking provides an intersection of cultural values (“embodied” and “embedded” skills) and their affect on economic development. Other age-old traditions that are also a hybrid of so many complex parts that only dedicated communities can sustain their legacy and effectiveness into usefulness in various parts of the world will be viewed as comparative subalterns to contemporary Western cultural literacy and currency. Understanding how assimilated technologies can grow from an indigenous culture will be examined as a primary trajectory of this century.
Helen Frederick is concerned with investigating the potentials of collective memory at sites of hand-driven productions, and discerning how they shape cultural bridging for indigenous peoples as well as foreigners and outsiders to the regions. Particularly with global ecosystem decline, Frederick asks what skills are most valuable for artists and artisans and their communities?
Helen Frederick is the Sward Visiting Artist. The Marilyn Sward Visiting Artist series is dedicated to bringing advanced and innovative book and paper practitioners from around the country to the Center for Book & Paper Arts.
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