Themes of labor, community, and creativity shape the visual and hands-on experience of Ulises: Assembly at the Tufts University Art Galleries in Boston
It is a Saturday afternoon and Tufts students have gathered for a workshop set in a gallery space at SMFA at Tufts. Artist and designer Lizania Cruz gets things started with an icebreaker question: What do you know about Frederick Douglass?
Douglass is indelibly engraved into the history of the United States. The celebrated orator and abolitionist, an eloquent voice against a racial society, was the most photographed man in America during the 19th century. It is not surprising that most students say they retain passing knowledge from middle school.
But for Cruz, Douglass’ legacy remains open to inquiry when framed by a contemporary racial context of her homeland. For the past five years, she has pursued what she describes as a “criminal investigation” into the “undermining and erasure of Blackness in the collective consciousness of the Dominican Republic.”
“I want to know,” she said, “why this happened and why this continues to happen.”
The Douglass connection to that inquiry may not be well-known, but for Cruz, it is a springboard for answers. Douglass visited the Dominican Republic in 1872 as part of a commission to assess public opinion on and benefits of annexation to the United States. In this venture, she asks, was he a suspect in or a witness to the “repression and suppression” of its African heritage?
This glimpse at how Cruz gathers and recontextualizes pieces of research, including in a New York multimedia installation, is one of three workshops for students held in conjunction with Ulises: Assembly, now at the Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG) through November 10. The workshops focus on different themes of assembling and building art, with a particular focus on artists’ books.
In September, Zimbabwean-born visual artist Nontsikelelo Mutiti, director of graduate studies for graphic design at Yale School of Art, invited students to bring a draft table of contents for a book they would want to create. It was a starting point for talking about intent and format.
Next month students will meet leading bookmakers from the Netherlands. BB Workshop, also known as the Bookbinding Workshop at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Instituut of Amsterdam, will offer students hands-on opportunities that explore various bookbinding and installation techniques.
Curator Laurel V. McLaughlin said the workshops are natural extensions of the exhibition, which was a collaboration with Ulises, a Philadelphia-based collective dedicated to artists’ books, independent art publications, and the community of people who make them. The workshops showcase the concept of “assembly,” not only of works of art and ideas but of people. They also show contemporary artists at work, a process often hidden from public view.
“Part of our thinking behind the show was to offer workshops that bring the labor of knowledge production forward and acknowledge its importance,” she said.
An Intriguing Assembly
The exhibition’s focus on labor spans five spaces: a bookshop, a Ulises institutional archive, a cataloguing station, a new archive of submitted materials, and a billboard.
The new archive element grew out of Ulises’ goal to strengthen connections across a global community of artists. To that end, the collective;recently put out an open call to bookworkers (those who make and design books, as well as librarians, archivists, and curators) around the world in the form of a simple question: “What do you do?”
Some 1,000 contributors responded, with many sending artists’ books—artworks in which they expressed their creativity through content, printing, typography, illustration, and/or binding. They also sent zines and printed ephemera.
The selection, now an eclectic and visually intriguing “assembly” at Tufts, will become part of the collective’s expanding archive. The exhibition also includes a public billboard by Ken Lum, “I’m Always Waiting,” an interpretation of the “liminal space of waiting for work, common to artistic gig work, and also a space of potentiality,” said McLaughlin.
The exhibition is the first installation/artist residency for Ulises, which is named for Ulises Carrión, a pioneer and theorist of the artist’s book. A bookshop included in the exhibition is dedicated to Carrión’s idea of books “as not just something that you read, but also as an artistic space of potential.”
Nerissa Cooney, who cofounded Ulises along with Lauren Downin, Kayla Romberger, Gee Wesley, and Ricky Yanas, said the exhibit aligns well with TUAG’s abiding interest in elevating artists’ books, as evidenced in exhibitions such as Bookworks and the large collection of artists’ books in the W. Van Alan Clark, Jr. Library at SMFA.
“Our collective has been running for almost 10 years and so this is a great time to have this experimental opportunity, and we’re excited to expand our reach through Tufts,” she said.
To Research and Transform
“What can you say from the archives that you have? How little do you know? How do you feel your ancestors are also part of this history? Where does that come into what you say?”
Cruz is nearing the end of her workshop. She has shared how her fascination with Douglass has inspired her art, and how it has informed her passion for exhaustive archival research.
To date, she has gathered in a self-created app hundreds of letters, newspaper clippings, and promotional advertisements that she brings together in novel ways to provoke new insights and understanding.
Now she encourages students to take a similar approach: to transform photocopies of selections from her archive, mostly from related 19th-century sources (newspapers, magazines, photographs), into new narratives informed by their own perceptions.
Isabel Overby, A25, settles on period sheet music. She cuts yellow construction paper into narrow strips and lays them on top of the music, partially concealing stanzas.
Her choices echo back to the message Cruz shared at the start of the workshop: of Black history being suppressed, of a story not fully told.
“I’m thinking about how the images that we have determine the archives,” she says, adding, “What’s obscured and what’s visible determines the history we see. We don’t see everything.”
Ulises: Assembly is on exhibition at TUAG’s Grossman and Anderson Galleries at the SMFA at Tufts campus at 230 Fenway, Boston, through November 10.