"Rubbing Shoulders with the Private Press Movement: The Clinker Press" Presentation and tour of Clinker Press by Andre Chaves. Tim Hansen will serve as moderator.
Apr
11
5:00 PM17:00

"Rubbing Shoulders with the Private Press Movement: The Clinker Press" Presentation and tour of Clinker Press by Andre Chaves. Tim Hansen will serve as moderator.

Andre Chaves was born in Brazil, far away from the worlds of Arts and Crafts and fine printing.  However, upon receiving a scholarship from the American Fields Service Exchange Student Program, he spent a year with a family in East Aurora, New York, home of the Roycrofters. Unfortunately, 1966 marked the nadir of interest in the Arts and Crafts movement, even in East Aurora. Returning to Brazil, he completed his medical studies; did his residency in Baltimore, Md., and on to Miami for a fellowship in hand surgery. He married Ann, a fellow East Aurora student from his high school days, and the couple eventually settled in Pasadena.

Contact with the Arts and Crafts movement took place gradually over the years -- a little Stickley here, a little Greene and Greene there -- but in the late 1980s, the couple bought the Duncan-Irwin House, designed by the Greene brothers, and went deeply into the Arts and Crafts world. During the decade that they lived there, Peter Hay, owner of Book Alley Bookshop, inspired the formation of a printing group, which stored a growing array of presses in the Chaves's garage. Clinker Press was born. The press continues to operate today, now located in Tualatin, Oregon, just south of Portland, with a focus on books and broadsides related to the Arts and Crafts movement.

Andre is a frequent lecturer on topics related to the history of printing and Arts and Crafts. He has lectured at the Arts and Crafts Conference in Asheville, North Carolina, at the Double Crown Club in London, and at the Alcuin Society in Canada. 

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"Thunderclap: Art & Life & Sudden Death" Lecture by Laura Cumming
May
18
9:00 AM09:00

"Thunderclap: Art & Life & Sudden Death" Lecture by Laura Cumming

Described as combining ‘memoir, art criticism, and history to brilliant effect’ (The New York Times Book Review), Laura Cumming’s highly-acclaimed latest book, Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life & Sudden Death, transports her reader into the captivating world of 17th century Dutch paintings in the light of her own life and those of two painters: the Dutch master Carol Fabritius, artist of The Goldfinch and a mysteriously small handful of other paintings, and Cumming’s own father, the Scottish painter James Cumming. Both painters died suddenly, and both left works that have changed the author’s own life What art can be, and how it can shift your thinking in a thunderclap - this goes to the heart of Cumming’s talk for the Ruskin Art Club.

Laura Cumming has been chief art critic of The Observer since 1999. Previously, she was arts editor of The New Statesman (UK), literary editor of The Listener (UK), and deputy editor of Literary Review. She is a former columnist for The Herald (Scotland) and has contributed to the Evening Standard (London), The Guardian, L’Express, and Vogue. Her book The Vanishing Velazquez won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was a New York Times bestseller. Her memoir On Chapel Sands was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford and Costa Prizes. Thunderclap has just own the Writer’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2024. 


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Hagy Belzberg: The Annual Ada Louise Huxtable lecture
Mar
14
5:00 PM17:00

Hagy Belzberg: The Annual Ada Louise Huxtable lecture

Hagy Belzberg is the Founding Partner of BA Collective, an architecture and interior design firm based in Santa Monica, California. He received his Master of Architecture with Distinction from Harvard University and held teaching positions at UCLA, USC, and SCI-Arc. Since 1997 he has established a diverse portfolio of award-winning built work, often using digital fabrication and non-traditional construction methods. He was honored by the American Institute of Architects California Council as an Emerging Talent, and in 2008 he was recognized as an “Emerging Voice” by the Architectural League of New York. In 2010, Hagy was confirmed into The College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects for “notable contributions to the advancement of the profession of architecture” and was a 2014 Interior Design Magazine Hall of Fame inductee. Recipient of over 100 awards, his work has been included in exhibitions in the USA, Canada, Spain, and Greece, and published in over 20 countries.

In this online event—the annual Ada Louise Huxtable lecture in honor of the longtime New York Times architecture critic—Belzberg will discuss how he has used digital fabrication and nontraditional construction methods to establish a diverse portfolio of award-winning work, which has earned him a place in the Interior Design Magazine Hall of Fame, among more than 100 other awards.

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Annual Ruskin Birthday Bash at the Telescope Studio Downtown Arts District: In Person + Zoom
Feb
11
3:00 PM15:00

Annual Ruskin Birthday Bash at the Telescope Studio Downtown Arts District: In Person + Zoom

Join us for this year's Birthday Bash honoring the 205th anniversary of British art and social critic John Ruskin's birth in 1819. (The actual date is February 8.) The festive event will feature the screening of a portion of Robert Hewison's  film "All Great Art Is Praise" (2019) at the Royal Academy of Art in London, with actor Michael Palin reading excerpts from Ruskin's unfinished autobiography, Praeterita; the world-premiere of a work for cello and piano featuring cellist Allan Hon and pianist Alex Zhu; the annual toast to Mr. Ruskin -- and, of course, a party and reception following.

The event is free of charge and open to the public. Bring family and friends to this celebration of Ruskin in LA!

Telescope Studio is located at: 2125 Bay Street, Los Angeles 90021. Parking is available.

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"Pestilence and Reanimation: Ruskin on Renaissance Art" with Prof. Jeremy Melius
Jan
13
9:00 AM09:00

"Pestilence and Reanimation: Ruskin on Renaissance Art" with Prof. Jeremy Melius

Bernardino Luini, Saint Catherine and Saint Agatha, Chiesa di San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore, Milan.

John Ruskin’s hostility towards Renaissance culture is well known. Denunciation of its pomp, scientism, and “enervated sensuality” gave moral urgency to the analysis of architecture in The Stones of Venice (1851-53), for instance, with its overwhelming narrative of social and spiritual decline. But when it came to the painting of Renaissance Italy, Ruskin found himself again and again of two minds. “Crushed to earth” by the achievements of several crucial artists—Tintoretto, Veronese, Titian (sometimes) in the 1840s and 50s; Botticelli, Carpaccio, and Bernardino Luini later in life—Ruskin couldn’t help but respond to their visionary force. This lecture explores key episodes in the critic’s developing conception of Renaissance painting: moments in which Ruskin had the courage to trust his own aesthetic responsiveness, despite the misgivings expressed in his historical accounts. It does so in the hope of opening up our understanding of Ruskin’s attentiveness to works of visual representation, as staged in his writings and drawings, and of how that exemplary attentiveness might continue to inform our own.

Jeremy Melius is a historian of modern art and criticism who has published widely on figures such as John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Pablo Picasso, and Lee Bontecou. He is completing a book entitled The Invention of Botticelli and at work on another concerning Ruskin and the historical study of art. Currently a NOMIS Fellow at eikones – Center for the Theory and History of the Image, University of Basel, in January 2024 he begins a new role as lecturer in History of Art at the University of York.

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Dec
2
3:30 PM15:30

MEMBERS’ RUSKIN ORIENTATION – AND A PARTY! IN-PERSON AT THE TELESCOPE STUDIO

In response to members’ inquiries, we’re hosting our first members’ basic orientation session on the vision of John Ruskin and the history of the Ruskin Art Club. Executive Director Gabriel Meyer and RAC board members will lead the discussion. Bring your questions!

Because it’s the season, we’ve also added a party to the mix. Feel free to bring friends and family to this festive and informative afternoon at the Telescope Studio in LA’s vibrant arts district. RSVP at info@ruskinartclub.org.

Telescope Studio is located at 2125 Bay Street (near the 10 Fwy., off Santa Fe), Los Angeles, CA 90021-1707. Parking available.

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“The Work of Iron in Nature, Art, and Policy” by John Ruskin STUDY SESSION with Philip Hoare
Nov
11
9:00 AM09:00

“The Work of Iron in Nature, Art, and Policy” by John Ruskin STUDY SESSION with Philip Hoare

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 AND SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 18 [OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, ON ZOOM] 9-10:30AM [PST]

“The Work of Iron in Nature, Art, and Policy” by John Ruskin will be the focus of two study sessions led by the distinguished author Philip Hoare.

Philip Hoare is an English writer, especially of history and biography. His most recent work, and the subject of last year’s RAC presentation by the author, is Albrecht Durer and the Whale: How Art Imagines Our World (2021).

Materials for Study Session:

"The Work of Iron in Nature, Art, and Policy"

Clive Wilmer's commentary on “The Work of Iron of Iron in Nature, Art, and Policy”

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Nov
4
10:00 AM10:00

MEMBERS’ STUDY SESSION: OVERVIEW OF RUSKIN’S LECTURE “THE WORK OF IRON IN NATURE, ART, AND POLICY” (1858) led by PROF. JIM SPATES

In preparation for author Philip Hoare’s two sessions on “The Work of Iron,” Prof. Jim Spates will provide Ruskin Art Club members with a basic orientation to this complex and seminal lecture.

Materials for Study Session:

"The Work of Iron in Nature, Art, and Policy"

Clive Wilmer's commentary on “The Work of Iron of Iron in Nature, Art, and Policy”

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18th Annual Los Angeles Archives Bazaar at Doheny Memorial Library, University of Southern California
Oct
28
10:00 AM10:00

18th Annual Los Angeles Archives Bazaar at Doheny Memorial Library, University of Southern California

THE STORIES OF LA

Experience the diversity of stories that make Southern California such a place of discovery. At the Los Angeles Archives Bazaar, presented by L.A. as Subject and the USC Libraries, anyone with an interest in the region’s history will find something of value. A broad array of institutions and archives will have experts on hand to show off their collections and answer questions.

The Ruskin Art Club will have a table at the bazaar and club members will be happy to greet you. Historical treasures from our Special Collections Archive will be on display as well as fine press pamphlets for sale and memorabilia.

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FATEFUL LINES: Ruskin, Noticing and Seeing Truly (IN PERSON & VIRTUAL)
Oct
5
5:00 PM17:00

FATEFUL LINES: Ruskin, Noticing and Seeing Truly (IN PERSON & VIRTUAL)

"Spray of Dead Oak Leaves," John Ruskin (1879)

In a complex world THE ELEMENTS OF DRAWING, Ruskin’s lessons on how to draw, hold  valuable lessons about what it is to be human, engaging us with the natural world and principles of creativity that can help us live in a more connected way. This lecture explores how, in truly seeing stones and leaves and landscapes, we can find them reflected in the patterns of our own lives.

Sarah woods

SARAH WOODS is an award-winning playwright and creative systems thinker. She’s founder of Artists In Exile, supporting artists to find refuge in the UK, a Visiting Researcher at the Centre for Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge and currently Fullbright Scholar in Residence at The University of Arkansas at Monticello.

Join us in person at the Denenberg Fine Arts 417 N San Vicente Blvd. Los Angeles 90048 or virtually!

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IN-PERSON (OPEN TO THE PUBLIC) AND LIVE-STREAMED: THE 23RD ANNUAL RUSKIN LECTURE AT DOHENY LIBRARY (USC): “‘MARIANA AT WORK’: RUSKIN AND GENDER”  BY PROF. DINAH BIRCH
Sep
12
5:00 PM17:00

IN-PERSON (OPEN TO THE PUBLIC) AND LIVE-STREAMED: THE 23RD ANNUAL RUSKIN LECTURE AT DOHENY LIBRARY (USC): “‘MARIANA AT WORK’: RUSKIN AND GENDER” BY PROF. DINAH BIRCH

“Mariana in the Moated Grange” by John Everett Millais (1851)

This is an in person (open to the public) event that will be live streamed at Doheny Library, with a reception and exhibition of Ruskin Historical Documents in the Feuchtwanger Room (4pm).

Dinah Birch, CBE, is an English literary critic. Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University, she has edited two books on Ruskin, Ruskin and Gender (2002) and John Ruskin: Selected Writings (2004). Birch served as the general editor of the 2012 edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature (2012).

Ruskin’s writing on women was complex, and sometimes contradictory.  Something similar may be said of his far-reaching influence, both in his lifetime and since.  Women were a major presence in his life, and his closest associates and most devoted followers were female.  His contemporaries did not see him as a wholly masculine figure, though he claimed patriarchal authority in his roles as cultural critic or as the Master of the Guild of St George.  In the decades immediately succeeding his death, his legacy often inspired women’s growing ambitions to play an active part in public life, for Ruskin had always insisted that they had a right and a responsibility to work – noting, for instance, of Millais’s painting of Tennyson’s Mariana (1851) that if he had painted ‘Mariana at work in an unmoated grange, instead of idle in a moated one, it had been more to the point – whether of art or of life’.  But he defined women’s obligations in language that was offensive to later twentieth-century feminists, and this damaged his reputation. Recent interpretations of Ruskin’s continuing significance have explored the tensions within his gendered identity.  This lecture will reflect on the evolution of these debates, arguing that Ruskin’s rich and challenging thought, with its piercing critique of unregulated capitalism and environmental destruction, continues to have much to offer both men and women. 

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MEMBERS ONLY: Ruskin Study Sessions
Aug
12
to Aug 19

MEMBERS ONLY: Ruskin Study Sessions

Please find below the readings for the study on beauty. You will find these texts on our website, http://www.ruskinartclub.org, in the Resources tab, under Works of Ruskin. Pdfs of the Library Edition (LE) of Ruskin's works are available there; the volume numbers are given below (page numbers match the pagination of the text not the online pdf.)

SESSION ONE: SATURDAY, AUGUST 12, 10-11:30AM STUDY SESSION: RUSKIN ON BEAUTY #1

1.      Beauty as Experience (Truth):

Praeterita LE 35:310-311 (par. 73); 312-315 (par. 75-77)

Modern Painters II LE 4:363-364 

2.      The Problem of the Picturesque

Modern Painters III: 5:193-200 (chapter XI)

Modern Painters IV: 6:16-20 (par. 10-12, with note on 20) 

           3.      Typical and Vital Beauty

Modern Painters  II: LE 4:42-50 Theoretic Faculty

Modern Painters II: LE 4:76-81; 87-91 Typical Beauty

Modern Painters II: LE 4:146-156 (end of par. 7); 161-162 Vital Beauty

STUDY SESSION: RUSKIN ON BEAUTY #2: SATURDAY, AUGUST 19, 10-11:30AM

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VIRTUAL PRESENTATION (OPEN TO THE PUBLIC): W. PATRICK EDWARDS: ON THE NATURE OF ART AND WORKMANSHIP BY DAVID PYE
Aug
10
5:00 PM17:00

VIRTUAL PRESENTATION (OPEN TO THE PUBLIC): W. PATRICK EDWARDS: ON THE NATURE OF ART AND WORKMANSHIP BY DAVID PYE

Patrick owns a successful restoration and furniture making company Antique Refinishers in San Diego.  In 2000, he opened the American School of French Marquetry to share the expertise he gained in Paris at the Ecole Boulle with fellow American woodworkers. He has long been a champion of the artisan philosophy of David Pye.

In this thoroughly mechanized age, what is the point of craft? Does it make any sense to work with hand tools when machines can do the same job faster, and in many cases better? What visual richness do we lose by embracing a mass-produced world?" "The Nature and Art of Workmanship explores the meaning of skill and its relationship to design and manufacture. Cutting through a century of fuzzy thinking, David Pye proposes a new theory of making based on the concepts of 'workmanship of risk' and 'workmanship of certainty'.

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Private Ruskin Art Club Tour (in-person) of Apricot Lane Farms, Moorpark
Jul
21
9:00 AM09:00

Private Ruskin Art Club Tour (in-person) of Apricot Lane Farms, Moorpark

This two-hour walking tour of one of the Southland’s most innovative ecological farms is open to the public (non-members are welcome). Apricot Lane Farms was founded in 2011 by John and Molly Chester, and today spans 234 acres of countryside in Moorpark, California, just 40 miles north of Los Angeles. Apricot Lane Farms regeneratively grows more than 200 varieties of fruits and vegetables, and raises sheep, cows, pigs, chickens and ducks with care and respect, while working in harmony (or a comfortable level of disharmony) within our dynamic ecosystem. For more information about the farm and its working philosophy, visit their website: http://www.apricotlanefarms.com.

We will tour all aspects of the farm with staff. Open-air transportation will be provided for those who do not wish to walk. $35 per person: Paid online at our website (under donation) www.ruskinartclub.org or by check to: Ruskin Art Club, 200 S Avenue 66, Los Angeles, CA 90042, earmarked Apricot Lane Tour. 

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MEMBERS-ONLY (in-person) Field Trip to the Autry Resources Center, Burbank
Jul
1
11:00 AM11:00

MEMBERS-ONLY (in-person) Field Trip to the Autry Resources Center, Burbank

This event is a specially guided tour of the Autry Museum of the American West’s remarkable new state-of-the-art research library with its Ruskin Art Club/Hector Alliott Collection (1919) and its indigenous cultures of California holdings. The research library now houses the former Southwest Museum holdings. Space is very limited, so please reserve early at: info@ruskinartclub.org


The Autry Resources Center is located at 210 S Victory Blvd., Burbank 91502. Although affiliated, the library is NOT located at the Autry Museum of the American West facility near Griffith Park.

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Ruskin Study Sessions
Jun
10
to Jun 24

Ruskin Study Sessions

This summer, we will continue our informal Zoom study sessions on key works of Ruskin on the Saturdays of June 10th, 17th and 24th. These sessions are open to all members. While they involve close study of Ruskin’s text, they do not assume any special expertise or familiarity with Ruskin. In these sessions, we will be studying “The Nature of Gothic” chapter from Ruskin’s Stones of Venice. Please register for these sessions on info@ruskinartclub.org. Reading assignments and supplementary articles will be posted on the website.

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MEMBERS-ONLY (in-person) Field Trip to the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library (Clark Library)
Jun
8
11:00 AM11:00

MEMBERS-ONLY (in-person) Field Trip to the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library (Clark Library)

William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

A historic house and library, built in 1926, in the West Adams district. One of LA’s gems, it houses Clark’s extensive collection of seventeenth and eighteenth-century English literature, one of the largest collections of Oscar Wilde manuscripts and memorabilia in the US, along with a specialty in fin-du-siecle literature, and fine press printing. Our field trip will include a tour of the house as well as a specially curated exhibition of Kelmscott press editions (William Morris), Wilde memorabilia, and fine press editions. 

The address is: 2520 Cimarron Street, Los Angeles 90018. Parking is available on site.

Please reserve your space at info@ruskinartclub.org. If you are not yet a member of the Ruskin Art Club and you would like to attend this event, consider joining or purchasing a gift membership for family and friends HERE.

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THE LAW OF HELP: RUSKIN'S MORAL VISION OF CONNECTION by Gabriel Meyer
May
25
5:00 PM17:00

THE LAW OF HELP: RUSKIN'S MORAL VISION OF CONNECTION by Gabriel Meyer

Portrait of John Ruskin, John Everett Millais (1853-54)

In art and social critic John Ruskin's fifth volume of his Modern Painters, published in 1860, Ruskin identified "help" as "the highest and first law of the universe -- and the other name of life." In this wide-ranging lecture, writer Gabriel Meyer will examine Ruskin's "law of help" and its moral vision of connection, whereby the "intensity of life is also the intensity of helpfulness -- completeness of depending of each part upon all the rest"; the laws of death, separation, anarchy, and competition. He will reflect on the fascinating interface of Ruskin's ideas with contemporary scientific explorations of the "evolution of cooperation," which critique aspects of Darwinian thought. And he will suggest ways in which Ruskin's "law of help" challenges contemporary mores, with its focus on radical individualism and its attendant ills -- social isolation and growing polarization.  

Poet-journalist Gabriel Meyer is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has lived and worked throughout the Middle East, the Balkans, and East Africa. His reporter’s diary on the civil war in Sudan, War and Faith in Sudan (Eerdmans), won ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year award for essays in 2006. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in recognition of his work as a journalist by the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology at UC Berkeley in 2017 and by Lancaster University in the UK in 2022.  He had been involved with the historic Ruskin Art Club since 1998 and currently serves as its executive director. He has lectured widely on Ruskinian themes, most recently at the University of Arkansas at Monticello and at Notre Dame University where he delivered the second annual “Ruskin” lecture in February (2022), sponsored by the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values, on Ruskin and ecology. His essay “Ruskin and the California Dream” appears in the latest edition of the Ruskin Review (Lancaster University, UK). He is a Companion of the Guild of St. George. 

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80th Birthday Tribute for Jim Spates
May
7
12:00 PM12:00

80th Birthday Tribute for Jim Spates

The Walls of Lucerne (1847; cat. 30). Ruskin Library, Lancaster University.

The Ruskin Society of North America and the Ruskin Art Club invite you to join us on Sunday, May 7, 12 noon-1:30pm [PDT] / 3:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. [EDT]/ 8:00 p.m. - 9:30 p.m. [BST] (UK) for a VIRTUAL 80TH BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE TO PROF. JIM SPATES (Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Hobart/William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY).

Our dear friend and colleague, Jim Spates, recently celebrated his eightieth birthday and his many friends and colleagues around the world wish to salute one of our generation’s great Ruskin scholars. Join us by registering below to receive more information and the zoom link to the event.

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"Ruskinian resonances in Japanese art and culture and the Ruskin & Morris Center of Osaka" by Prof. Ikuko Kurasawa
Apr
27
5:00 PM17:00

"Ruskinian resonances in Japanese art and culture and the Ruskin & Morris Center of Osaka" by Prof. Ikuko Kurasawa

Library, Ruskin and Morris Center of Osaka.

The Ruskin & Morris Center of Osaka was founded in 2005 by Mr. Norio Tsuyuki. In the last five years, a group of volunteer members came together in the wake of the bicentennial of Ruskin’s birth, and we have been holding events related to Ruskin, mainly in Kyoto and Osaka, such as reading discussion sessions and a symposium to learn about Ruskin’s ideas.

In this virtual presentation, we will give an overview of Ruskin’s influence on Japanese art and culture. We will also introduce our center’s recent programs and activities. Finally, we will lead attendees on a virtual tour of the Ruskin & Morris Center of Osaka, where you will view the valuable Ruskin materials in our collection.

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John Walker & Dr. Kazuya Oyama on the Japanese poet-artist Otagaki Rengetsu (1791-1875)
Apr
13
5:00 PM17:00

John Walker & Dr. Kazuya Oyama on the Japanese poet-artist Otagaki Rengetsu (1791-1875)

APRIL IS RUSKIN IN JAPAN MONTH AT THE RUSKIN ART CLUB

Two presentations this month will highlight the traditional craft aesthetics of Japan and John Ruskin's enduring influence on Japanese thinkers and artists today.

John Walker was born in Bloomington, Illinois in 1963.

He has degrees from University of Southern Maine (BA in Philosophy) and School for International Training (MA in Education), but was primarily educated by a life of travel. Hemmingway led him to Spain in 1984 and later, a wayward angel opened the door to a life and career Japan. In 1990, he began as a language teacher in Kyoto, then, in 1999, established an English school in the city’s northern ward. Enamored by Japanese culture, he began visiting temple markets in search, first of hand-woven bamboo baskets, and later, objects with spiritual significance. It was only a mater of time before he encountered the work of one of Japan’s most celebrated Buddhist poets, the artist, calligrapher, ceramicist, Otagaki Rengetsu (1791–1875). In 2004, he purchased his first scroll by Rengetsu. Over the last 19 years, has collected her ceramics, calligraphy and painting avidly, mounted a retrospective at the Nomura Art Museum of 2014, co-translated over 900 of her poems in English, and co-authored a book on her life and work: Otagaki Rengetsu – Poetry and Artwork from a Rustic Hut (2014) Amembo Press, Kyoto.

"More than 200 years after her birth in Kyoto, Rengentsu, whose name means "Lotus Moon," continues to inspire. The delicate moods of her poetry, the subtlety of her brush and the presence of her simply crafted objects feels sacred. This power to move the human heart rises neither from her talent nor training, but from sorrow. Rengentsu suffered a series of tragedies at an early age, yet found her way to a spiritual life of modest observations and communion with nature. Rengentsu's poems illuminate tiny vignettes of personal experience and the challenges of the human condition. In essence, they are about loss and how we may yet live in grace and wonder at with what remains and what shall come." -- John Walker

Dr. Kazuya Oyama: Lecturer & Assistant Professor of Literature at Doshisha University (2017-present).

A specialist in Japanese poetry of the Edo Period (1600-1867), specifically waka, the 5-line, 31 syllable poetic form (cousin of the haiku, the 3-line, 17 syllable form widely known in the West). He was the archivist for many years at Reizei House, the Japanese National Poetry Archive in Kyoto. He has written extensively on the poetry of early Edo emperors and the subject of the present symposium, Otagaki Rengetsu (1791-1875). He co-authored a monograph on the poet and artist (Otagaki Rengetsu: Poetry and Artwork from a Rustic Hut, 2014, Amembo Press, Kyoto. He has co-translated Rengetsu‘s entire poetic oeuvre of more than 900 poems into English. He has been a consultant to the national broadcaster of Japan (NHK) for their documentary films and books on Rengetsu.

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2023 Ada Louise Huxtable Lecture on Architecture: Dr. Emily Pugh: “Architecture Critics Aline B. Saarinen and Ada Louise Huxtable in ‘Dialogue’” with the Getty Research Institute
Mar
23
5:00 PM17:00

2023 Ada Louise Huxtable Lecture on Architecture: Dr. Emily Pugh: “Architecture Critics Aline B. Saarinen and Ada Louise Huxtable in ‘Dialogue’” with the Getty Research Institute

Prof. Emily Pugh is ill and will not be able to deliver the Ada Louise Huxtable Lecture this week. We have rescheduled the event for Thursday, March 23, 5-6:30pm, on Zoom. Please join us then! We apologize for any inconvenience.

Aline Bernstein Saarinen was one of the most influential architectural critics in the postwar US. Her writings on art and architecture appeared in a wide variety of venues from the 1940s into the 1970s. She served as associate art editor and critic for The New Times from 1948 to 1953, wrote for popular magazines such as Vogue and McCall’s, and in 1963 was hired as the first full-time arts critic on US television. Saarinen’s criticism found a wide and enthusiastic audience, helping to create, according to critic Reyner Banham, a “new architectural public” in the US in the 1950s and 60s. In 1970, TV Guide dubbed Saarinen “a cultural institution.”


Saarinen’s career unfolded at a key moment in the evolution of popular architectural criticism in the US, building on the work of Lewis Mumford in his New Yorker column “The Sky Line” and preceding that of Ada Louise Huxtable, who would take over from Saarinen at the New York Times in 1963. In this talk, I will explore Saarinen’s influence, considering how her criticism, in print and on TV, played a decisive role in shaping the public’s perception of architecture in the United States in the postwar period.

Emily Pugh received her PhD in Art History from the CUNY Graduate Center, where her studies focused on postwar architecture in the US and Germany, as well as technologies of architectural representation. She is the author of Architecture, Politics, & Identity in Divided Berlin (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), and her writing on the Cold War urban built environment have appeared in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Centropa, and Space & Culture. Pugh’s research has been supported by the Center for Architecture Theory Criticism History at the University of Queensland, the European Architectural History Network, and the Foundation for Landscape Studies. She is currently at work on a second book, focused on architectural criticism on US television in the 1950s and 1960s.

This is an online event, register below to receive more details.

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The Annual Ruskin Birthday Bash with the Zelter Quartet hosted by Andrew and Chloe Sapienza at the Telescope Studio
Feb
9
5:30 PM17:30

The Annual Ruskin Birthday Bash with the Zelter Quartet hosted by Andrew and Chloe Sapienza at the Telescope Studio

Ruskin’s birthday (February 8) is always a big occasion for the Ruskin Art Club. This year we are celebrating it on Feb. 9. We will present a full evening of readings, toasts, and music to honor the great art and social critic on his 204th birthday. Among the evening’s highlights will be a concert by the youthful Zelter Quartet, led by cellist Allan Hon, who will perform music by John Ruskin (!) as well as Haydn's String Quartet in G-major, op. 77.

The Telescope Studio is located at 2125 Bay Street, Los Angeles 90021. Parking available. The event will also be live streamed.

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Loosing The Eternal Horses From The Dens of Night with Philip Hoare
Jan
14
9:00 AM09:00

Loosing The Eternal Horses From The Dens of Night with Philip Hoare

Like all great artists and visionaries, John Ruskin was a time-traveller.  His aesthetic reached far into our present, his future, and deep into the past we have yet to uncover, from the deep time of the minerals and rocks he collected, like talismans or instruments, to the urgency of his Fors Clavigera newsletters, which prefigure our own social media and podcasts.  He looks back too, through the visionary eyes of Albert Dürer, as he called him, in whose astonishingly prescient images of the natural world were mapped his own.  At the same time Ruskin inspired a floppy-haired young man, who was doing his own impersonation of Dürer's dandy style: Oscar Wilde.  

Taking these three vivid figures, Philip Hoare will explore the nature of their aesthetic, and the aesthetic of their natural world. With an eclectic supporting cast, ranging from Thomas Mann to Andy Warhol, William Blake and Marianne Moore to Patti Smith, Hoare will draw on his recent book, Albert & the Whale - a work which prompted the New York Times to call Hoare 'a forceful weather system of his own' - the author, curator and broadcaster will take us on a whirlwind tour of images and ideas, in a possibly forlorn attempt to pin these geniuses down.

Philip Hoare is the author of nine works of non-fiction, including biographies of Stephen Tennant and Noël Coward, and the studies, Wilde's Last Stand and England's Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia.  Spike Island was chosen by W.G. Sebald as his book of the year for 2001.  In 2009, Hoare's Leviathan or, The Whale won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. It was followed in 2013 by The Sea Inside, and in 2017 by RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR.  His latest book, Albert & the Whale, led the New York Times to call the author a 'forceful weather system' of his own.

Philip is also co-curator, with Angela Cockayne, of the digital projects www.mobydickbigread.com and www.ancientmarinerbigread.com; and he swims every day in the sea.

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“The other name of life”: An introduction to Ruskin’s Modern Painters with Sara Atwood
Nov
3
to Nov 10

“The other name of life”: An introduction to Ruskin’s Modern Painters with Sara Atwood

Two sessions exploring Modern Painters:

Thursday, November 3rd, 5pm PDT.
Thursday, November 10th, 5pm PST.

Session 1: Nov 3rd

In this session we will discuss passages from the first volume of Modern Painters, published under a pseudonym (“By a Graduate of Oxford”) in 1843 when Ruskin was just twenty-four years old. Conceived as a defense of J.M.W. Turner, whose late work had come under critical attack, the book evolved into a sophisticated study of contemporary art. Ruskin’s breadth of knowledge, attention to detail, and authoritative voice quickly won him a readership and, once his identity became known, established him as an important new figure in art criticism. We will read an excerpt on ‘Turner’s Waterfalls’ and two short chapters: “Of Ideas of Imitation” and “Of Ideas of Beauty.” We will read closely, paying equal attention to both meaning and craft (language, themes, rhetorical strategies). What ideas does Ruskin present in these extracts and how does he do it? Why did this work by a young, unknown writer make such an impression? How does Modern Painters continue to enrich our perception and sharpen our vision?

Session 2: Nov 10th

In this session we will discuss the ways in which the perspective and tone of Modern Painters evolved over the course of five volumes and seventeen years. We will read two selections from Modern Painters 5, the final volume of the series, considering not only the changing nature of Ruskin’s thinking, but the development of his style and the changing character of the Modern Painters project. Published in 1860, this volume shares a broad, allusive perspective with other works Ruskin produced during this period, as he began to foreground the social criticism that had underpinned his work from the start. Modern Painters 5 is a multi-layered text rich in ideas about art, society, the natural world, mythology, and language. It is a composite text, a blend of word and image in which Ruskin’s carefully designed plates interact with and enrich his argument. Although Modern Painters 1 and 5 are different in many ways (as each successive volume is different in some way from the last) they are yet clearly parts of a whole in which each volume is a brick in a complete edifice, interdependent and necessary. As Ruskin himself said of the organic, inevitable development of the completed series: “it has been written of necessity. I saw an injustice done, and tried to remedy it. I heard falsehood taught, and was compelled to deny it. Nothing else was possible to me. I knew not how little or how much might come of the business, or whether I was fit for it; but here was the lie full set in front of me, and there was no way round it, but only over it. So that, as the work changed like a tree, it was also rooted like a tree—not where it would, but where need was.”

Sara Atwood’s book, Ruskin’s Educational Ideals, was published by Ashgate in 2011. Further publications include contributions to the Yale University Press edition of Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (2013), Teaching Victorian Literature in the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave 2017), John Ruskin and Nineteenth-Century Education (Anthem Press 2018), William Morris and John Ruskin: A New Road on Which the World Should Travel (University of Exeter Press 2019) and Victorian Environmental Nightmares (Palgrave 2019). She has lectured widely on Ruskin, both in the US and abroad, focusing particularly on education, the environment, and language. She delivered the 17th Annual Ruskin Lecture co-sponsored by the Ruskin Art Club and the Doheny Libraries (USC) in September 2017 on “Valuing Education in a Market Society.” In February 2019, during Ruskin’s bicentenary year, she gave a lecture at the Houghton Library, Harvard University to mark the opening of the library’s exhibition Victorian Visionary: John Ruskin and the Realization of the Ideal; she also presented at the bicentenary conference John Ruskin: 19th-Century Visionary, 21st-Century Inspiration at the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. She is co-director of the Ruskin Society of North America, a Companion of the Guild, a board member of the Ruskin Art Club and a lecturer in English literature and writing at Portland State University.

 

Materials for Events

November 3rd, 2021

Links to the materials for study:

Modern Painters

November 10th, 2021

Links to the materials for study:

Modern Painters

Optional Reading:

"Imitation and Imagination: Ruskin,. Plato, and Aesthetics" by Sara Atwood (2011)

"The Earth-Veil": Ruskin and Environment by Sara Atwood (2015)

 
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A Tribute to Louise Coffey-Webb (1966-2022), Lecture: "A Royal Treasure: The Re- discovered Late 19 th c. Javanese Batik Collection of King Rama V of Siam" by Dale Carolyn Gluckman
Oct
20
5:00 PM17:00

A Tribute to Louise Coffey-Webb (1966-2022), Lecture: "A Royal Treasure: The Re- discovered Late 19 th c. Javanese Batik Collection of King Rama V of Siam" by Dale Carolyn Gluckman

Rama V in Western dress

Thai Batik

 

Louise Coffey-Webb

Earlier this year the Ruskin Art Club and the Los Angeles art and museum world suddenly lost an outstanding teacher, curator, arts coordinator, family member and dear friend and colleague with the sudden passing of Louise Coffey-Webb. This program will begin with a tribute to Louise and the career she built in California after leaving England to make LA and then Culver City her home. This will be followed by a presentation on the King of Siam’s travels in Singapore and Java in 1871, 1896, and 1901 and the batik collection he made. That 300-piece collection was re-discovered in 2009 in the inner chambers of the Grand Palace in Bangkok by the speaker and a team from the Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles (QSMT) at the Palace. Through historic photos of the royal entourage and highlights of rare and important batiks the remarkable story will come to life.

Dale Carolyn Gluckman, an independent curator and museum consultant specializing in textiles and dress. After a distinguished career as a curator of costumes and textiles at LACMA, she left in 2005 and became a senior consultant to the Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles in Bangkok. Dale has curated over 30 exhibitions as well as lectured and published widely on textiles and dress from East Asia to the US and Europe. Among her many credits are lead curator of the award-winning 1992 LACMA exhibition and publication When Art Became Fashion: Kosode in Edo-Period Japan. Her latest exhibition, A Royal Treasure: The Javanese Batik Collection of King Chulalongkorn of Siam, is accompanied by a fully illustrated 320-page catalogue. 


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Van Akin Burd Ruskin Lifetime Achievement Award: Ruskin Society of North America
Sep
24
9:00 AM09:00

Van Akin Burd Ruskin Lifetime Achievement Award: Ruskin Society of North America

Van Akin Burd, who died aged 101, devoted most of his academic career to the study of John Ruskin. The author of around 50 scholarly articles on the Victorian thinker, artist and philanthropist, and the editor of four editions of his writings, Burd was by common consent the towering figure in modern Ruskin studies. In 1951, he took a position at the State University of New York at Cortland, where, despite attractive offers from elsewhere, he remained for his whole career.

Perhaps his greatest discovery came one day in the early 1960s when, while reading Ruskin on JMW Turner at the Pierpont Morgan library in New York, Burd happened to consult a collection of letters written by Ruskin for the headteacher and pupils of an experimental school for girls at Winnington in Cheshire. The girls were known to have inspired The Ethics of the Dust (1866), perhaps the strangest book in the Ruskin canon. 

Burd’s first Ruskin edition, The Winnington Letters of John Ruskin (1969), was the result, and it was instrumental in initiating a Ruskin revival. In the same year, the scholar James Dearden, with whom Burd would form an enduring friendship, organized a Ruskin conference at Brantwood, the master’s house on the shores of Coniston Water, Cumbria, and were thus brought into contact with a new generation of scholars.

Burd’s next edition was the two-volume Ruskin Family Letters (1973), an intimate record of Ruskin’s formative years. It assembles and annotates the family’s correspondence from the early years of his parents’ long engagement to the launch of Ruskin’s first book, Modern Painters, in 1843.

His next subject was Rose La Touche, the young woman to whom Ruskin proposed marriage when she was 18 and he 47. John Ruskin and Rose La Touche (1979) is an edition of Rose’s diary. It provided a new understanding of her character and brought out the depth of Ruskin’s love for her, so often stereotyped and misunderstood.

Burd next turned to editing a previously unpublished set of Ruskin’s letters written in Venice in the winter of 1876-77, soon after Rose’s death at the age of 25. Christmas Story: John Ruskin’s Venetian Letters of 1876-77, appeared in 1990.

Burd was born in Miami, Florida, one of three children, and the only son of Melvin, a building contractor, and his wife Elizabeth (nee Van Akin). At the University of Chicago, he developed a love for the work of Turner and the pre-Raphaelite painters. After leaving, he was a schoolteacher for a couple of years. He met Julia Robinson, a teacher, and they married in 1943. He then enlisted in the US navy, and was a member of the force that invaded, and later rebuilt, Okinawa, Japan.

On shore assignment during his naval service, he read Proust, and it was the latter’s interest in art, architecture and Venice in particular that led Burd to the novelist’s passion for Ruskin. As a frequent visitor to the UK, he became a companion of the Guild of St George, the utopian charity founded by Ruskin in 1871. His energy was prodigious and at least two of his visits, in the company of his friend the Ruskin scholar James L. Spates, were made during his 90s. In that decade he published six new papers on Ruskin, the last in his 100th year.

Melvin Van Akin Burd, literary scholar, born 19 April 1914; died 7 November 2015.


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The 22nd Annual Ruskin Lecture: The Doheny Library USC “THE ECONOMY OF HEAVEN: RUSKIN, CAPITALISM, AND THE POST-CAPITALIST FUTURE” with Professor Eugene McCarraher
Sep
8
5:00 PM17:00

The 22nd Annual Ruskin Lecture: The Doheny Library USC “THE ECONOMY OF HEAVEN: RUSKIN, CAPITALISM, AND THE POST-CAPITALIST FUTURE” with Professor Eugene McCarraher

John Ruskin in the TV series "Desperate Romantics"

While John Ruskin has been recognized as one of the 19th century’s most trenchant critics of capitalism, the religious character of his criticism is often ignored, and its contemporary significance is either dismissed or unappreciated. But Ruskin’s opposition to capitalism was rooted in a (heterodox) Christian understanding of creation and humanity, a sacramental conception of reality that is urgently relevant as we veer - with economic and ecological despoliation looming - toward some sort of post-capitalist world. Ruskin’s notion of “the economy of heaven” enables us to envision a world after capitalism that is more humane, generous, and ecological sensitive than we can achieve by relying on political and technological solutions alone.

 

An associate professor of humanities and history at Villanova since 2000, Eugene McCarraher’s research has focused on social thought, capitalism, and religion in the United States. He is the author of The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019).

 
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Ruskin in the Media: Towards an Ethical Depiction with Ann Gagné and Sara Atwood, moderator
Jun
9
5:00 PM17:00

Ruskin in the Media: Towards an Ethical Depiction with Ann Gagné and Sara Atwood, moderator

John Ruskin in the TV series "Desperate Romantics"

As an art critic, John Ruskin’s work is often positioned in terms of the visual. Ruskin is always looking, seeing, and recording. However, media depictions of Ruskin do not focus only the visual, but rather examine the larger ethics of the sensory, what different senses are mentioned, depicted, and used, which often suggests a flawed representation of him and his work. Beginning with a few nineteenth century visual caricatures of Ruskin, Gagné will explore the depiction of Ruskin in the television series Desperate Romantics (2009), movies Mr. Turner (2014) and Effie Gray (2014), as well as popular media responses to Ruskin’s 200th birthday in 2019, to show how touch, literally and idiomatically, becomes an ethical preoccupation in these representations. She will explore how these depictions of Ruskin verge on anti-intellectualism and complicate the accessibility of Ruskin’s work for those outside of academic and art spaces. She will end with a call to action on how we can make Ruskin more accessible in our everyday media use.

 

Ann Gagné is an Educational Developer (Universal Design for Learning) at the University of Toronto Mississauga and an adjunct Communications instructor at George Brown College. Her work and research focusses on supporting accessible pedagogy, especially through reference to the sensory. Her book Embodying the Tactile in Victorian Literature: Touching Bodies/ Bodies Touching was published by Lexington Press in 2021. Other Ruskin focused publications include “Architecture and Perception: The Science of Art in Ruskin” (2019) in Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature and “Recovering a Ruskinian Tactile Ethics of Architecture” (2019) in Modern Horizons Journal. She has presented on Ruskin and tactility at international conferences such as NAVSA, NeMLA, VSAWC, and at Birkbeck, University of London. She is Companion of the Guild of St. George a board member of the Ruskin Society of North America

 
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Every Portrait Tells a Story with Curator Emeritus R. F. Johnson
May
12
5:00 PM17:00

Every Portrait Tells a Story with Curator Emeritus R. F. Johnson

Robert Flynn Johnson is Curator Emeritus of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where he served as Curator-in-Charge for thirty-two years (1975-2007). He taught art history at the San Francisco Art Institute (1977-2007). He also taught at the California College of the Arts, Stanford University, University of California, Santa Cruz as well as a connoisseurship course for the Achenbach Graphic Arts Council.

 
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Ruskin and the Plastic Crisis: “Modern Manufacture” with Amy Woodson-Boulton
Apr
28
5:00 PM17:00

Ruskin and the Plastic Crisis: “Modern Manufacture” with Amy Woodson-Boulton

Andreas Gursky, 99 Cent, 1999

I’ve often thought that John Ruskin or William Morris, those tireless critics of the cheapness and ugliness of industrial products and processes, would have a lot to say about plastic (not least: “we told you so!”). Ruskin’s design ethos of “truth to materials” shows us the economic logic that was already at play in the nineteenth century—he railed against the substitution of wood for marble or plaster for stone. That same logic would drive chemists to develop synthetic polymers applicable to numerous uses and available through the apparently endless supply of fossil fuels. Plastic is now evidence in the rock strata for the Anthropocene as a geological epoch and embodies multiple aspects of our current crises: our disposable economy, reliance on fossil fuels, rapidly changing climate, and the unevenly distributed toxic effects at all stages of plastic’s production, use, and disposal. These negative externalities fall along historically constructed lines of racial inequality, and such disparities continue to make plastic seem deceptively cheap. Now that microplastics are everywhere from the air to the ocean to human blood, Ruskin’s sense of both “modern manufacture” and the “storm-cloud” of uncontrolled production and pollution has taken on new meaning. Thinking about Ruskin and plastic together can give us ideas and materials for thinking through the intertwined problems of systemic racism, mass production, hidden costs, art and design, and extractive economies.

 

Amy Woodson-Boulton is professor and past chair of the Department of History at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. A historian of Britain and Ireland, she works on cultural reactions to industrialization, including the history of museums and ideas about “primitive art” in anthropology and art history. Published work includes an edited volume, articles, and book chapters as well as Transformative Beauty: Art Museums in Industrial Britain (Stanford, 2012). She has recently published “Totems, Cannibals, and Other Blood Relations” at the Victorian Review and “Teaching Modern Environmental World History, Or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Urgency of Climate Change,” co-authored with Elizabeth Drummond for World History Connected. She teaches modern British, European, and global courses that focus on imperial, cultural, public, and environmental history. 

 
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BOOK ART: AN EVENING WITH LEADING BOOKBINDER, RESTORER, AND BOOK ARTIST, CHARLENE MATTHEWS
Mar
31
5:00 PM17:00

BOOK ART: AN EVENING WITH LEADING BOOKBINDER, RESTORER, AND BOOK ARTIST, CHARLENE MATTHEWS

Charlene Matthews at her studio in Los Angeles.

"Using materials as unusual as Victorian ceiling tile, kangaroo leather, and a fish-eye lens, the one-woman show that is Charlene Matthews Bindery outfits books in a cramped studio sandwiched between a restaurant and a florist. A blur of vivid hair in an electric blue studio, Matthews flits among her 19th-century binding tools, which include a huge press, a paper-cutting guillotine, and “job backers” (steel leviathans that grip and cut). In her restoration work, she cloaks hardboard covers in vintage silk, ribbon, and leather finished so finely, they look translucent" (LA Magazine).

Matthews, a legendary teacher of bookbinding crafts, a book designer for major artists, and a book artist herself, will take us on a virtual tour of her many-faceted world and offer us, in the bargain, a unique tutorial on the care and maintenance of books in our own libraries.

 
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