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Works on Paper #3 & Reception for Katherine Kuehn’s Niedecker Panels
July 19, 2019 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
FreeYou are cordially invited to a reception and presentation for the current exhibition at Passages Bookshop:
NIEDECKER PANELS
Katherine Kuehn
Works on Paper #3:
- Katherine Kuehn — on her sewn works
- Karl Gartung — on Lorine Niedecker, and related poems
- Charles Hood — “How to Write Nature in the Midwest”
- David Abel — on collaboration
Friday, July 19
7:00 pm
Passages Bookshop
1223 NE MLK Blvd.
Free admission; reception and refreshments to follow
This summer’s exhibition at Passages Bookshop consists of sewn works by Katherine Kuehn, in which she had embroidered texts by Lorine Niedecker, Henry David Thoreau, and David Abel on vintage and hand-dyed fabric panels and ribbons. Kuehn’s sewn work of the past two decades (including texts by Paul Celan & Nelly Sachs, Gertrude Stein, and Helene Cixous, among others) are a direct outgrowth of her long practice as a typographer, letterpress printer, and printmaker; as she once noted, “after twenty-five years of setting type by hand, I wanted something slower.” The artist’s attention to the design details of each letter translates into a transformed experience of reading, which is further heightened by the various forms of display of the finished works (as wall hangings, ribbons, and on a specially constructed “reading machine”).
For the third installment of the “Works on Paper” performance/lecture series at Passages, Katherine Kuehn will discuss the genesis and development of her work with sewing and texts; Karl Gartung, poet and cofounder of the Woodland Pattern Bookstore and Art Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, will share his research related to the poet Lorine Niedecker, and read related poems; Charles Hood, poet, naturalist, and photographer, will read his essay “How to Write Nature in the Midwest,” with comments from his recent trip to Niedecker’s cabin in Wisconsin; and David Abel will read and discuss works produced in collaboration with Kuehn, including the thirty-seven-foot ribbon Threnos.