Recent Acquisitions
New Artists' Books
The Bingham Center recently purchased a number of new additions to our collection of over 200 artists' books by women. We were pleased to add two new titles from Lise Melhorn-Boe’s Transformer Press. Melhorn-Boe describes A Good Wife Wouldn't as “about a woman who wants a dishwasher, but whose husband won't let her buy one, even with a prescription from her doctor, and money from his parents…It's a tunnel book made of pink handmade paper hands with colour-copied images of dirty dishes, washed dishes in a drainer and a dishwasher at the end of the tunnel.” Vamp and Tramp Booksellers describe Penelope's Apron as “a poignant story of thwarted creativity and conforming to parental expectations of how a good little girl should behave.”
For their book Marriage Matters, Cheri Gaulke and Sue Maberry invited 10 lesbian and gay couples to go to Sears and have their portraits taken. These families reflect on the question “when your relationship is not legally recognized, what does marriage matter?” The materials used evoke wedding invitations and with the alternating vertical and horizontal pages splayed open, the book’s shape resembles a two-tiered wedding cake. Each page of North Carolina artist Susan Leeb’s book Shame is a cutout of an eighteenth-century woman's gown with a naked female torso on the reverse. Folded, these pages slip inside a cloth bag with a sewing pattern design just as a dress pattern would slip into its envelope.
The catalog from Vamp and Tramp Booksellers describes Soap Story by Angela Lorenz, as telling “the story of a young woman in Calabria, Italy, during the 1950s whose real life reads like a fairy tale or "soap" opera. Six installments are silk-screened on linen pages that are in turn embedded in small, square blocks of soap imprinted with figures from lead type. After drying, the linen sheets slot into six acid-free pages with oval die-cuts through which the text remains visible. The process confronting the reader reflects what the protagonist must face. In transforming the story, you allow the young woman to wash her hands of her sorrows.” As a library we are faced with the choice of preserving the original format, leaving the story untold, or washing away the soap to reveal the linen pages of the story. You can’t have your soap and read it too! (Apologies for the very intended pun.) Luckily the text of the tale is included in the description of the piece.
From Women’s Studio Workshop, we have acquired I Can Make You Love Me by Kathryn Immonen and Promise Not to Tell by Bisa Washington. I Can Make You Love Me extends our holdings of books that explore clothing and sewing as a theme. Promise Not to Tell uses a spare narrative and silkscreen prints to tell a personal history of child abuse and trauma. We have also added another chapter to Lois Morrison’s Mechanical Doll series with Their Journey Begins.
More about our artists' books collection
Jessie Vanderbilt Simons Papers
The life of Jessie Vanderbilt Simons has been documented through letters, scrapbooks, photographs and other manuscript materials. However the most fascinating piece of this collection consists of 29 yearly diaries, covering the years 1870 through 1935 (the bulk of which cover 1890-1935), with regular daily entries covering details of her daily life, family life, her numerous, lengthy trips overseas, her active participation (and leadership of) the Richmond County Chapter of the American Red Cross, and the Women’s Motor Corps, and her work with The National Federated Workers for Disabled Soldiers (she served as Vice President), and The Veteran Association of Women War Workers. Also documented is her lengthy friendship with noted New York photographer Alice Austen. Austen was one of the first women photographers in this country to work outside the confines of a studio.
Minnie Bruce Pratt and Mandy Carter: Two New Southern Activist Collections
The papers of Southern feminist activists Minnie Bruce Pratt and Mandy Carter have recently been acquired by the Bingham Center. Both women were profiled in the January 2007 issue of Curve magazine, for a feature titled “Ten Powerful Lesbians in the South.” Pratt is a writer, poet, activist, and professor. She was a member of the editorial collective of Feminary: A Feminist Journal for the South, Emphasizing Lesbian Visions, which was published by a women’s collective in Durham and Chapel Hill, NC. Carter is a self-described “southern out black lesbian social justice activist.” She has been involved with multi-issue grassroots organizing for the last 39 years, including serving as Executive Director of Durham-based Southerners on New Ground (SONG), and working with the National Black Justice Coalition and the Democratic National Committee. Pratt and Carter have each carefully documented and recorded their work, and their papers will become rich sources for researchers.
Related Links
- Sallie Bingham Center's Guide to Donating Materials
- Past Acquisitions
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