The Heavy Lifting Listening Tour aspires to offer opportunities for healing, and dreaming, through dialogue. An introduction to the project opens with a display of the artists’ book and of the experimental film,On Heavy Lifting. This is followed by a conversation between poet Theresa Whitehill and the audience in which she alternates reading her poems with an invitation for audience members to read their own work or share brief stories in response to the themes and material. These gatherings consider what might lie beyond these difficult times by creating space to name the darkness in the belief that the first stage of recovery from grief is acknowledgement.
The tour kicked off in February 2023 in Ukiah and has occurred monthly in communities impacted by the wildfires throughout northern California as far north as Seattle.
• SNOWED OUT Feb 23 7:00 Writers Read, Grace Hudson Museum Community Room, 431 S Main St, Ukiah with guest, Georgina Marie Guardado, Lake Co. Poet Laureate
• Oct 8, 2023 Cascadia Poetry Festival, Spring Street Center, Seattle
• Oct 26, 2023 7:00 Writers Read, Grace Hudson Museum Community Room, 431 S Main St, Ukiah with guest, Georgina Marie Guardado, Lake Co. Poet Laureate + exhibit Oct 26-Nov 5
• Nov 11, 2023 2:00 North Bay Letterpress Arts, 925-D Gravenstein Hwy South, Sebastopol
HEAVY LIFTING by Theresa Whitehill and Felicia Rice
"Heavy Lifting" page spread
"Heavy Lifting" page spread
"Heavy Lifting"
The new studio
The new studio
Final move into brand new studio. Rising from the ashes!
"Heavy Lifting" recording session
"Heavy Lifting" recording session
Printing in the shipping container
Shed and shipping container
Rainbow strikes Moving Parts Press!
HEAVY LIFTING Poems by Theresa Whitehill
Bookwork by Felicia Rice
Preface by Inge Bruggeman
Foreword by Felicia Rice
HEAVY LIFTING is a fierce work that names the darkness in the belief that the first stage of recovery from grief is acknowledgement, and that the precursor to action can be anger. It is a response to a call sounded by artist/educator Paul Soulellis in 2021: “Publishing has always been political, but has it ever felt as urgent as it does right now in the global distress and intersecting crises of the past year? There’s a desperate need for new language to express publishing’s renewed urgency and importance. …let’s turn away from old, legacy publishing models towards something new: an ethics, craft, and politics of urgent making.”
About the book
The limited edition artists’ book, Heavy Lifting, is the outcome of a close collaboration between artist/printer Felicia Rice of Moving Parts Press and poet Theresa Whitehill. It began in 2019 with an exchange in which a poem sparked a drawing which sparked a poem which led to a book structure, then spiraled back round again. In 2020, during their early work on the project, Felicia lost her letterpress shop of over 40 years to a devastating megafire in the Santa Cruz Mountains just as the death of George Floyd trained a blazing light on the many deep-seated inequities in this country amid the global pandemic and threat of political totalitarianism. Heavy Lifting took flight in spite of and because of our personal and collective crises of this terrible time and tackles these issues in book form, performance, and dialogue in search of a tenable future.
The innovative book structure of nested accordion-fold panels features stunning poems by Theresa Whitehill in compelling conversation with prints by Felicia Rice. Inge Bruggeman writes in the preface to The Heavy Lifting Companion, “Felicia Rice has … an unsurpassed commitment to the book as a unique space for expressing artistic content…. Heavy Lifting not only demonstrates Rice’s innovative use of the artists’ book format, it reveals the unique power of this art form to unfurl within the hands of the individual, thus beautifully connecting the individual’s role to art, poetry, and the world around them.”
About Theresa Whitehill
A California-born poet and letterpress artist, Theresa Whitehill has been involved in the production of poetry events and readings for her entire career, especially open readings. These open venues became a key part of her own editorial process in which she refined and strengthened the voice of her poems.
Born in Sacramento and raised in Marin County, Whitehill’s interrelated focus on literary and book arts came out of her studies with poet William Everson at UC Santa Cruz in the late 1970s and at Mills College in the Book Art program in the early 1980s. Since 1984 she has lived in Mendocino County where she is well-known to local poetry audiences.
Travel and living for stretches of time in Europe and especially Greece, Spain, and Portugal have allowed her to witness older cultures in which poetry is considered not just relevant but essential to the vitality of the life of everyday people and by extension the social fabric itself. This early insight has inspired her commitment to cultural projects that address the fundamental connection between poetics and the land. She is a former Poet Laureate of Ukiah, and a co-founder of the Watershed Poetry Mendocino festival.
Her publications include Deep Valley: Poets Laureate of Ukiah 2001—2018 (2019), A Grammar of Longing (2009), Saudades (2003), and A Natural History of Mill Towns (1993). Her poetry and broadsides are in national fine press collections including the Getty Center for the Arts, the John Hay Library of Brown University, and the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.
About the poems
Theresa Whitehill’s poems tread a tenuous path at the boundaries between personal and collective reckonings with work that portrays alternating grief, tenderness, defiance, and outrage. The result is a suite of poems that deliberately fuses moments of personal and collective experience in a profound act of witnessing. The work acknowledges the almost unbearable pace of relentless crises that have unfolded in recent years—covid, climate change, racial injustice, the threat of totalitarianism, immigration crises—and begins to dwell in what might lie beyond these times.
From the foreword by Inge Bruggeman: “It’s hard to convey the crisis that happened to us / back in the early 21st century,” the poetry begins, at first almost modestly taking a dispassionate long view, a look back from an imagined future to this nearly mythical time before sweeping back into the urgency and the experiences of the recent past: “From this time, we date a different life. The stories / we told our children changed at this time. / Our dreams changed. Some of us stopped dreaming. / Others registered guns or took part / in compromised immune systems.” Whitehill subverts the forms of the lament and the ballad and the assumed lyricism that goes along with those forms, nearly lulling the reader into a seeming complacency, before tripping the reader up at a key moment to declare: “War then: the background always. Dreamers / and heretics—always.”
About Felicia Rice and Moving Parts Press Felicia Rice is an artist, letterpress printer, publisher, and educator. In 1977 she set Moving Parts Press in motion. With one foot firmly planted in the 19th century and the other in the 21st, she utilizes letterpress and digital technologies to produce limited edition artists books, prints, and broadsides in collaboration with visual and performing artists, writers, and philosophers.
Work from the Press has been included in exhibitions from Mexico City to New York and Japan. Her books are held in library and museum collections worldwide and she has been the recipient of many awards and grants from the NEA to the French Ministry of Culture. In December 2018 Rice was featured in the award-winning PBS Craft in America documentary series in their episode, “Visionaries.”
Her entire letterpress shop and her life’s work was destroyed in a catastrophic wildfire in the Santa Cruz Mountains in August 2020. Rice has relocated to her family home in Mendocino and with the help of over 800 supporters has reestablished Moving Parts Press in a new studio.
Rice writes, “As a printer, my job is to confront complex issues and render my response to them in book form. As an artist, my job is to do so with profound integrity. As a publisher, my job is to make these issues public. As printers have done every decade since Gutenberg, I’m here to respond to argue for a more just society.”
About the prints and book structure
The final stanza of Theresa’s poem, “The Loveliness of Mistakes,” is the driving force behind Felicia’s prints for the “birds” panel of this book. The text overprints a series of drawings of birds rising against a texture of wind and smoke captured from prints taken from rounds of an ancient oak lost to “forest management.” The bird spirits rise in the face of the fires that destroy so much of the West every year. This panel of the book was printed in a tiny wooden 85-year-old shed which served as Felicia’s father, Ray Rice’s art studio for 40 years.
The second “crisis” panel nestles into and almost obscures the birds. Our collective crises are called out in letterforms gathered from gravestone rubbings overprinting high-contrast photographic memes culled from the web. The indistinct dark silhouettes suggest the enormity of these haunting and unresolved issues. This panel was printed in a steel shipping container while the new studio was under construction.
Excerpts from Theresa’s poems on the back of the “crisis” panel were printed in the clean, new studio where is was possible to do the demanding and careful work of letterpress printing. Each of the three workspaces used over a two year period impacted the nature of the printed sheets: organic and rough, gritty and industrial, or clean and carefully crafted.
The book structure of freestanding nested panels was inspired by the experimental folded book structures of the 20th century Russian Modernist Iliazd, and the heavily designed and engineered paper sample books of the late 20th century that could be found in every letterpress print shop and design studio.
About Craig Jensen Heavy Lifting is the seventh Moving Parts Press book bound by Craig Jensen. The first two, De amor oscuroandTallos de luna, were bound at BookLab, Inc. in Austin, TX in the early 1990s. The next four books, beginning with Cosmogonie intime in 2005, were bound at BookLab II, and now, with Heavy Lifting, Craig is working under his own name at his studio in San Marcos, TX. Moving Parts Press books depend on Craig’s years of experience and broad knowledge of book structure and housing construction, fine materials, and efficient high quality hand workmanship for their exquisite integrity as book objects. In close collaboration with Craig, Felicia realizes her aesthetic vision of beautiful books.
The Heavy Lifting Project
The impact of the artists’ book, Heavy Lifting, is multiplied by the greater Heavy Lifting Project, which includes a companion book, a powerful public art project in a form new to me—experimental film, and public appearances with fundraising and workshop components.
•The Heavy Lifting Companion, an 84-page digitally-printed book, features the full suite of poems by Theresa Whitehill generated out of this collaborative effort, with a preface by Inge Bruggeman, Director of the CODEX Foundation, and essays by Felicia.
•On Heavy Lifting is a film experiment that draws on readings of Theresa’s poems, live footage of the bookmaking process, and digital projections with dance to perform the fullness of this artists’ book. The film goes beyond instructional video and imagined architectural installation to create an immersive experience of Heavy Lifting.
• The Heavy Lifting Listening Tour offers opportunities for healing, and dreaming, through dialogue. It kicks off with a book display, readings, and film screening on February 23, 2023 in Ukiah and will occur monthly in communities throughout northern California in 2023.
• Mendocino County’s February ’23 REM magazine, features an in-depth article about the book, titled “Heavy Lifting Lifts Off,” including a revealing conversation with the collaborators.
About the companion book
The companion to Heavy Lifting is a digitally printed book that holds the full suite of poems produced by Theresa during this multi-year collaboration. The poems and bookwork are framed in a preface by Inge Bruggeman that provides the context of the project within the artists’ book world, a critical perspective that presents the main artistic themes and how they are deeply embedded in issues of craft, resulting in a profound example of “urgent publishing.” A foreword by Felicia describes how and why the book came into being, and further essays present other elements of the greater Heavy Lifting Project. The book was designed by Theresa and Felicia, who found the heavy lifting of this project much much lighter when shared.
7.75″ x 9.5″ 84 pp.
Edition of 320, of which 200 are available for sale: $35 Purchase here!
About the film On Heavy Lifting is a film experiment that draws on readings of Theresa Whitehill’s poems, live footage of the bookmaking process, and digital projections to create an immersive experience of the artists’ book.
Moving beyond the instructional video typical of artists’ books, this experimental film provides an immersive experience of the book itself and its complex compositions of birds, words, shadows, and spoken word.The intent is to evoke the fullness of the artists’ book through a multi-media experience of its many facets.
The film is included with each limited edition book on an SD card, and will be broadcast online soon in an effort to satisfy the search for “an ethics, craft, and politics of urgent making.”
17:12 min
Collaborators
Frej Barty, videographer
Paulo Ferreira, reader
Georgina Marie Guardado, Lake County Poet Laureate, reader
Dennis Letbetter, videographer
Eleana Newton, editor
Arlo Reeves, videographer
Sidney Regelbrugge, Mendocino County Youth Poet Laureate, reader
Felicia Rice, producer/director and film subject
Will Rice, composer and producer
Jim Schoonover, reader and videographer
Kara Starkweather, film subject
Shmuel Thaler, photographer
Gustavo Vazquez, consultant
Theresa Whitehill, poet, reader, and film subject
About the listening tour
The Heavy Lifting Listening Tour aspires to offer opportunities for healing, and dreaming, through dialogue. An introduction to the project opens with a display of the artists’ book and presentation of the experimental film, On Heavy Lifting. It is followed by a poetic conversation between Theresa and the audience in which she alternates reading her poems with an invitation for audience members to read their own work or share brief stories in response to the themes and material.
It kicks off in February in Ukiah and will occur monthly in communities impacted by the wildfires throughout northern California in 2023.
•Snowed out! Feb 23 7:00 Writers Read, Grace Hudson Museum Community Room, 431 S Main St, Ukiah with guest, Georgina Marie Guardado, Lake Co. Poet Laureate
• Oct 8, 2023 Cascadia Poetry Festival, Spring Street Center, Seattle
• Oct 26, 2023 7:00 Grace Hudson Museum Community Room, 431 S Main St, Ukiah with guest, Georgina Marie Guardado, Lake Co. Poet Laureate + exhibit Oct 26-Nov 5
• Nov 11, 2023 2:00 North Bay Letterpress Arts, 925-D Gravenstein Hwy South, Sebastopol
About our appearances Cascadia Prophets with Theresa Whitehill, interviewed by Paul E. Nelson
Details of the artists’ book, Heavy Lifting
Typeset in Stempel Garamond and Faster One types and printed by Felicia Rice from lasercut and photopolymer plates on Arches Watercolor paper. Images created by Rice and printed from lasercut wood plates made by Rice and photopolymer plates made by Jonathan Clark of The Artichoke Press. Letterpress and relief printing by Rice using a Vandercook proof press at Moving Parts Press.
Two nested accordion-fold panels: Panel 1 “Birds”: 10″ x 14.5″ x 80″ and Panel 2 “Crises”: 10″ x 12.5″ x 100″
Panels extended: 15′ end-to-end
Book: 10″ x 14.5″ x .75″
Clamshell Case: 11″ x 15.625″ x 1.625′
Accordion-fold book and clamshell book box covered in Brillianta book cloth by Craig Jensen of BookLab II
Edition of 60 signed and numbered copies, accompanied by the book, The Heavy Lifting Companion, and the film, On Heavy Lifting, in a clamshell book box
Price
Standard edition of 48: $2700
Deluxe edition of 12: $3400
About the deluxe edition
Every book in the edition is accompanied by the film, On Heavy Lifting, on an SD card, but the deluxe edition includes a second clamshell box holds a laser cut printing plate and a digital viewer loaded with the film, On Heavy Lifting, and eight other shorts. The films and videos tell the complete story of loss due to fire and the years of recovery since.
Deluxe edition of 12 signed and numbered copies. $3400
Acknowledgements A very special thanks to those who helped with the process of making this book. As always, Jim Schoonover, Rice’s life partner, gave valuable counsel on many aspects of this project. “I doubt there would be a Moving Parts Press without him.”
VENUS ENVY Chapter I: The First Holy Communion Moments Before the End Chapter II: The Harem and Other Enclosures Chapter III: Cihuatlampa, the Place of the Giant Women Chapter IV: The Road to Paris and its Aftermath–The Curandera’s Botanica
Artwork by Amalia Mesa-Bains
Introduction by Jennifer A. González
Bookwork by Felicia Rice
Edition of 1500
7 3/4 x 7 3/4 inches (accordion extends to 9.5 feet)
$38
About the book The book, Venus Envy: Chapters I-IV, documents the four-part Venus Envy Series of autobiographical installations completed over several decades by Amalia Mesa-Bains to chronicle four chapters in her life as a Chicana woman. It uses historic photographs in an accordion-fold structure to illustrate the series undertaken between 1993 and 2008. These images are accompanied by significant texts by art historian and critic Jennifer A. González.
The Venus Envy Series is a narrative through personal and collective feminist perspectives of the artist Amalia Mesa-Bains’s life stages, from early childhood to marriage to aging. The story unfolds through a number of altar-installations using an aesthetic of vernacular abundance and accumulation done in settings of religious splendor, secret spaces of the feminine, and archaic landscapes of paradise. It is situated in a historical continuum from the present to the colonial period of European expansion into the Orient to the time of the Aztec Empire, and it ends in a reflection on health challenges leading to healing and recovery. These contemporary practices of wonder and beauty are at the same time a woman’s political remembrance of conflict and joy, sorrow and loss and resilience.
Art critic and historian Jennifer A. González writes in her introduction,”Mesa-Bains’s tableaus are neither a simple enactment of religious tradition nor a purely secular art installation, but rather a hybrid genre intended for a new Chicano/art-identified audience able to decipher the multiple iconographic references in both a Mexican and US historical context. The slippage between “folk” art and “fine” art, between tradition and innovation, is characteristic of Mesa-Bains’s altar installations.”
This is the eighth book in the CHICANX/LATINX SERIESof artists’ books from Felicia Rice and Moving Parts Press. These works of contemporary Chicanx/Latinx artists and writers in translation explores the intersection of cultures, disciplines, and book structures. Each book is the result of a close collaboration with the book artist, Felicia Rice.
Read the June 9, 2023 ARTnews review of Amalia’s “long-overdue” retrospective exhibition at BAMPFA here.
About Amalia Mesa-Bains Amalia Mesa-Bains is an artist and cultural critic. Her artworks, primarily interpretations of traditional Chicano altars, resonate both in contemporary formal terms and in their ties to her Chicano community and history. She has innovated on sacred spaces and created contemporary installations exhibited nationally and internationally. She has written about Chicano and Latino art and is a leader in the field of community arts. Among her many awards is the distinguished MacArthur Fellowship. She is Professor Emerita in the Visual and Public Art Department at California State University at Monterey Bay. Learn more at her website: amaliamesabains.com
About Jennifer A. Gónzalez Jennifer A. González is a professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at UC Santa Cruz, and a faculty member in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York. She has published in numerous journals including Diacritics, Camera Obscura, Bomb, Open Space, Art Journal, the Journal of the Archives of American Art and in numerous exhibition catalogs. Her books include Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (2008) which features the essay, “Divine Allegories,” on Amalia Mesa-Bains’ installation work. She served as chief editor of Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology (2019) which was included in the best art books of the decade by ArtNews in 2020.
About Felicia Rice Felicia Rice is an artist, letterpress printer, publisher, and educator. With one foot firmly planted in the 19th century and the other in the 21st, she utilizes letterpress and digital technologies to produce limited edition artists books, prints, and broadsides in collaboration with visual and performing artists, writers, and philosophers. In 1977 she set Moving Parts Press in motion. Work from the Press is included in exhibitions and collections, both nationally and internationally, and has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants. The Chicanx/Latinx Series, featuring contemporary Chicanx/Latinx artists and writers, has fed the editorial and artistic direction of the press for over thirty years.movingpartspress.com
This two-part exhibition features Amalia Mesa-Bains’s installation Venus Envy, Chapter I: The First Holy Communion Moments Before the End (1993/2022), presented for the first time since it was originally realized in 1993. The second part, Madrinas y Hermanas (Godmothers and Sisters), features works from SFMOMA’s permanent collection curated by Mesa-Bains and accompanied by texts written by the artist.
From theCHICANX/LATINX SERIESArtists’ Books This series explores the intersection of cultures, disciplines, and book structures. These works of contemporary Chicanx/Latinx artists and writers in translation are issued in both limited and trade editions. Each book is the result of a close collaboration between writer, artist and the book artist, Felicia Rice.
"The Necropolitics of Extraction" by author TJ Demos and artist Felicia Rice
"The Necropolitics of Extraction"
"The Necropolitics of Extraction" by author TJ Demos and artist Felicia Rice
"The Necropolitics of Extraction" by TJ Demos and Felicia Rice
"The Necropolitics of Extraction"
"The Necropolitics of Extraction" by author TJ Demos and artist Felicia Rice
"The Necropolitics of Extraction"
"The Necropolitics of Extraction" by author TJ Demos and artist Felicia Rice
"The Necropolitics of Extraction"
"The Necropolitics of Extraction" by author TJ Demos and artist Felicia Rice
"The Necropolitics of Extraction"
"The Necropolitics of Extraction" by author TJ Demos and artist Felicia Rice
"The Necropolitics of Extraction"
"The Necropolitics of Extraction" by author TJ Demos and artist Felicia Rice
"The Necropolitics of Extraction" essay, "Against Extraction"
"The Necropolitics of Extraction" essay, "Against Extraction" by TJ Demos
About the book The Necropolitics of Extraction is a contribution to the CODEX Foundation’s project, EXTRACTION: Art on the Edge of the Abyss. It is the outcome of a collaboration with T.J. Demos, activist and scholar.
In the essay “Against Extraction” that fuels this book, T.J. Demos writes, “Extraction represents the violent transformation of life into capitalist commodities…[It] is a mode of necropolitics: the governance of the dead and dying, including the transformation of habitats into sacrifice zones; the relegation of populations to the worn-out, used-up, and debilitated; the conversion of life-worlds into death-worlds.”
In this accordion-fold book, one long print commenting on the rapacious aspects of extraction resolves in a call to action with Demos’s essay. The print first depicts some of the most pressing problems of our time and then shows the faces of leading social, political, and environmental activists, illustrating Demos’s call to action, “The greatest urgency is to build social movements of mutual aid and collective organizing dedicated to a shared political project of justice and radical equality, on the basis of solidarity—the political form of belonging most opposed to relations of extraction.”
What comes after the end of the world? And how can we cultivate futures of social justice within capitalist ruins? The book closes with the statement: “To make the impossible gradually possible, there is no other choice.” The book describes a closing, but offers an opening as well into an unknown world on the verge of revealing itself through our collective imaginations.
About T.J. Demos T. J. Demos is an award-winning writer and professor of visual culture at University of California, Santa Cruz, and Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He writes widely about contemporary art, global politics, and ecology, and is the author, most recently, of Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg Press, 2017) and Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016). Demos co-curated Rights of Nature: Art and Ecology in the Americas, at Nottingham Contemporary in January 2015, and organized Specters: A Ciné-Politics of Haunting, at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid in 2014. A Getty Research Scholar during Spring 2020, his latest project is Beyond the End of the World, a Mellon-funded research project, art exhibition, film screening series, and book asking how radical cultural practice can transcend catastrophism and negativity, and cultivate futures of social justice and ecological flourishing.
About Felicia Rice and Moving Parts Press Felicia Rice is a book artist, typographer, letterpress printer, publisher, and educator. In the mid-’70s, while a student of the history of the book and typography, she also learned to handset type, operate old-style letterpresses, and run a hot lead typecasting machine. In 1977 she set Moving Parts Press in motion. With one foot firmly planted in the 19th century and the other in the 21st, she utilizes letterpress and now digital technologies to produce limited edition artists books in collaboration with visual and performing artists, writers, and philosophers. Work from the Press is included in exhibitions and collections widely, both nationally and internationally, and has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants.
Rice writes, “As a printer, my job is to confront complex issues and render my response in book form. As an artist, my job is to do so with profound integrity. As a publisher, my job is to make these issues public. As printers have done every decade since Gutenberg, I’m here to respond to argue for a more just society. It is critical that we do not to remain silent when any living being is attacked, humiliated, or their dignity is harmed. We can speak out as individuals, or better still, we can come together to organize and support one another in taking action to support the dignity of all members of our communities.”
About Craig Jensen of BookLab II Craig Jensen has been binding Moving Parts Press artists’ books at BookLab II for fifteen years, beginning with Cosmogonie intime in 2005. Moving Parts Press books depend on Jensen’s years of experience and broad knowledge of book structure and housing construction, fine materials, and efficient high quality hand workmanship for their exquisite integrity as book objects. In close collaboration with Jensen, Rice realizes her aesthetic vision to create beautiful books.
About the images Our culture, our society, is tilting toward the visual, while retaining a place of respect for the written word. The layering of textures and photographic images, overprinted with degraded type, allows for reading both visually and verbally. This satisfies our appetites for the visual and the verbal, and provides multiple entry points for the viewer.
The materials of the clamshell book box reflect our Zoom moment. The cover is a dark, animate rectangle of paper outlined in hi-vis lime, a color that protects against and calls attention to danger, and facilitates communication when we most need it. Opening the box reveals the book with hi-vis orange tape running below the extended images which shouts phrases taken from Demos’s writings, like a chyron beneath the evening news. The stained lines in the crumpled brown paper and the gray smog printed from a rumpled t-shirt hover between the organic and the synthetic.
The prints within each landscape of oil rigs and derricks, mining operations and excavators, and corporate logos overprinted with degraded type suggest a deterioration, the ultimate and inevitable destruction of civilization as we know it. Dry-transfer type, such as Letraset, was popular from the 1960s to the 1980s and revolutionized graphic design. Forty years later my cache of the original material is barely usable as its polymer-based materials have hardened. The cracking lettering references our lack of foresight in developing products that are safe and durable over time. We’re in a free fall, showered with cracking plastic bits.
In the making of fine books we consider the life of the object, using archival materials and techniques to ensure the stable condition of the edition over time. We know from experience that books printed in the 1500s are still with us in remarkable condition, reaching out from over 500 years in the past. Making this type of book is a reaching out to the future, a statement of belief in a future. The thumbprint, tree rings, and spreading oak tree speak to the healing properties of time in the natural world. The blues and grays turn to yellows and greens: from darkness to light, from despair to hope.
About the deluxe edition Rice has created a deluxe edition of ten unique copies, each one augmented by her original pencil drawings. The atmospherics of each page spread are heightened to bring out the dark and the light aspects of the images moving through the book.
Details THE NECROPOLITICS OF EXTRACTION Essay by T.J. Demos
Images by Felicia Rice
9 x 11.5 inches (extends to 17.25 feet)
Forty copies designed in transfer types Letraset Times Bold, Letragraphica, Franklin Gothic, and No. IL4607; Zipatone Emboss Bold; and Formatt No. 5518, No. 5378, No. 5384, No. 5372, and No. 5590; and digital types Helvetica Neue, Janson Text, and Times New Roman.
Printed by Felicia Rice from photopolymer plates on Hosho paper backed with Rives BFK Tan paper. Images created by Rice and printed from photopolymer plates made by Rice and Jonathan Clark of The Artichoke Press. Letterpress and relief printing by Rice using a Vandercook proof press at Moving Parts Press.
Binding by Craig Jensen of BookLab II. Clamshell box covered in cloth and handmade Cave paper.
Edition of 40 signed and numbered copies of which 75% was destroyed in 8/20 fire:
• Standard edition of 30 in cloth and paper covered clamshell box $2500 7 distributed, 23 destroyed in 8/20 fire
• Deluxe edition of 10 with unique drawings by Felicia Rice $3200 3 distributed, 7 destroyed in 8/20 fire
10% of the proceeds from book sales will be donated to support organizations working for environmental justice.
THE LONG DISTANCE is a limited edition artists book of seventeen poems by San Francisco poet, Beau Beausoleil. These spare narrow poems are written in the winter margins of love, alongside shards of waking dreams, and find place within our country’s vicious history. They reveal a mixture of the poet’s continuing concerns: social justice, and the interior spaces of love and memory.
Designed by Felicia Rice, THE LONG DISTANCE was handset in Lightline Gothic and Garamond types, and letterpress printed on Somerset Book paper at Moving Parts Press by Felicia Rice and Jared Cortez. The poems are accompanied by four relief prints by Rice. Craig Jensen of BookLab II bound this edition of 55 signed and numbered copies.
Texts by Ellen Bass, Francisco X. Alarcón, Elba R. Sánchez, Yves Peyré, and
Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Letterpress, relief, and pochoir techniques with images by Enrique Chagoya, Robert Chiarito, Felicia Rice, and Ray Rice
Limited edition of 40
Scroll book with magnetic clasp: 9” x 49.5”
Box: 4”x 4” x 9”
$250 out of print due to 8/20 fire
ABOUT THE BOOK
Side 1
AUTODIDACTICA displays Felicia Rice’s evolving aesthetic concerns (typographic, illustrative, structural) and exploration of content (poetry and performance scripts from a range of constituencies with a primary focus on Latino culture), from 1980-2014. It begins with an excerpt from Ellen Bass’ FOR EARTHLY SURVIVAL, and includes reproductions of the pages from five subsequent books.
Side 2
Here Felicia’s drawings of her cars over the past decades are overprinted on a collage of encyclopedia pages. Each car has a story relating to the development of the press and its publications. These stories are presented in performance by Felicia Rice. Dates of upcoming performances to be announced.
