“Men’s words are carved in stone from here to kingdom come. So, no, we’re not going to do quotes by men. Thanks for asking.”
The story of Dead Feminists starts with Sarah Palin. More specifically, Sarah Palin’s glasses.
In response to the upcoming 2008 election—and Palin’s place in it—printmaker Jessica Spring planned to print a broadside with a quote by 19th century American suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Come, come, my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles, and see that the world is moving. Spring needed a central illustration that would tie the historic quote to contemporary events, and Palin’s rounded rectangular glasses were fast becoming iconic. So, Spring contacted Chandler O’Leary, an illustrator who had just moved into Spring’s neighborhood and commissioned some spectacles. O’Leary—with an enthusiasm that Spring would soon learn she brings to everything—instead drew the entire quote, along with the glasses.
Spring letterpress printed an edition of 44 broadsides just before the election and quickly sold out. Though they had considered it a one-off project, Spring and O’Leary soon found themselves discussing a post-election follow-up, with a quote by Eleanor Roosevelt. The Dead Feminist series had come bursting—unexpectedly, but with great purpose—to colorful, energetic life.
Almost eight years later, there are twenty-two broadsides in the “Dead Feminists” series; twenty-four by the time their book drops next year. Each print revolves around a central quote by a historic feminist thinker—no contemporaries allowed. The process to completion is deeply collaborative: Spring kickstarts it by identifying the person, the quote, writing a biography, and tying the quote to a contemporary social issue. O’Leary then creates a sketch and hands it back to Spring, who figures out how she’ll manage to print it. O’Leary’s bold, graphic illustrations do the heavy lifting, as she must combine the quote with a portrait of the subject, conjure flavors about her background or life’s work, and fit a colophon at the bottom.
Broadsides are large posters that were used widely across the English-speaking world as announcements, proclamations, or advertising: think Wanted posters in the Old West or signs for traveling shows. These broadsides are letterpress printed by hand at Springtide Press, Spring’s Tacoma-based studio. The artists create between two and four new prints each year, and if that doesn’t sound like a lot, consider the amount of research, sketching, production, promotion, and mailing that includes.
A majority of the process is done by hand though there’s some digital wizardry to streamline things. Once the pencil sketch is finalized and the colors chosen, O’Leary traces her sketch in dark ink on vellum. Because each color is printed one at a time, they each need their own plate, and she’ll produce as many tracings as there are colors. She scans the tracings, converts them to a bitmap file, and sends them out to be made into plates of light-sensitive plastic, or photopolymer. This is a rubbery, squishy plate that’s reminiscent of a floppy plastic placemat. The plate is mounted on a metal base in Spring’s Vandercook press, inked with its color, and paper run over it. Then, they switch plates and ink, and the process continues until each print has every color and layer. Some prints have sexy extras to them, such as gold ink—like the sumptuous 2014 Imogen Cunningham print—or a “rainbow roll”, which is created using an oscillating roller which blends multiple ink colors to create variable gradients—as in the wildly colorful Sarojini Naidu print.
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Sitting in Spring’s studio with the two, surrounded by presses and shelves of movable type, I quickly understand the team dynamic. O’Leary is unreserved and voluble, excited to discuss their upcoming book, the history of Dead Feminists, and techniques. Her manner is bright and inclusive, drawing me quickly into their circle, and soon we’re all commiserating about cycles of feminism and dropping f-bombs together. She explains that the two hadn’t had any real plan to make Dead Feminists into a series at the outset:
“This whole process has been kind of a flying by the seat of our pants thing.”
Spring interjects dryly,
“Er, let’s not—how can we make that sound better?”
O’Leary seizes the moment with a joke. “We do ‘improvisational ideation’!”
“Right. That.”
Spring is the veteran of the two, with printing experience stretching back twenty-five years, to her days in Chicago before the massive current resurgence of letterpress, when she bought her Vandercook press for the cost of transporting it. She’s the quieter of the two, but I can see her considering angles and tumbling thoughts over in her mind to refine them. When she speaks, it’s to pierce straight to the core of an idea or to add a wry, dryly funny comment.
I can imagine the long, tiring, but wildly creative and productive sessions between the two that lead to each Dead Feminist broadside, and why they’ve been able to produce works of artistry, startling poetry, and ferocious intelligence.
Unsurprisingly, their first three prints featured quotes from women involved in political issues (Stanton, Roosevelt, and suffragist Alice Paul), as political women write more and are better recorded. But they soon stepped away from obvious candidates and found lesser-known people to highlight.
“Everyone expected us to do a print for Maya Angelou when she passed away, but—no offense—we’d rather introduce you to someone you don’t know, and should.”
“We have a list of women whose work we want to highlight,’ says Spring. “Sometimes we just have to wait for a current event to happen in order to highlight her. [Environmentalist] Rachel Carson on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was one of those, in 2010.”
Sometimes written works by a particular woman no longer exist, or there’s no accurate portrait. Their first quote-less broadside debuted in 2014—on Fatima al-Fihri (ca. 800-880 C.E.) who founded the oldest continuously operating university in the world in Fes, Morocco—and they used her epithet, “Oum al Banine” or “Mother of the Children” instead of a quote. When the print was released, O’Leary wrote passionately on her blog about the pressing questions around their lack of a quotation:
“I spent a long, long time creating this illustration—not only because of all the ornate patterning, or the carefully-researched Arabic script. Not just the time I spent trying to find images of Al-Qarawiyyin, or information about Fatima’s life. …this became an exercise in trying to understand. Why we had to go back 1200 years to find a woman like Fatima, who had made a lasting contribution and who was remembered. Why we could not find a relevant, direct quote at all, despite months of research and consulting scholars on this topic. Why it is so difficult and dangerous for a girl to obtain an education in so many parts of the world.”
The connections drawn by Spring and O’Leary—historic, biographic, artistic—are some of the most compelling parts of the broadsides. Some are clear parallels, but others are a testament to Spring’s lateral thinking, and force you to do a little stretching to get to her destination. To commemorate the Occupy Wall Street movement, Spring chose Jane Mecom, the largely unknown younger sister of Benjamin Franklin, and a line from their lifelong correspondence: “My power was always small, tho my will is good.” O’Leary mimicked Mecom’s handwriting—rough, misspelled, with the stilted syntax of the barely educated—on the left side of the print, and contrasted it with the flowing, educated hand of her brother. With this contrast between have and have-not, Spring and O’Leary ably give life to Franklin’s better-known quote; “Yes, we must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
I ask if inclusion and diversity is a large part of their thinking when they choose their subjects. Both nod immediately.
“We’re hyper-aware of the racial, cultural and religious makeup of the series,’ says Spring. “People send us their requests, but it’s almost always for white women. We want a range and a variety of representation.”
O’Leary dives deep into researching colors, iconography and patterns that would be representational of the place and time of writer, giving each a different and authentic feel. The palette in al-Fihri’s broadside are based on the tiles in the mosque she founded; Rywka Lipszyc’s piece makes use of the floral motifs found in her diary written in Auschwitz; mehndi and paisley designs spring rococo around Sarojini Naidu’s words; Mecom’s words are rendered in Wedgwood porcelain blue.
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“If we had a swear jar for every time someone asked us if we’re planning to include quotes by men…” starts O’Leary.
“We could retire on that jar,” finishes Spring.
“Fine art and printmaking are both arenas that used to be largely boys’ clubs,” Spring tells me. She remembers buying her printing presses and equipment largely from widows of printmakers who were thrilled to sell to a young woman printer.
“Even today, we go to print expos or art shows, and we both run up against assumptions about how and why Chandler and I are artists. Oh, it’s so nice that you have this hobby. Oh, you can afford to do your projects because you both have husbands with full-time jobs.”
O’Leary nods and interjects succinctly:
“Fuck you, hard.”
While Dead Feminists puts the focus on women, the series isn’t about aggrandizing them or knocking down men. The quotes swerve away from “girl power,” and most don’t even reference women directly. and the issues they relate to broadly affect all people. But what they lack is the reference to “mankind” or using “man” as a general for all of society.
“Men’s words are carved in stone from here to kingdom come. So, no, we’re not going to do quotes by men. Thanks for asking.”
Though the prints are created by hand and could fetch a pretty penny, the two aren’t particularly motivated by money: they price them at an extremely reasonable $40 each. They understand the value of the work, and that they’re underpricing. But Spring explains that they believe in the broadside as a political object, a statement about the democratic multiple.
“We want to be remunerated, sure, but our audience is not big collectors. Anyone who wants one should be able to have one. Broadsides historically were posted in public, so theoretically if these were true broadsides, you could get it for free.”
Proliferation’s the thing—getting the quotes read and the message across. It’s getting there: the full archive has been acquired by the National Museum for Women in the Arts, and the University of Washington Special Collections Library was one of the earliest annual subscribers. They’ve found a special niche in hearts of teachers and librarians, a majority of whom are women. But not all.
The two recently went to Codex, an expo for printers. A teenaged boy came up to their table, and had what they can only describe as a shocking, visceral reaction to the work.
“This is sick! These are so awesome!” he gushed.
O’Leary and Spring thanked him, slightly surprised. Moments later, he returned, dragging his mother by the arm.
“Mom! Look, it’s just $40. I can buy one for myself!”
Welcome to the Dead Feminists, kid. They’re happy to have you.
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The Dead Feminists book is forthcoming in Fall 2016, and will include stories, history and behind-the-scenes info on the series.
Original Dead Feminists prints and postcards are available at http://www.deadfeminists.com/
Jessica Spring (Springtide Press) is at http://springtidepress.com/
Chandler O’Leary (Anagram Press) is at http://chandleroleary.com/
The post There Is a Light That Never Goes Out: The Art Behind Dead Feminists appeared first on STACKEDD Magazine.