Year-long Vassar College lecture series kicks off with Shirley Jones lecture, September 26

A lecture by writer, artist, and printer Shirley Jones of Red Hen Press in Wales will kick off a year-long exploration at Vassar College of how Old English texts are transformed. Jones' lecture, titled "The Written Word – The Printed Image: The Artist's Books of Shirley Jones," is the first of four events in a series titled "Transformations of Text." Her lecture is scheduled on Thursday, September 26, at 5 p.m. in Taylor Hall, room 203. A display of Jones' books will accompany her lecture.

After teaching English in London for several years, Jones attended courses in lithography, etching, and sculpture before being accepted for the postgraduate printmaking course at Croydon College of Art and Design, where she published the first two of her 22 artist books.

She set up her own studio and continued to publish her etchings and mezzotints, complementing her poems, prose pieces and translations from Old English and Old Welsh, which she sets and prints, letterpress, in editions limited to about 40. In 1983, Jones named her press and gave up binding her own books. Each of her books is "a total concept, the choice of paper and typeface, the unity of text and images, the harmony of the binding as carefully considered as the visual and literary creativity involved," according to Jones.

Her work has received critical acclaim and is now collected by rare books libraries and private collectors in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, and South Africa. Nineteen solo exhibitions of her work include an exhibition at the National Art Library in the Victoria and Albert Museum and a 20-year retrospective at the Gregynog Gallery of the National Library of Wales.

The series, sponsored by Vassar College Libraries and the English Department, will include another lecture, on Thursday, November 14, by Kevin Kiernan, director of the Electronic Beowulf Project at the University of Kentucky; and a performance of Beowulf selections put to music by Benjamin Bagby, of the medieval music ensemble Sequentia. It will conclude with a symposium in the spring. Dates for Bagby's performance and the symposium will be announced at a later date.

Vassar, founded in 1861, is a highly selective, residential, coeducational liberal arts college located in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations or information on accessibility should contact Campus Activities Office at (845) 437-5370. Without sufficient notice, appropriate space and/or assistance may not be available.

Vassar College is a highly selective, coeducational, independent, residential liberal arts college founded in 1861.

This article was posted on Friday, September 6th, 2002.