 No open access. Welcome to the print archival practices and new media panel. First, on behalf of this event, I would like to share this Indigenous People's Land and Territory Acknowledgement. Founded in 1889, the University of New Mexico sits on the traditional home lands of the Pueblo of Sandia, the original peoples of New Mexico, Pueblo, Navajo, and Apache, since time immemorial, have deep connections to the land and have made significant contributions to the broader community statewide. I don't know myself. And those who remain stewards of this land throughout the generations and also acknowledge our committed relationship to Indigenous peoples, we gratefully recognize our history. And now, I would like to introduce myself. My name is Maria Erin Jones. I am the OER fellow. I'm going to let's see. Is everybody in? Somebody else? Sorry. I am the OER fellow, and I am an MFA candidate in dramatic writing here at UNM. As it is related to the panel today, I would also like to share that I'm the founder and co-producer of ABQ Zine Fest, New Mexico's first and the oldest Zine Festival. Now it's 13th year. And now I would like to introduce the panelists. Carol A. Wells is an activist, art historian, curator, lecturer, and writer. She has been collecting protest posters and producing poster exhibitions since 1981. Trained as a medievalist at UCLA, she taught the history of art and architecture for 13 years at CSU Fullerton. Her articles are on political posters, have appeared in numerous publications, and she has lectured extensively throughout the US and abroad. Amy Sulcer, also on our panel, began her time at the Center for Study of Political Graphics as a volunteer in 2015. She is now the archives director and oversees three other archivists in the cataloging, preservation, digitization, and management of CSPG's collections. Sulcer received her MLIS from UCLA and her BA in art history and visual art from Occidental College. She worked on a variety of archival projects at art institutions in Los Angeles, including the Skirval Cultural Center, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and the Getty Research Institute. Kenneth Oravets received his PhD in literature from Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, in 2023. His research focuses on investigating contemporary media culture, materiality, and reading practices through the study of art comics. His pedagogy focuses on inclusive strategies for entwining instruction and reading comprehension, collegiate success, and multimodal rhetoric. Dr. Suzanne, I'm sorry, Dr. Oravets. Dr. Suzanne Anderson-Rido is associate professor of European art and chair of the Department of Art at the University of New Mexico. She received her MA in art history from Freiberg, Germany and her PhD from UCLA to focus on European art in the 18th and 19th centuries. Okay, I've introduced all of you. And so let's begin with your presentations. We would like to go first. Carol, will you start us off, please? And we can queue up your slides here. So actually, let me start with a question. I was given some questions. Is that how I should start my presentation? I should actually just talk a little bit about the slides and then go into that first question of how I started. I think if you would like to start with your slides, that would be great. And then we can go into questions. Thank you all for doing this and for having Emily and myself to speak about the work that we do and hopefully spread the word to a broader audience. I was told that you wanted to focus on community. And so I picked five slides that deal with different aspects of community organizing and building community through the posters. I don't know if you wanna, I think you're gonna be showing them, right? Cause I don't, that's what I was told. That's why we sent them to you. We're showing the slides here. Oh, I just can't see them. Okay, that's unfortunate. Is there any way you can have it so I can see them also? You should be able to see the slides. And I think, I think I'm always seeing my names. I'm seeing the slide that has the Center for the Study of Political Graphics. My name and Emily's name. That's the first one. Perfect. So then if you would just like to call out when you want the slides changed and we will change them. Okay. So I just wanna make sure I don't run too long. So this first slide is, I mean, most of the slides are dealing with our anti gentrification. That's really a fairly consistent theme throughout the building community posters that we have. And we have many from actually around the world. I think all of the ones I've picked here are from the United States. This is actually a 10 year struggle that was partially a victory, partially not. But it started in 1979 when they were trying to tear down and neighborhood that was a lot of affordable housing. And one of the last buildings that was surviving was called the International Hotel, which was where 196 low income, mainly elderly Filipino and Chinese men had been living there is one actual resident, the man you see in the front with his fist in the air and the fist breaking forward, Felix Eisen, Filipino, he had been living there since 19, since late 20s. So it was really 1928. And they fought it for 10 years. It was the students from Berkeley and San Francisco State literally fought them off. There were like six, at least six major confrontations over 10 years with the police confrontations. The delay gave them another 10 years, but they finally lost. They leveled the building. Felix was the last one to be evicted and he died just a few weeks later or a couple of months or two later. So it's like where the victory side of it comes in the community was so outraged that they never were able to build there the high rise that they were planning on building. And ultimately they built a community center with a museum to the struggle. So, and the posters are one of the main things that organized, kept it alive and continued to tell the story. Next one, please. I won't be talking quite as long about the other four, but this is a poster from Brooklyn, from 2007, the earlier poster was 1979. And it's pretty much the standard slogan, their profit versus our community stopped the gentrification in Brooklyn. And this was put out by the Families United for Racial and Economic Equality and Christopher Cardinale did the primary design. You can see that the people that are trying to put the buildings on top of the people who are fleeing and then the people are organizing together and pushing the buildings out. So that's the kind of the shorthand version, visual version. The next one, please. This is a silk screen. We don't know, it was from the 21st century but we don't know when it was interesting because this is not very far from where the center is and we sent this picture all over that community and we never were able to identify the artists but there's a lot of gentrification in LA as in most cities around the country and they've really been fighting back. And this particular poster from Boyle Heights community of East LA, the Boyle Heights working class community wants better neighborhoods but with the same neighbors. Yes, give us better services, give us cleaner streets, give us more better public transportation but don't evict the people who are here and don't replace the people that are here and give a wealthier community the services the people that are here now basically deserve those services as a message. The next slide. Micah Bazant from the Bay Area. I don't watch my neighbors, I see them. We make our community safer together and it's just a beautiful, a lot of posters are very militant, very negative and Micah Bazant has an incredible ability to really make positive statements while making the same kind of, the complaint is there of what usually happens but it's not, but it's done in a very positive affirmative way. And then the final poster is also from Berkeley from 2006 from the community health works and the picture, the image is actually from a Frida Kahlo painting but I thought the slogan was a perfect slogan for this section of my presentation that social justice is the foundation of community health and it's actually the foundation of community. So those are the five posters that I chose. Should I go into how I founded the center now or should I let someone else come in first? I think we'll go on to the next panelist and look at all of the presentations and then we'll come back to questions and more statements and we would love to know more about the center and your founding of it. Okay. Thanks. Emily, so we'll start with your presentation. Yeah, of course. Hi, I'm Emily, I'm the archives director at the Center for the Study of Political Graphics and I work with Carol. I've sort of been asked to join the talk to provide a little more detail about how here at CSPG we provide access to the protest poster collection and about the work that sort of happens behind the scenes. So CSPG is a really small organization with a large collection of over 90,000 human rights and protest posters and basically consists of two adjoining office suites where we keep all of the posters and we've cataloged over 30,000 unique posters during the last 34 years of CSPG's existence. So about 30% of our collection is fully cataloged on an item level and the vast majority of the posters are stored here in flat file drawers. Each drawer has about a dozen large archival folders which are shown on the table in this image and each folder contains a big batch of posters. So we sort the posters either by topic or by country or by artist and all of the 3,400 plus folders in the archive are listed in an archival finding aid that researchers can access online. So they can at least have a reference point in inventory. So they can request specific folders to view. They can request research appointments. We have researchers that come to the center from all over the world and our research audience is very diverse. It includes activists, organizers, curators, artists, scholars and educators. Could you show the next slide please? Yeah, so the biggest priority for our archive right now is digitizing the collection. This is especially important for us because we have so many international posters and people are not always able to travel to the center to do research here. So for most of CSPG's history, we sent posters to an outside vendor to be photographed. But since January, 2022, we've set up a digitization studio in-house and we're photographing the posters on site. And our archivists have digitized over 32,000 posters since we started this project. And this is a really great accomplishment for such a small organization. We really only have four staff people that work directly with the collection. Next slide please. So all of this digitization work is kind of in the service of putting our posters online on a collections website so that the public can freely access our collection. We've had a small collections website since about 2015, but we're in the process of rebuilding it and changing it to include more images and to have the ability to zoom in on the poster images and kind of see finer details. Could you show the next slide please? This slide kind of gives you a taste of what we're going for. The site will have sort of a list of all the folders in the archive and then you can see the record for one folder here. So there's the title, artist groups, tire, graphical, popular. And next to where it says description, there are like names and keywords about what items are in that folder to make it, you know, text searchable. And on the new website, you'll be able to see the images of the poster that are inside the folder. So this is sort of what we're aiming for. And yeah, right now we're mostly just focusing on digitizing the poster collection and constructing this upgraded website to give the public access to the images. And we're hoping to launch this new website at the beginning of next year. But yeah, thanks so much for your time and I appreciate the chance to speak about the work that we do here. Thank you so much, Emily. Let's move on to Dr. Kenneth Borovitz. So we'll shoot those up. Thank you. This is a hybrid presentation, so we're online and we're sitting here in the room. All right, can everyone hear me on the Zoom? Yes. I apologize if I'm not looking at the owl but look at the screens, the new modalities for me. So I'm Dr. Kenneth Borovitz. I'm here with the University of college at the University of New Mexico. Now I'm going to be talking a bit about my work on research into comics, zines, print, and the media. So I received my PhD in literature very recently, 2023. And in that program, my focus was on studying and teaching recently canonical literary graphic novels. So our speaker is Miles, Mike and his trophies were Sepless, Allison Bechtel's Fun Home. Those are often considered the three canonical graphic novels as much as their work would be canonical and it's come out the last 20 years. But in the course of my research, I began to dive into works that began to experiment with comics form, right? It's often that we think of comics as a genre but rather comics is a medium of expression that's not limited to certain types of content but rather is a mode of expression with very indistinct and flexible boundaries. And so it's like footnotes and Gaza by Rosako and what it is by Linda Berry, pages of which are depicted on the screen really got me thinking about the gray areas between comics and other medias. From there, I decided to go really crazy with it and I decided to focus in explicitly on experimental comics. So experimental comics, they're reimagined in comics formal devices favoring the purposeful radical and sometimes playful deviation from tradition. And one of the key areas I was exploring was comics as visual objects. So comics as image text objects rather than merely image texts thinking about the vitality of objecthood and preserving and reading in a literary sense whether comics are functioning as distinct objects. So for instance, on this slide, I have excerptions of three works. On the top is a work from the Haida Manga artist, Michael Nicoliani-Lannis called Red. Red is a book but if one would have two copies of the book and rip out all of the pages, it would be arranged on the wall to create a mural as depicted in that image. In that sense, the book is really deconstructing the notion of boundaries and borders. It's a comic, but as you can see, it isn't using conventional panels but rather form lines and indigenous to the Haida people. And so Michael Nicoliani-Lannis's work really explores that type of object breaking, dimensional breaking. On the bottom right, we have work by Yako Pelzebue who is an Instagram cartoonist who's really exploring that format. And then in the bottom left, we have work by the cartoonist Lalee Westvend which is printed in RezaGraph, which I'll get into in a second. But overall, experimental comics are independent on the ground, experimental artsy comics community. We find a place like Epikuzine Fest, for instance. A lot of wonderful experimental comics. It was there. So RezaGraph printing was one area that I was invested in in my dissertation. Some folks might be familiar with it, some folks not. RezaGraph emerged in the 1980s as a means of job printing, printing of federal materials. It's extremely compact, yet can print materials very quickly and in multiple colors. So it was originally favored for things like cruise ships, churches, small organizations, but on material quickly. It builds off of many a graph technology. So essentially, you create a difficult stencil. You then put in a ink drum of one predetermined color, then the stencil prints onto that ink drum in a singular color. RezaGraph is a dry ink, so you can print layers immediately, which allows for multicolor prints as that little diagram is illustrated up there. In the time since it was invented, it's become a favorite medium for the small press, especially for comics and zine craters who are used to using or maybe say stealing prints from Kinkos. RezaGraph opened up a whole new world of color possibility and expressive possibility. Part of my dissertation research that I interviewed 12 RezaGraph print makers from RezaGraph Studios across the country about their work, about their community-oriented work. And then I put that up in this old zine. I actually had a bigger zine, but this is the one I dispernerated at RezaLonga last week. I went to the local Op-Kirky RezaGraph studio. I have one more slide. This is not related to comics, but it is related to archival work in new media and I thought it'd be fun to share. When I was at Northeastern, I was part of a project called Letter Press Goes 3D. We had a letterpress studio called Husky on a Letterpress and we explored techniques for using laser engraving on wood as well as 3D printing to replicate the historical woodcuts. So on the left is a woodcut from the early 1900s by Thomas Nason that we recreated using laser engraving on wood. We also have an illuminated letter being 3D printed there. And then we also integrated new technologies with Letterpress design. So for instance, we 3D printed a QR code that was type I, that I would then integrate into our promotional bookmarks. So lots of fun with new and old media. Thank you, Dr. Orvitz. And let's move on to our final panelist presentation from Dr. Suzanne Anderson with Reader. Yeah, all right, let me see if this maybe works enough. Yeah, so I'm gonna change a little bit the focus. And that I'm looking at work and I brought to you today particularly one work that was produced in the early 19th century and was a very, very successful print album, print project in the early 19th century. And it focuses of what was then called the Finoss. So really within the art dialogue. And I'm bringing this project because I find it's fascinating as a work that we don't necessarily think of as a political engagement work. But when you look a little bit deeper you can really see the layers of it and its effects. So I just wanted to remind people a little bit that the beginning of printmaking in Europe, which is my focus is in the 15th century. And it's really a revolution like it was in the 15th century like what we are experiencing in the 20th, 21st century was digital images. Meaning for the very first time images could be reproduced. You have multiples of these images that travels to different places. So it opens up entirely kind of new questions in the arts. A big role for printmaking happened to on the one hand make known an artist's work, sometimes produced by the, let's say painter. And that's an example here on the left. Dura produced this print of the presentation of Christ in the early 16th century. This Dura is a Renaissance artist from Germany, but this print circulated in Italy. And the Renaissance painter Raphael knew about Dura because of the prints, not because of his paintings but which was his main work. And as a result is they get in touch with your letter writing and they're exchanging work. So Dura's work is known in Italy through this print. So that's completely kind of changing your audience, changing your influence. Another really big and important role for printmaking is reproducing existing works of art. We don't really think of that today because we're so focused on originality, but up to the 19th century probably the biggest role of prints, of the multiple of a print is making a print after another work of art. And that's what you see here on the right where you have an 18th century print after a 17th century Netherlandish painting showing the scene now in black and white. And I also wanted to focus, I want to draw you focus on what's underneath the print. It's not only the title of it, but it also tells you who owns the print. Not the prints, sorry, who owns the painting. So in other words, prints can serve as knowledge carriers, you learn about other works of art through the prints, but you also learn about the wealth and the status of those who own works of art. So a print can really kind of emphasize the social position of the owner of artworks. And another very important role of printmaking is that it provides models for artists. So be it the fully reproduced print becomes the model for an artist to learn about the vocabulary about the composition, et cetera. And it was in French training, art school training, you started by making copies of drawings and prints. And that's what you see here in the image in the center. So it's, you don't start with drawing after a 3D object or let alone a life model, but every artist and every artisan as well really started with studying prints first, making copies of them first. So my research right now is focused on this print album that's called the Musée Français, the French Museum, which is a huge compendium of prints bound on four volumes and produced between 1803 and 1812 and produced by over 150 engravers from over nine different countries. So it's a truly international, vast project that was funded by private publishers. However, the state got interested in it very, very quickly and it made it very successful because what it represents, this is a series of prints representing works of art from the Louvre Museum in Paris. The Louvre Museum was opened as a national museum and just 10 years prior, the first prints emerged in 1793. And if we just recall what the Louvre was was basically the royal collections and then during the revolution, they added the collections from churches to it and aristocrats that made up the collection. And when it opened as a national museum, the first national museum that we have, very quickly and then Napoleon with the revolutionary wars of Napoleon, he not only conquered lands, but he also conquered cultures. And when after the army had invaded a city and a land, they would pull out the artworks and bring them all to France. So France becomes the hub, not only politically, but also culturally. So now this museum is really, it's larger than anybody had ever seen before. It's a huge collection, the Louvre Museum and the Napoleon. And it has all the great pieces that people have been admiring such as the Louvre Gohan that you see here on the left or Leonardo's St. Anne that you see here on the right. Interestingly, is that this reproduction of these artworks was unbelievably successful. And we know that because we find this album everywhere. We find it in private and public collections, in libraries, in trade schools throughout Europe, but we even find it or we found it in South Africa and also in the Americas. So question matters why, why is such a thing so successful in its own time? And I think the answer is because it's a powerful didactic and that is a propagandistic tool. So if you bear with me, I just wanted to look at one print in particular. And this is a print by the United States and this is a print by Tavadiou, a French engraver, relatively young at the time, who reproduced a famous painting by Raphael that was in the Louvre at the time, St. Michael. And this is then published in the third volume, I believe, of the Musée Français. So when we think of reproductive prints, we think of copies, right? It's like, oh, it's just the same thing in black and white and it's a little smaller. Well, it really isn't that when we start looking at it closely. It's kind of a very unique temporary look at this painting that the engraver takes for his own place and time. So one thing we, of course, we have to consider that this painting here by Raphael is relatively large. The print is one sixth of its size. So I try to size it down, but not too much so that you can't see anything anymore, right? But yeah, it's very, very small compared to the original painting. And of course it's tonal, right? It's black and white rather than colorful. So that means the artist can't just copy, but the artist has to make changes. The engraver has to make changes. Some of them decide, you know, how do you deal with this new scale? How do you deal with the new color range or tonal ranges? So what we see is that Tertillier actually changes things a little bit. So look carefully that for instance, the devil and the angel, the figure composition is actually moved a little bit closer to us. Why? Well, in this reduced version of the, you know, reduced size of the version, it really emphasizes the position of this angel, the powerful, forceful position of the figure group rather than letting us escape into this wide open space, right? So it's an adjustment of these things rather than color with a kind of golden type of color or yellowish colors in the soft warm nuances, the engraver has the line. It can't really be painted, it has to be linear because of how you create a viewer engraver. And also instead of color, what you have is maybe a brilliant black and white, but not the painterly effects of a color. So we have all of these adjustments at the time, but then if we look in a bit more detail, we can see that even within the details he starts to make changes, subtle, but nevertheless changes. So for instance, if you look at the left where you see Raphael's angel, just the lower part of him, look at the tunic, this golden tunic or soft color tunic, that's very decorative from this angel that then the engraver translates into this much more functional linear kind of a tunic or whatever the soldiers are wearing these times. And if you look at the devil, the face in particular, the whole articulation of this devil becomes so much more straightforward, right? He has this grimace and he has these incredible loss that really show the strength and the tail becomes really scaleless. In other words, he has to translate these things. But what that also means is that when we now start to step back again, instead of having this divine figure of Raphael, what we have is much more this young, powerful fighter. He's like a soldier, completely calm in action. Meaning again, for the time, we're talking at a time when Europe is in war, this resonates with people. And sure enough, this print is winning prizes and one of the top prize at the time. And people are really saying, this is the way we need to look at old masterpieces through print milky. And then we find this print, sorry, one more. It stopped. Well, here we go. No. Okay. And then we find these print albums and that's what I wanted to show you with that picture on the right, just the size of it, right? These are large albums that we're talking about. We find this album in Rio de Janeiro in the National Collections of Rio de Janeiro. And that really I thought was striking, like why in this world are we now bringing these prints and finding them in places so far away from the moveable. But what's fascinating is that it seems that this print of these albums actually came to Brazil with a group of French artists in 1816. So right after the fall of Napoleon, many people had to leave France because they were too closely aligned with the Napoleonic regime. And these artists left France to come to Brazil to establish a French-style art school in Rio de Janeiro, which at this point is the capital of the Portuguese colony and the Portuguese king was actually residing in there at the time and back this project wanting to bring and bring in these French artists to build a school which ultimately resulted in the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts that was founded in 1822. So artists bring these prints with them, why? Well, again, remember prints are training tools. So it's excellent training materials for artists to learn the visual vocabulary, to learn what is the quote unquote great art, great art of Europe that now becomes the model for artists who are working for a European colonial court to learn their work and their language and their vocabulary. So I would argue that the prints indeed serve a very political role here as outlining a European canon in the arts, outlining a cultural ideal for the arts. The prints now reinforce Europe's cultural political hegemony in this colonial world. So a little bit of different focus. And I just wanted to add maybe one more thing. I'm working right now with a group of scholars and on this particular project of the Musée Francais and we're trying to put together a website with the digital imagery and the kind of archival material and new interpretations of this work that was so successful throughout the 19th century. Thank you, Dr. Anderson-Reedle. This is also fascinating and I almost can't contain my excitement about just hundreds of years of printmaking. It's very exciting. We have about 15 minutes or so left in our time together. So I'm going to open it up a little bit to questions here online. But first I want to also introduce Jennifer Jordan who is the OER librarian. And so we've been working together today. So I just want to add a face to this tech support a lot more than that, obviously. And then I also want to mention that those of you who are over in Albuquerque in the room, there is a small exhibit inside of Zimmerman. If you just go diagonal to this room, it's called The Visual Power of Print, Images from the Sam Elsley Collection. So there is a print by Carol A. Wells in this collection. And it's really the impetus for this entire event was finding this print and then connecting the print to a living artist and then saying, would you please, would you please be on this panel? So that's how that all happened. And please go take a look at the prints. They're beautiful. They're fascinating and they're exciting. So I am going to start some questions, but please let's make this a little less formal. I've got questions that I can, oh, thank you. There it is. That's the print that I was just speaking about. And I'm sorry, but Carol, is this your first print? Is this what you were telling me recently? Uh-oh, you're muted. There. No, it's not my first poster. I did my first poster. And I don't consider myself a poster artist. I've probably made a half a dozen posters, but it was kind of like by default because there was nobody else around to do something that needed to be done or that I felt needed to be done. But my first effect of the posters, at least though the first, most of the posters that I made, we're not talking huge volume, were about Central America's struggle, which is how I got involved and how I transformed from a medievalist to a poster collector and exhibitor because it had to do, it was that life-changing trip to Nicaragua that I did. Actually, that's not even true. That was 81 and my first poster was 1979, but it was also about Nicaragua. It was as a fundraiser for the Nicaraguan Literacy Crusade. So the Nicaraguan Revolution was actually very central to my education and transformation from the 12th century to the 20th. Thank you, thank you. And so I wanna start with you asking a few questions. So would you please tell us how you started this archive and why? I know you've kind of answered this, but maybe expand that for us. Well, I really refer to it as an accidental archive, although I know a lot of archives consider themselves accidental because my passion for justice, which I've been exhibiting and working on since high school and civil rights movement, Vietnam War protests, were, and then in my passion for art, I became an art historian, really came together in the political poster. I was like, I was just like, wow, these two things that I'm passionate about. And this was in the middle of Reagan, President Reagan's war against the people of Central America. And I was using the posters produced in Central America to create a different narrative, to create a narrative of they were trying to get a better life for themselves, feed their families, develop healthy care, get an education, and the US was trying to prevent all of that. So it really started out as an organizing tool for people to use in the United States as a way of one more tool of organizing against the war, to get the word stopped, kind of things never changed. We're still using posters to promote wars and to stop wars. And it went, this was before the internet, before texting, before, and it was all through word of mouth, through solidarity activists that this exhibition, which started in 1981, and it literally went around the country repeatedly from 1981 to 1989. All through word of mouth, all through the solidarity network. And every place I would go with the exhibition, people would take me to the local bookstore, which was usually a university town, a lot of left bookstores, and they all had leftover posters from past events. And so I helped them clean house. And I would come back from every lecture, every exhibition with piles and piles of posters. And that was really the origin of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, which actually wasn't incorporated until 1988. But it was founded to be a resource for activists because although the exhibition and the initial collection was Central America, they quickly became, I think the second exhibition I did was on women's rights. The third exhibition was on liberation theology. And then it just kept growing and growing. And people say, we need an exhibition on this, a former political prisoner says, could you do an exhibition on political prisoners? I said, well, if you help me, I'm sure we can find the posters. So that's really how it happened. People would come to us and they would want us to work with them to create a labor exhibition or an AIDS exhibition. And we were able to find the posters and work with them to create an exhibition. And then they just kept, our exhibitions have actually been over 400 venues of the United States and internationally since 81. So that's kind of astounding. When you think of a shoestring. Wow, yes, that it is, it is astounding. So I had a question about archiving specifically. Like I just, I noticed in Emily's presentation, you have acquired a way of scanning your posters to make it easier. And I think we were talking about this earlier in another conversation, that this came about during the pandemic as a necessity to be able to keep working in some way. Emily, would you talk to us a little bit about making that shift into scanning your own work in-house? Yeah, that was our big pandemic project. CSPG in its history as an organization has gone through a lot of different digitization efforts. In the 90s, early 2000s, they made slides and then the slides were scanned. And then we started realizing that the images were too small. So we needed larger images. So for a long time, CSPG was able to use an outside vendor to photograph our posters as needed for research requests and for exhibitions. And yeah, during the pandemic, the studio clothes that we had used for a long time, they decided to just completely shift their business model and not do any more photography. And yeah, we had for a long time dreamed of being able to photograph the posters in-house and be able to photograph more posters because it is a lot of work to inventory the posters, to deliver them to the photographer, to do the quality control, like checking all the files when you get them and then inventorying the posters when they come back. So it was something that we'd wanted for a long time and the pandemic just sort of provided an excuse because we did look at other vendors and they were quite expensive because the thing about posters is they're all oversized. They're all considered oversized and photographers tend to structure their pricing around the size of the objects. So eventually it just became more cost effective and more what we wanted in terms of being able to utilize the archive to have something in-house. And we got a lot of help from an archivist in the Bay Area named Lincoln Cushing who did a poster digitization project. And we had a lot of help from sort of someone who volunteered a photographer at the Getty Research Institute who sort of helped us pick out equipment and trained us to use it. So yeah, we've sort of been doing the digitization effort in earnest since January, 2022. And how will this affect your inevitable expansion? You're going to end up having more things in the archive. How has this upgrade, how's this upgrade going to support that growth? Well, that's, I don't know if you want to- You can go ahead, you can go ahead. That's actually part of the longer question about the future of the center because initially, I mean, for over 30 years we had rent free space and that was we were supposed to have that in perpetuity and it was part of a foundation that was about a over a dozen groups had rent free space and it was built in. And then after the founder of the foundation died his son was able to find a loophole and destroy the foundation. And we were not able to, we fought it for a couple of years but we weren't able to convince the court the attorney general that something was off here. So we don't know the long-term future of the center and digitize the entire collection is going to allow us to continue to function whether or not we are the holders of the actual objects. And so before we don't, we want to be, we want to stay independent because there's nothing else like us. We're also, we'll consider a partnership with an existing institution. And there are some models for that. I know USC is in a partnership with the one international game, Lesbian Archives and that's been working well for quite a while. So we're not sure what's where we're going but we are sure that we are going to digitize the whole collection before any final decision is made so that we will at least be able to make sure that these 90,000 posters continue to be in the public access because they were made for people to use as tools for educating and organizing people to action. And so it would be terrible if they were buried in some institutional basement and not have, and not accessible to the public. So that's our priority. Yes, I mean, I think it's a battle between being able to archive and then this idea of impermanence and who decides what is not, what's important and what should be recycled quite frankly. Speaking of impermanence, I want to talk to Dr. Orvis and I'm sorry, I'm looking this way and not at you when I'm trying to connect with everybody. Could you tell us a little bit about z-making and a little bit about the impermanence of that and the struggle between keeping a z in alive for future folks to take a look at and what kind of things are important to you in that respect? Yeah, and I'm sure it's a topic that you're also very familiar with. Yes. And z-making is so powerful because it is rooted in unfettered individual expression and community. When someone sets up to make a z-making, they're not reliant on the network of publishers, manufacturers, distributors. It is them who is set upon making this work for themselves, for other people in the community to read. And that comes to certain challenges for archiving and collecting z's. Z's are made in very small rungs. For instance, as Rizzo, you can very rapidly print somewhere between a hundred to a thousand copies of a zine, but once you go above a thousand copies of this not at all practical because you have to hand-collead everything, among other reasons. Zines themselves, so in part because they're based in, we could say manufacturing methods that are so DIY, are not strong objects. This is stapled down. And as a result, there is a sense of inevitable decay that accompanies the limited run of the zine in the first place. For instance, the Rizograph, it's a dry ink is only ever meant for ephemeral materials. The archival resilience of Rizograph is still very much on improving. And one reason why in my project, I wanted to interview zine makers and zine print studios and publishers was because at least then we would have some type of artifact of the work that was being done, even if the work itself was not accessible in the future. I think it's gonna be, it's a huge challenge to reduce the emergence of zine librarians, but the idea of a comprehensive one is almost impossible. And I wouldn't say that it's antithetical to the nature of zines, but it's the intense locality and intimacy of the zine makes it very difficult for them, our kind of users. Yes, it's true. I mean, if you know a zine maker, do you know them? You've read their zine, you know who they are. It's very, it's connective tissue somehow, it's very strange. But it also makes me think of the presentation from Dr. Anderson Riedel about the subtle changes in a masterwork and then a masterwork of print. Would you talk a little bit about how graphic artists overcome the perception that their art is just a reproduction as opposed to a dialogue across time or across design? Would you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I think actually that is, it has been a problem for artists in the past, but the problem is much bigger today because I would say since the later 19th century, there is such an emphasis on originality which really didn't exist prior. And because this kind of printmaking was taken over by photography, right? And then we're talking what? Is it now a documentation or is it an interpretation? So these are questions that are discussed with photographers and photo historians as well. Well, very much. But one way for the artists that I was talking about to overcome that institutionally is by the way they were trained. And that's actually really interesting. Printmakers were part in the early 19th century of the fine art academic system where artists in France are trained. Actually, printmakers were trained in a printmaking studio. Yes, but absolutely. But they were also asked to join the studies of painters and sculptors. So we have a number of artists who worked with Jacques Rida, one of the biggest names at the times or one of the biggest studios, or with really successful sculptors. And some of them actually became painters or sculptors. But the reason of it was that they truly understood how a painter is working and how a painter is expressing certain things. And then translate that into their own techniques and ways of expression. And I think that was a minimal moment to recognize that even if you translate an image from one medium into another, you truly have to understand your model and rethink it. And so it's that rethinking of, re-experimenting of with forms and with expression and in the arts that make them being recognized as worthy works of art in their own right. And then people have access to it. And I think that's another big part because only the Pope on some of them on sculpture. But now I can put it up in my house. And so I think, yes, you adhere to the image that you see, but he also really embrace the quality of the print. And so that accessibility, what the poster is to move people to action in this case is to include them in that fine art discourse. And I think that's a really an important part of why prints were so unbelievably successful. Even though they were reproductions. I really do appreciate your presentation because I'm reflecting on looking at a painting of Albert Durer my whole life and looking at his fingers and realizing that his hands were not, he was not just positioning that way. His hands were shaped that way through making sort of photography from cutting into wood and cutting into stone. So it's very obvious that printmakers are artists because they are using their buddies. And it's the same as musicians who are using their hands to play instruments become the shape of that need. And it's true of jazz artists that we are interpreting music. Someone's original music, we interpret a different way, a variation or a variant in comic book making. So looking intently at something is not copying it. It is internalizing it and then expressing it as a human being. It's incredible collaborative work. Okay, so we're coming to the end of our discussion. Are there any questions? There's one in the chat. There's one in the chat. Okay. All right. Would you help me find that on the list? I'm an artist who work as archived in CSPG. Hi, Carol. I have a question for the expert on themes in comics but it extends to other forms of archiving as well. Much of comics, particularly experimental comics that play with the form are both physical objects and nowadays often contain links to aspects of the comic that only exist digitally. And in that way, exist as multiple mediums that are also only one medium simultaneous. How does one score those aspects of physical media when they extend beyond the tactile but are still technically part of the zine and comic? Yeah, so you're thinking of something like a hyperlink but then a comic to a digitally related work. I see you on the screen, so not if that's what you're thinking about. That's part of what I'm thinking of, yeah. Yeah. So I've also seen comics linked to 3D models even online. So that's where it gets really complicated, I would think. There's a work I'm thinking of as well called, it's called Beyond Pen and Pixel by Amarith Borsak where you pulled a book to a webcam and then it generates a rotational 2D model of the abstract that can be contained within a book. If I'm remembering how that works correctly. The other iconic one I think of, it's not even a zine at all but there is this really terrible horror movie called The Devil Inside and then it didn't have the end to the movie. It just was like, if you want to see the end of the movie, go to thedevilinside.com. While you go to thedevilinside.com and it no longer exists, the movie has no ending, right? And I think that's the tricky thing about digital media, especially web-hosted digital media is it is so reliant on a continual stream of capital. Like if it is not being financially supported, it is not going to exist. And the moment thing more impermanent than a zine might be a website, right? And I think that is just a intense institutional challenge and a choice that a zine maker makes will when they include something that is digital in their work, they have to accept that there is going to be a fennel unless they put in the financial supports to maintain an online service. That's tough. Thank you. Sorry, not a more optimistic answer, but thanks to Sam. Thanks for that question, Jared. Anyone else have questions I'd like to pose? Oh, what do you want to say? Hello, I just want to look on that, maybe connecting the parallel medieval studies to going into the poster world and thinking about the palimpsest and to what extent that as a very affordable form and just reusing materials in order to bring the most needed up-to-date contemporary thoughts for me to get put on, parchment or on other media kind of brings the old back to the old advice first time. I just have actually a little comment. A lot of people think, how could you go from the 12th century to the 20th? But it's not, when you think about, I mean, all art is political, not all art is overtly political, but all art is, everything is political. But the medieval art was some of the most overtly propagandistic art that was ever made. It was totally upfront in glorifying the state and glorifying the church and glorifying, I mean, and then the Renaissance became more secular. So the politics of their art was certainly a little less in your face, but it was totally there. So the in-your-face aspect of the propagandistic quality of medieval art is like a political poster. I mean, it's in your face and it's out there. So it's, you know, the trick becomes finding the political interpretation of things that aren't so blatant. And when I, you know, I've been challenged, I make that statement all the time, all art is political or everything is political. Every billboard is political. But people say, oh, it's not. And it's just, they know how to read it. They don't know how to read, you know, what's out there, how the images are working on us. Thank you. Yeah, if I can just, and I completely agree and to see the nuances of that engagement with the public and then political engagement with the public is what's so fascinating when you look at these works and to get back to the digital archives is, you know, like what you're doing with your posters, digitizing them and really making them available. It might be temporal until we have a new web system and it all breaks down. But until then, the opportunity to research, to learn, to engage with it is really something that is mind-blowing, to be honest. And, you know, having the ability to go into archives, you know, from New Mexico, in Los Angeles, in Paris, in Rio de Janeiro is something that can really help us to pose new questions, to examine these ideas in a new light. And the other thing that I wanted to bring up is the digitization when you do it in a high quality, allows us today to see things that I haven't even seen with my silly little loop, you know, decades ago when you're at the work. Does the artist work necessarily so we can zoom in like this so crazily? No, that's not the idea, right? You're supposed to see it from a certain distance. But to understand of why things operate the way they are and you can really go into that depth is just, yeah, it just changes how we comprehend some of those works. And I'm so grateful for your digital archives to allow an access and to allow a study and a comparison that way that I really feel that we're in a very lucky time period right now to really widen our horizons for that way. It must be like looking at a distant star through a telescope. Yeah, suddenly discovering something that's been there the whole time. Yeah. You were able to get closer to it. And you know, when you talk about the artist's hands you can see exactly where it starts, where it ends, where it swells. So all of these things, right? It's like, well, that's a little geeky, but the geeky part is also sometimes when you have a fascination and they make it to the visual power that these works have, all of these works. You know, I just want to add one other thing. The folk, I mean, I think digital is critical. It's totally, it's opened up a whole new, many universes of working with images and disseminating images and just a quick story. A friend of mine, a wonderful artist named goes by the name Mr. Fish did an image of Che Guevara merged onto the famous statue of King Tut and he, during the Tahir Square and he put it on, he called it Walk Like an Egyptian and it was put online. And the next day somebody took a photograph of somebody in Cairo holding his piece. Yeah. It was just like, you know, one of these, you can't imagine things moving that fast and connecting us. But I also want, if people are so especially, younger people, they're used to seeing everything this size and it's different. And we have a lot of young interns every year and they actually touched the physical object that really was carried in a Black Panther Party demonstration or put on a car of a Black Panther Party funeral or was part of the United Farm Workers. It gives them chills and it's very different when you're seeing something this size than when you're seeing something this size that always looks the same in many ways. So there is something for getting people interested and informed, but also having access to the originals. I mean, if something is the size of a billboard, it has a very different impact and feeling than if it's the size of a sticker. Stickers are important, but they have a different function, much more intimate. I said that for you, Jerry. Because you made two. I was nodding. I don't know if it's clear on camera, but I was just like, yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much for that. Are there any other questions before we close out? I just want to say thank you to everyone watching, everyone in the room, and to thank our panelists. And this has been an amazing discussion and so glad it's reported so we can go back and review and come up with more ideas. Long live print. Long live all of you. Thank you, Mari. Thanks for having me, I think. Thanks. Thank you. Okay. I think that's it. That's it. Thank you. Should I add? Did our panelists stay on for a moment? Let me stop at 30. I'm going to jump in.