Preview: Making Art With Letters, Paper & Ink

Making Art With Letters, Paper & Ink

April 30, 5:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m.

Adams House Art Space

Though a book may seem like an endless stream of words on a page—especially when rushing to finish required reading—one freshman seminar knows better. Freshman Seminar 34z: “Making Art with Letters, Paper & Ink” has spent a full semester exploring the meaning behind individual words in written works. The course, taught by Zachary C. Sifuentes ’97, will present an exhibit that visually interpret words from various works of literature during this year’s Arts First festival.

The primary goal of the seminar is to devise creative interpretations of the language found in poems and books, and then to create artistic representations of these ideas. “It’s a class about the meaning of words,” said Matthew E. Warshauer ’14. “It’s about words that have more meaning than when you just read a sentence. Words have meaning in how they look, in how they’re printed, and in the way they’re arranged on the page.” The Arts First exhibit will feature projects from throughout the semester, including poems that have been transformed into drawings, and reproduced books in which passages are rearranged. For the final project, the class is creating ‘altered books’––books that are reconfigured to illustrate important aspects of the story.  Students were asked to select books of importance for the piece. “I chose to work with ‘Peter Pan’ for my main piece in the show,” says Madalyn S. Bates ’14. “I tried to convey the idea that there’s a lot more darkness to the Peter Pan story than we think, because there are a lot of nightmare scenes and darker motivations [in the text]. I took the words from the text, and wrote them over each other, which created art and depth and shading out of just the words themselves.”

Though the students are essentially putting together a visual art show, the course and the exhibit are predominantly rooted in language and words. Due to the literary element of the seminar, artistic skill is not as essential as deep understanding and creative interpretation of the literary texts.  “It’s really nice that the seminar emphasizes our creativity in a way that doesn’t require experience or extensive artistic talent,” said Jasmine M. Omeke ’14. “We just [work on] capturing the essence of texts in a creative way, and get a cool product out of that.” The course’s show will take place on Saturday in the Adams Art Space from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.