LAST EXHIBIT:
A Lifetime Gifts Collage (1967-2021)
From five decades and thousands of miles of literary travel, I learned to save gifts and value the exchanges by which readers and writers generously shared some of their work. I was always reluctant to discard posters: they united images and texts and typography, they announced, previewed, caught passing eyes. A poster could document any dramatic moment on a literary journey. Discarded, abandoned, I took them down, took them home.
Randomly selected and organized from a 50-year personal archive, these 50+ posters gathered here intend to save some of our past literary relationships: to our peers, to all kinds of ads, books, writers, reading, places, publishers, editors, events, sponsors, keynotes, topics. Whatever text was left on my desk, on my door, in the mail, after a visit, freely given, I saved. Here I give some of them back to anyone who walked a similar road during decades after WWII. Like a beekeeper, I always had a passion to gather, to save some ripeness, to be grateful. To remember. And to share something of my own, however transient.
Beyond posters, I also exchanged and saved memorabilia rescued from the highways and byways, the billboards and tack boards and hallways and wastebaskets, the recycle bins of print history. Serendipity was always with me walking to bookstores, galleries, student shows, photos with letters, translations, castaways, notes from friends. I found my former students, such as Richard Beckman (1957–2004), the artist sculptor, who studied with me in the 1970s. As a student, he gave me an original poster-size drawing which I saved (listing #117). Later, he became a famous art professor at the University of South Florida and received national recognition for his exhibitions in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. (Discovered and published here for the first time during this exhibition research.) Another year, gifts came from grateful students in China, another year from Sweden, another year from Germany.
So as you look around this exhibition of gifts and random castoffs, please remember—this is one way writers live: as Henry James said, “Try to be the kind of person on whom nothing is lost.” Generous people haven’t lost our unique regional collage at once history, literature, bio, travel, journal, poetry, art, broadcasting, film, etc. This exhibit engaged a few of them: Kristin Summers of Redbat Creative worked months on catalog pages, captions and photos to make them documentary, non commercial, and accurate; Curator gathered 50 years of every thing, wrote captions, paid expenses. Katie Larsen and Dana Summerfield of Pendleton Art and Frame contributed materials and labor; other pro bono contributors include Alex Fyfe, Ryan Fyfe, Julie and Peter Farnam, Conor Wood, Terry Moser. Permissions and copyrights pending. Release and exhibit site TBA.
—George Venn (La Grande, Oregon)
Randomly selected and organized from a 50-year personal archive, these 50+ posters gathered here intend to save some of our past literary relationships: to our peers, to all kinds of ads, books, writers, reading, places, publishers, editors, events, sponsors, keynotes, topics. Whatever text was left on my desk, on my door, in the mail, after a visit, freely given, I saved. Here I give some of them back to anyone who walked a similar road during decades after WWII. Like a beekeeper, I always had a passion to gather, to save some ripeness, to be grateful. To remember. And to share something of my own, however transient.
Beyond posters, I also exchanged and saved memorabilia rescued from the highways and byways, the billboards and tack boards and hallways and wastebaskets, the recycle bins of print history. Serendipity was always with me walking to bookstores, galleries, student shows, photos with letters, translations, castaways, notes from friends. I found my former students, such as Richard Beckman (1957–2004), the artist sculptor, who studied with me in the 1970s. As a student, he gave me an original poster-size drawing which I saved (listing #117). Later, he became a famous art professor at the University of South Florida and received national recognition for his exhibitions in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. (Discovered and published here for the first time during this exhibition research.) Another year, gifts came from grateful students in China, another year from Sweden, another year from Germany.
So as you look around this exhibition of gifts and random castoffs, please remember—this is one way writers live: as Henry James said, “Try to be the kind of person on whom nothing is lost.” Generous people haven’t lost our unique regional collage at once history, literature, bio, travel, journal, poetry, art, broadcasting, film, etc. This exhibit engaged a few of them: Kristin Summers of Redbat Creative worked months on catalog pages, captions and photos to make them documentary, non commercial, and accurate; Curator gathered 50 years of every thing, wrote captions, paid expenses. Katie Larsen and Dana Summerfield of Pendleton Art and Frame contributed materials and labor; other pro bono contributors include Alex Fyfe, Ryan Fyfe, Julie and Peter Farnam, Conor Wood, Terry Moser. Permissions and copyrights pending. Release and exhibit site TBA.
—George Venn (La Grande, Oregon)