Save Mills Book Art

This site was established by graduates of the MFA in Book Art and Creative Writing Program to help save the Mills College Book Art Program. Please help save this program which for 35 years has empowered students with skills in book art, printmaking, letterpress printing, bookbinding, and more. Share your story below!

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The Book Art Program Helped Launch My Career

I had left my job as a special education/elementary school teacher just before continuing my studies at Mills. I didn't know what career path I would take. Then in 1976 or '77, a savvy and energetic librarian unearthed the Mills letterpress that was stored in the basement of the library. Betsy Davids and Kathy Walkup were the first instructors. Once I took letterpress printing, I was hooked. I continued to find jobs in printing and publishing, started my own publishing company, and later worked in communications at a major Bay Area corporation. My job was a dream job: It combined my editorial skills with my knowledge of printing and publishing. Also, through my own publishing company, I received a National Endowment for the Arts grant and published a book of 21 African-American plays. The book is in libraries and has been used as a college textbook. I don't know what my career would have been had I not found my love of printing and publishing through the letterpress class at Mills.

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An Influential Model of Interdisciplinary Practice

The Book Art/Creative Writing dual thesis program at Mills College gave me an insight on how to connect what was previously disparate right brained creative output and logic. Prior to attending the program at Mills, I was still working in a compartmentalized methodology and scope, often pursuing one outlet at a time. Poetry, music, book art, installation art, and performance art are in and of themselves worthy of practice and development of craft. We can give our attention to each and with the program at Mills, I was able to formulate a cohesive interdisciplinary practice, moving between rooms and even creating new rooms and hallways with each new work.

When I ran into a crisis in 2012, my doctor suggested that I wait a few months to complete my thesis. While the crisis had little to do with the content in the thesis, I had broken, and knew that my doctor was wrong and I couldn’t wait to finish the work and the thesis exhibition that was then only weeks away. I owed it to myself to finish the work and in the spring, my album of music and poetry culminated in an artist’s book as part of the exhibition. Without the support from my time on campus, this work may never have been completed. I gained strength from knowing that I was able to methodically construct a creative work with emotionally difficult content. Please support this vital interdisciplinary approach to the creative process. Students practicing in an interdisciplinary way rely on the support of faculty who are engaged and responsive, provocative and at the forefront of their field. This program, the only such program nationally requires students to think about the detail that gives a vision of the bigger picture. This program is vital to emerging book artists working in any genre of the arts and humanities. It is not only craft oriented but develops the conceptual base for intriguing, inspiring, and beautiful works. My time at Mills can’t be repeated and I am truly thankful to have been given the opportunity to develop my artistic, musical, rhetorical, and conceptual skills. I could not have done it without this program.

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As a collector, I would encourage you to keep the program intact.

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photo: 2009 Meg Day at Mills College  (MFA Creative Writing - Poetry '10 -- now Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing at Franklin & Marshall College) None of my experiences at Mills College can come close in comparing to the education I received in Professor Walkup's courses, nor the incredible curiosity, creative intelligence, historical framework, & sense of community I gained as a book art student & later as a volunteer studio assistant. Working in book art made my poetics pop: in Professor Walkup's courses, I began to understand what kind of lineage we step into when we read & write poetry, which opened up a new realm of understanding for me as a student who often felt out of place as hard-of-hearing, genderqueer, & a first-generation college student. The letterpress studio made my expensive MFA worth every dollar. It was where I found my working class roots combined, for once, with the arts. That studio is the site of many of my first experiences with activism & social justice; what's more, it's the place that I discovered my own scholarly trajectory & unearthed new theoretical frameworks for literature & poetics which I've gone on to publish. Learning to set type & hand-print my own poetry broadsides & chapbooks presented me with a novel sense of how powerful print can be: if words can make manifest the world, then the actual word made material can offer the printer an exclusive chance to create world meaning in the most literal sense. Professor Walkup's courses revolutionized my poetics in ways my creative writing classes never could, turning theory into practice. From my work in the studio stemmed a book that would lead to a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry &, most recently, winning the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship for Poets. My career very literally began in that studio. Professor Walkup is, after all, one of the big reasons I felt called to pursue my Ph.D. & become a professor, myself.

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Optical Sound, 2010

A collaborative reading involving the Creative Writing MFA, the Book Art MFA, & the music department in which contact mics were placed on the presses as they were run to create the soundtrack to a reading & simultaneous new media projection.

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All book arts programs deserve to be saved and nurtured! Save book arts at Mills College.

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A Place We Shine!!

The Book Art Program at Mills College allows students to shine.  The program encompasses the best and encourages excellence in a very specific area of the arts.  This is special and something that very few academic institutions can offer.  Please reconsider terminating this wonderful program at Mills!!  

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Visit Original Link

A rallying call from MFA graduates Kate Robinson and Mirabelle Jones to save the program. Please feel free to use this in your podcasts and audio news sources!

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I was an artist in residence a number of years ago. It was a life-affecting experience to spend a week setting type with Kathy's wise patient thoughtful guidance. Fred Frith and I played a concert in the studio, with printing press, guitar, and ortet instrumentation, using the partially printed letterpress work as our score. 

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I am shocked that the Mills College Book Art Program is being considered for closure. I graduated from Mills 29 years ago with an Economics degree. I took Book Arts in my senior year and it was my all-time favorite program at Mills. Taking Economics was a practical course to take, but it was the Mills College Book Art Program that opened my eyes to new possibilities. I especially loved the hands-on experience creating posters and books and letting my imagination fly. 

At that time, we did not imagine things like ebook readers and tablets would become our primary tools to read content. It is well known that a typography course influenced Steve Jobs when he created the Macintosh, which was first released in 1984 while I was at Mills. 

Today’s technology makes the Book Art programs even more imperative. We must not forget how important books and pieces of paper have helped advance our human knowledge and tools. The Mills College Book Art Program is where we all can use our hands and imagination to create and appreciate its great import. 

I have a MLIS and work as an eLibrarian in education.

Please do not close the Mills College Book Art Program. 

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save Mills Book Art

I am not a graduate of the program. I have not taken classes there. But my daughter graduated from Mills, and I am an active book artist, and have lived in Oakland for 36 years. I have always been thrilled that the Bay Area is a significant champion of the book arts, with the Mills program, the San Francisco Center for the Book, and so many others. The Mills program deserves its outstanding reputation. Its existence helps keeps books alive, in a world which is being swallowed by technology.It would be a travesty to underestimate its power and importance. It should be considered a selling point in drawing students to Mills. Thanks for your wisdom in allowing the program to continue to work its magic.

heath frost

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Mills Town Hall Meeting Recording

If you didn't make it to the open meeting at Mills today that's ok we still love and need your support. To not leave anyone out we've recorded the meeting, please share this with anyone who was not able to attend and is interested and check back for more recordings. Also, listen to this recording in preparation for the next meeting on Wednesday 10282015!!!!

https://soundcloud.com/save-mills-book-art/town-hall-open-meeting-10212015

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In this day of electronic media this press and the quality of expression are not something to discount.

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Keep the books arts alive at Mills!

Please keep this program and these facilities going strong. I visited during conferences for APHA/FDH and CBAA and was wholly impressed by the program and students. This program offers a unique and much needed approach to the study of book arts; it challenges and nurtures the author as maker and storyteller to craft compelling, content-rich, works of art.

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This last week, I taught a book arts workshop in juvenile detention. In planning my work there, I thought about doing book groups and writing workshops. I thought about writing letters to characters or authors. I thought about making personal connections with literature. But last week I observed a life skills class that lacked something. It was impersonal, dry. So, I decided to work on life skills through book arts. The kids made concertina books (no needles, no staples!) and placed on the page visual and textual representations of their goals and how they are going to get there. Like maps to the future. The youth absolutely loved the rub on letters (with enormous thanks to Eduardo De Ugarte) because it gave their books a professional look. And when we affixed the covers, there it was, a moment that I haven't been witness to for far too long.

"I'm an author!"

These students were so very proud of their work. They had not only worked hard to make beautiful objects, but they worked hard within themselves to articulate their goals and how they will reach them. The act of creating a book, an instrument often seen as the tool of those in power, has the ability to affirm and validate a young person who does not often feel affirmation and validation. It can open a gate for a student who has previously felt apart from literate culture, welcoming them in as qualified members of what has seemed a closed society. Bookmaking carries substantial symbolic weight.

Book Arts are not expendable. They affect not only students working in visual arts and book history, they affect those in English and writing, those studying education or any field in which working with youth might play a part. Book Arts synthesize so much of what "education" and "literacy" hold dear, including the arithmetic of actualization, the poetry of presence.

After graduating from Mills with a major entitled The Book: Its History, Culture, and Creative Form, I earned the Charlene Garry Scholarship to attend Camberwell College of Arts and there received my MA in Book Arts. Following that, I earned an MFA in Photography at the University of Arizona (my book works are all photographically based). Now I am in my final year of a Ph.D. in Language, Reading, and Culture at the University of Arizona. Mills College, the Book Arts Program, and Kathy Walkup all were instrumental in the successes I have achieved artistically and academically. I am currently on the job market for professorships in Literacy, hopefully somewhere where I can weave all my interests together, including children's literature, book arts, and literacies (visual, textual, media). All these interests have been built on the foundation of the Mills College Book Arts program.

Please let Mills College know how important the Book Arts program has been for those involved and will be for future participants.

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Looking for Mills students/alums who have participated in exhibitions at 23 Sandy Gallery

Hello Friends,

I am preparing a list of Mills College students or alumni who have been included in any exhibition here at 23 Sandy Gallery over the last 9 years. And, I know there are many.

My plan is to submit at least a letter or at best a catalog including images of all of the artists who have participated in exhibitions here at the gallery as a way to demonstrate that Mills graduates frequently go on to commercial art gallery representation and/or exhibition success.

If you or anyone who know has ever participated in a 23 Sandy exhibition and is a current or former Mills book art student or alum, please contact me off list at [email protected].

Thank you,

Laura