Al-Mutanabbi Street

Description:	Barlow, Heidi (printer)Lipkin, Elline (author)Ali, Aga Shahid (author) Edition of 17. This collection supports and promotes awareness to the important mission and framework of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalitions focus on the lasting power of the written word and the arts in support of the free expression of ideas, the preservation of shared cultural spaces, and the importance of responding to attacks, both overt and subtle, on artists, writers, and academics working under oppressive regimes or in zones of conflict, despite the destruction of that literary/cultural content. When coming up with the design for the broadside, I chose to only have text and color in my broadside.. I formatted the text so it would draw the viewers eye and focus their minds on just the poem. I felt that after reading the poem, just having text alone would have the strongest impact on the viewer because the poem is written so well. When I read the poem I had my own imagery created in my head by the descriptive writing, so when making the broadside that was a key reason why I had just text, so that the viewer and reader could create there own image, making the poem more personal. During this printing process there were many challenges that I faced. Some of the problems were producing the background for the broadside. After I had chosen the poem , I decided on a fading background of two colors which was violet-red and tangerine orange. These colors fit well with the text of the poem because the poem mentions fire more than once. Creating the broadside was difficult at first because the method I chose for applying the background was very time consuming. Each background slightly differed from the next by varying color application, i.e. some are bright while others are slightly duller, and at times the ink would roll on heavier or lighter depending on how many times the roller went on the paper. For creating the background, I made a cutout stencil that blocked the border of the paper and then rolled the ink directly onto the paper. The process used for applying the text for the poem was by creating a polymer plate and printing it on a Vandercrook letterpress. For the colophon I hand set type and printed onto the bottom of the broadside. I chose black ink for the poems text to make it stand out from the background.
Origin:	2007
Created By:	Barlow, Heidi; Lipkin, Elline; Ali, Aga Shahid
Contributor(s):	Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition
Source:	http://iuidigital.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/AMSSH/id/190
Collection:	Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition Collection
Rights:	http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Copyright:	In Copyright
Subjects:	broadsides letterpress printing art

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