Snow Falls

Description:	Letterpress with linoleum cut. Edition of 30.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. I am not a particularly political artist, but I can be provoked. I came to the Al-Mutanabbi Project when two separate friends sent me the identical email, thinking I already had done a broadside. My ongoing project is to mine the daily newspaper for vocabulary that I use to construct a short poem--to make a sort of distillation of the days mood. Since I had been doing this for several years (not daily, but often) I found a poem from about the time of Al-Mutanabbi that addressed the subject of the Iraq war. Then it became about learning about the situation and looking at Islamic calligraphy and book illustration to design something appropriate. I used the Dale Guilds Arrighi ornaments to build an elaborate frame for the poem, which I set in a 19th-century Gothic. I cut two simple linoleum shapes as background color, and it all seemed to go together. For myself, doing the broadside has taught me a few things about Islamic art and culture. I would hope that the project as a whole could have a larger impact and help in some small way to find a resolution to this war.
Origin:	2009
Created By:	Henry, Barbara
Contributor(s):	Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition
Publisher:	Harsimus Press (Jersey City, New Jersey)
Source:	http://iuidigital.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/AMSSH/id/202
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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