Tag: process

October 28, 2019

Trees of Life

This season we are celebrating the efforts of young, live feminists like Greta Thunberg, Autumn Peltier, India Logan-Riley, Isra Hirsi, Winnie Asiti, Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, and many others. These young women are leading people of all ages and nationalities into the streets to demand decisive climate action from our world leaders. In solidarity with their efforts, our newest Dead Feminists broadside highlights the words of Africa’s “Mother of Trees,” Wangari Maathai:

Until you dig a hole, you plant a tree, you water it and make it survive, you haven’t done a thing. You are just talking.

Maathai dedicated her life’s work to restoring the environment in her home country of Kenya. Along with a tireless group of women followers, she planted millions of trees, disrupting and enraging a corrupt, authoritarian regime in the process. While her government was bent on resource extraction, the theft of public lands, and a kleptocratic program of personal enrichment (stop us if any of this sounds familiar), Maathai kept planting seeds—and held her ground.

I wanted my illustrations to be really graphic and bold, with strong, simple silhouettes—I ended up thinking a lot about Crockett Johnson’s illustrations in the midcentury children’s classic, The Carrot Seed. While the book wasn’t a direct or obvious reference, there’s definitely a link there (at least in my head!). Printing was the real challenge here, though. Jessica had some seriously tight registration to contend with, as well as the tricky business of printing delicate text and large flood areas in the same print run (without overinking or underinking either one!).

Color ended up being our other big challenge here. We mocked up many different color schemes, never quite happy with any of them. We wanted to avoid too-obvious tree colors like brown or leafy green, but going too far in the other direction just seemed…weird. Then it dawned on us to look at East African textiles for inspiration, and that made us approach the inking station with new eyes. We took those naturalistic tree colors and cranked the saturation up to eleven—and suddenly it all clicked.

Our 29th broadside is printed in the bold, joyful colors of kitenge fabric, which Wangari Maathai wore as her personal signature. Central to the design is an African baobab tree, also known in folklore as the tree of life. The baobab’s iconic stout trunk anchors the composition, with its roots forming Maathai’s name and a white baobab blossom framing her portrait. Elsewhere in the design are a baobab sapling and even a baobab seed (hint: look for a certain comma).

To symbolize the interconnected nature of the world’s biomes and climates, the tree is adorned with “fruit” (drawn to resemble the baobab’s pendulous hanging fruit) portraying a number of vulnerable and endangered Kenyan species, including the African wild dog, Grévy’s zebra, black rhinoceros, hirola (Hunter’s antelope), lesser kudu, and tree pangolin.

To help continue Wangari Maathai’s efforts, we are donating a portion of our proceeds to two tree-planting organizations. First up is Maathai’s own Green Belt Movement, which is continuing her legacy in East Africa. Closer to home, we are also contributing to One Tree Planted, an American nonprofit that plants a tree for every dollar donated (and also follows up over time to make sure the planted trees actually survive). We are supporting both organizations via Action Grants from the Dead Feminists Fund.

Purchase your copy in the shop!

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Trees of Life: No. 29 in the Dead Feminists series
Edition size: 176
Poster size: 10 x 18 inches

Printed from hand-drawn lettering and illustrations on an antique Vandercook Universal One press, on archival, 100% rag (cotton) paper. Each piece is numbered and signed by both artists.

Colophon reads:
Wangari Muta Maathai (1940 – 2011) was born in the central highlands of Kenya, in a rural village. Unlike many girls her age she attended school, and was awarded a scholarship to attend college in the United States, focusing on biology. She returned to Kenya to earn a PhD — the first East African woman to do so. She joined the National Council of Women in 1976, working with women to plant trees. Through Maathai’s Green Belt Movement, more than 51 million trees have been planted throughout Kenya, reforesting the environment and improving the quality of life. Tree planting gave Maathai an opportunity to teach communities to protect their own interests, pursue self-government and regain a cultural foundation stripped away by colonial rule and government corruption. The Green Belt Movement grew with Maathai on the front line, fighting authoritarian abuses of power, land-grabbing, and illegal detention of political opponents. Kenya returned to a multi-party democracy in 2002 and Maathai was overwhelmingly elected to Parliament, also serving in the Ministry for Environmental and Natural Resources. In 2004 Maathai was the first African woman awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, honoring her lifelong commitment to democracy, human rights and environmental conservation. Her example inspires us to action: “It is the people who must save the environment. It is the people who must make their leaders change. And we cannot be intimidated. So we must stand up for what we believe in.”

Illustrated by Chandler O’Leary and printed by Jessica Spring, with hope that our collective climate action will bear fruit for the planet. 176 copies were printed by hand at Springtide Press in Tacoma.

January 29, 2018

Who is your historic heroine?

Early this month we heard our book had moved from the shortlist to join the winners of the 2018 Pacific Northwest Book Awards. The awards, produced by the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, recognize “excellence in writing, publishing, and illustration in the PNBA region.” The first requirement of winning is to, well, write some more. So we wrote an essay about one of our favorite feminist topics: collaboration. PNBA also asked us to suggest our favorite local independent bookstore so celebrations could ensue. Of course we chose King’s Bookstore. Owned by sweet pea flaherty, supported by an awesome staff, beloved by Tacoma, and home of two store cats, the choice was obvious. They have been incredible partners in getting the word out about Dead Feminists well before there was a book to sell.

The celebration takes place February 13 at 7 p.m. This proximity to Valentine’s Day was no mistake. We want to share some love, cookies and keepsakes with our readers, and ask you to share your favorite dead feminist with us. Choose an important woman in your life—a relative or an historic heroine—and create your own Gal-entine to tell us more about her. We’ll create a display of these Gal-entines at King’s, which will stay up through International Women’s Day (March 8), and share these lovely ladies and their stories through social media for folks too far away to attend. Our printer pal Mary Bruno will join us in the festivities, and show some of her work, too.

We are working on a new broadside, to be unveiled at the party, to commemorate the PNBA award. Not quite a Dead Feminist broadside, this will feature hand lettering and hand set type using action words from the book that have helped guide us through a very challenging year.

Many thanks to PNBA and Pacific Northwest independent bookstores and readers. We are truly honored!

Heading East
For folks on the eastern side of our large state, we’ll be in Spokane this February to share our work. We’d love to meet you.

Auntie’s Bookstore
Book signing — print your own letterpress keepsake!
Sunday, February 4, 2018 at 4:00pm
402 W. Main Ave
Spokane, WA 99201

Re-Sisters: Dead Feminists broadsides, steamroller prints and
our individual books and prints
February 6 through March 23, 2018
Bryan Oliver Gallery, Whitworth University
300 W. Hawthorne Rd., Spokane, WA
Opening: February 6, 5-6 p.m., Lied Center
Lecture: February 6, 6 p.m., Lied 102

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October 17, 2017

Estados Divididos

Well, here we are. Our book has been out for a year, and already (for us, anyway) it has transformed from a celebration of women’s accomplishments to a laundry list of battles in need of fighting all over again. The new president has been in power mere months, and already he and his toadies have singled out the most vulnerable among us to be blamed, excluded, punished, even crushed. As artists, we feel our path is clear, our work is cut out for us: the hard part is choosing where to start, upon which injustice to focus first. In the end, the oppressors chose for us, with a seemingly endless succession of outrages against Latino-Americans and Central-American immigrants: the border wall, ICE raids, the DACA repeal, Joe Arpaio’s tent cities and later pardon, the list goes on. And since nobody spoke truth to power like Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, who better to preside over this broadside?

Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?

Frida’s life story is the stuff of legends, and one that many of us know by heart. So rather than travel the well-trodden ground of her accident and illnesses, or her relationships with Diego Rivera and famous men and women of her era, we paid homage to Frida’s artwork instead. (Even our edition number is symbolic of Frida’s body of work: she created approximately 200 paintings in her lifetime.) Estados Divididos is largely inspired by two of Frida’s paintings.

The first is Self Portrait Along the Border Between Mexico and the United States, which she painted in 1932 in Detroit, while Diego worked on a mural commission there. It’s painted on tin, in the Mexican folk tradition of retrablos or devotional paintings. She signed the piece with the name Carmen Rivera, perhaps as a tongue-in-cheek response to the way Americans would have referred to “the wife of the artist.” Interestingly, Diego insisted that she was the real artist in the family, calling her “la pintura más pintor,” using both the feminine and masculine form of the word painter in reference to her prowess (and possibly her androgyny, as well).

The other painting that inspired our broadside is What the Water Gave Me, painted in 1938. This is the first Frida Kahlo painting I (Chandler) ever saw—and it has, in a way, haunted me my entire life, even as my understanding of it has grown and changed as I’ve aged. This painting is largely known as Frida’s autobiography: scenes from her life, both joyful and painful, as well as symbolic figures are combined in a tableau reminiscent of an allegory by Hieronymous Bosch. These scenes float in a tub of bathwater in which she’s soaking her battered, scarred feet: both her bath and her unflinching self-reflection are rituals both soothing and possibly agonizing.

We tried to channel that unflinching gaze of Frida’s when we created this broadside. We’ve highlighted intolerance toward Latino-Americans and Spanish-speaking immigrants before in our Adina De Zavala broadside, but whereas we mostly dealt in metaphor and veiled symbolism then—the gloves are off now. Every time we heard of some new cruelty directed towards Latinx populations, our fury and disgust grew, and we funneled that rage into the design itself. The lower half of the illustration comes right out and says it: faceless ICE agents in red MAGA baseball caps arrest and threaten and round up and brutalize people, while civilians rat out their neighbors, carry tiki torches, turn a blind eye to injustice, or sign executive orders with their tiny hands.

That said, our design is still filled to the brim with symbolism and layers of meaning, starting with the title. Estados Unidos is “United States” in Spanish, but we are anything but united right now—so our title is the Spanish translation of “Divided States.” Also, the bird taking wing is a quetzal—an ancient Mayan symbol of liberty and a more modern emblem of Central and South American culture. And because right now the whole world is upside-down, we’ve turned our paper upside-down, too. The deckle, that natural rag edge from the paper mold that you normally find at the bottom of our broadsides, is now at the top. (We think it gives Frida’s cloak a nice fluttery quality as her portrait presides over the composition.) The folksy, children’s-book illustration style contrasts sharply with the content of the lower half of the design. This is a jab at American exceptionalism and the fairytales we tell ourselves about who counts as “us” and who gets lumped in with “them.” That contrast of cheerful colors and serious subject matter is yet another nod to Frida’s life and work: she has frequently been referred to as “a ribbon around a bomb.”

The two separate color schemes represent two worlds: Mexico and what Frida called “Gringolandia,” peace and war, heaven and hell, tolerance and bigotry, freedom and captivity, friend and foe. Like a flag—or a war zone—the two full-bleed color fields are sharply bifurcated by a no-man’s-land of Whiteness, representing the border wall of white supremacy that has long since been erected in America. Yet if you follow Frida’s words and footprints, starting in the trouble below and heading upward, you’ll find a way through—a path across the divide.

In recognition of this challenging duality, we are donating a portion of our proceeds to two different nonprofit organizations. One is Border Angels, a San Diego-based organization that provides free bilingual immigration services and consultations, as well as migrant and day-laborer aid and outreach—including border rescue stations and desert water drops. The other donation supports Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, a Seattle-Tacoma-based advocacy group that provides legal assistance to community members facing deportation. This is our second donation to NWIRP, acknowledging the very important and difficult work they tackle, especially in our hometown of Tacoma, at the Northwest Detention Center.

Purchase your copy in the shop!

Estados Divididos: No. 26 in the Dead Feminists series
Edition size: 200
Poster size: 10 x 18 inches

Printed on an antique Vandercook Universal One press, on archival, 100% rag (cotton) paper. Each piece is numbered and signed by both artists.

Colophon reads:
Frida Kahlo (1907 – 1954) was born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón in Coyoacán, Mexico. Growing up in La Casa Azul, Frida would endure lifelong pain due to polio, a near-fatal streetcar accident, and more than 30 surgeries, including foot amputation. She began painting to ease the pain and combat the boredom of bed rest, often creating self portraits. Incorporating symbolism from her own life as well as Mexican popular culture, Frida declared: “I paint my own reality.” She was fearless in depicting the female form and experience, including pregnancy and miscarriage, and her tumultuous relationship with muralist Diego Rivera. Frida and Diego had a shared mexicanidad, an identity born of Mexico’s indigenous cultures and its colonial past, and a common dream of a liberated socialist country. After her wedding to Diego, Frida took to wearing the Tehuana style of dress, including long skirts, embroidered blouses and floral headpieces. Traveling with Diego as he took commissions in the United States, Frida was miserable in “Gringolandia.” Her self portrait on the border between the two countries contrasts belching smokestacks with agrarian themes, juxtaposing electrical wires in America with plant roots in Mexico. One of the most important 20th century artists, Frida’s paintings confront those issues that divide us more than 60 years after her death, including gender and cultural identity, feminism, politics and power.

Illustrated by Chandler O’Leary and printed by Jessica Spring in opposition to racism, injustice, intolerance and walls of hate.

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October 13, 2016

Song of Aloha

When we wrote and illustrated our new book, Dead Feminists: Historical Heroines in Living Color, it was important both to us and the publisher that we fill the pages with new content, rather than simply rehash the story of our previous broadsides. So it came to us that one great way to do that would be to have a new broadside appear in the book and in the world simultaneously. One of the biggest challenges of doing this (other than having to print the broadside ahead of publication and then keep the secret for months) was choosing who to feature, considering the fact that we’d be introducing the broadside to a brand new and much larger audience. We wanted to feature a woman who touched the world, and who reflected the world we had become.

We live in a global society, with different cultures mingling—and at times clashing—with a regularity we now take for granted. It is easy to forget the imperialist origins of globalization, where Western cultures sought to dominate and even extinguish the societies they encountered. Colonization of the Indigenous world has had far-reaching effects on both people and the environment, the consequences of which we are only beginning to understand. And who better to understand the ripple effects of colonialism than the queen of a colonized nation?

“E onipai’a . . . i ka ‘imi na’auao.” (“Be steadfast in the seeking of knowledge.”)
— Queen Lili’uokalani

Queen Lili’uokalani was the last monarch—and only queen regnant—of the Kingdom of Hawai’i. Raised by traditional Hawaiian custom and a resident of a post-colonial country, she was fluent in the ways of both Hawaiian and Western cultures. Her reign was sadly brief—thanks to powerful foreign interests who refused to share the nation they had claimed for their own. Yet she devoted much of her life to preserving traditional art forms and recording them for others to study. Hers was the middle road—the road of survival.

For Indigenous women like Queen Lili’uokalani, there is no going back to life before Euro-American contact. Yet Lili’uokalani led a life that included and celebrated both the culture of her birth and the one imposed upon her later in life. Her example of sharing both traditions with future generations helps us all create a path forward. We are especially thankful to Alison Milham, a Hawaiian book artist who has extensively researched the Queen and who helped us fine tune our message.

Jessica and I have our own paths to walk when it comes to creating each new broadside in our series. In my case, I’m always eager to explore different historical eras and design styles. And Jessica is constantly looking to push the envelope of what’s possible with letterpress printing—she loves to experiment with different techniques, like the split-fountain inking on our Nightsong broadside, or the crazy metallics of Focal Point, or the large floods and knocked-out shapes of Title Nine Iron. This time we wanted to create a tropical rainbow, but rather than printing every letter in ROYGBIV separately, we puzzled out how to create an illusion of a full-color design with translucent, overlapping colors, which Jessica would print in just four passes on press.

Jessica’s job was extra tricky, since the different plates had to line up perfectly to make the illusion work. But my end of the process was confusing, too: since I do the original drawing in black and separate the colors by hand, I had to keep checking and re-checking to make sure I didn’t assign some blob of color on the design to the wrong plate.

Generally speaking, we usually print our colors from lightest to darkest. So this time we started with a deep saffron yellow—the color of royalty in the Kingdom of Hawai’i, and one symbolic of Queen Lili’uokalani’s reign.

Then we overlaid a hot-hot pink on top of the yellow, one that stood in both for tropical flowers and the blazing color of the sun setting on Hawai’i’s Indigenous rulers. Wherever the pink overlapped the gold, the ink mixed to create a fiery orange.

Next came a pass of cerulean blue. This part might seem confusing, because you can’t actually see any blue in the finished piece (though you can see it on press on the photo of Jessica above), but it’s an essential ingredient of our color scheme. Wherever the blue overlaid yellow, we got green. Where it hit that hot pink, a royal purple resulted. And where it touched any orange areas that resulted from the previous pass, a russet brown appeared.

Finally, we were ready for our last color, a rich black (actually, Jessica ran that last pass twice—the double hit of black made the ink nice and opaque) that brought everything together into harmony:

Our 24th broadside, Song of Aloha, depicts the lush flora and unique fauna of Hawai’i. Plumeria and hibiscus bloom, while leaves and fronds stand in silhouette in homage to traditional Hawaiian quilt motifs. At the center of the design is Queen Lili’uokalani herself, wearing a sash in royal colors, her signature brooch, a necklace of shells (from the extinct species Carelia dolei) and a Kamehameha butterfly in her hair. As a symbol of the vanished Hawaiian monarchy, every bird pictured is an extinct Hawaiian species—including the greater koa finch, the Hawai’i mamo, the Lana’i hookbill, the Hawaiian crow, and several species of endemic honeycreeper that now only exist as museum specimens.

Oh, and hidden in the design are ‘Iolani Palace and a line of music from Lili’uokalani’s famous composition, “Aloha ‘Oe.”

This piece marks the inauguration of the Dead Feminists Fund, to which a portion of our proceeds (and those of our new book!) will be donated. In honor of the power of women’s work, the Fund supports nonprofits that empower girls and women to create change in their own communities.

Song of Aloha: No. 24 in the Dead Feminists series
Edition size: 192 prints
Poster size: 10 x 18 inches

Printed on an antique Vandercook Universal One press, on archival, 100% rag (cotton) paper. Each piece is numbered and signed by both artists.

Colophon reads:
Lili’uokalani (1838 – 1917) was the last monarch and only queen regnant of the Kingdom of Hawai’i. Born into the royal family, she ascended the throne in 1891 via traditional election after the death of her brother. She reigned for less than two years, until Sanford B. Dole—backed by American business interests and the Marines—deposed her and dismantled the monarchy. Dole placed Lili’uokalani under house arrest and despite her formal letters of protest, Hawai’i was annexed by the United States in 1898 without due constitutional process.

Queen Lili’uokalani lived with one foot planted in each culture, embracing Victorian dress and Western mannerisms while working tirelessly to preserve traditional Hawaiian art forms. A prolific singer, musician and composer, her best known song was “Aloha ‘Oe” (“Farewell to Thee”), written in both Hawaiian and English.

Illustrated by Chandler O’Leary and printed by Jessica Spring, knowing that the spirit of aloha can honor what we’ve lost and save what remains.

UPDATE: poster is sold out. Reproduction postcards available in the shop!

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October 12, 2016

From print to page

Earlier we shared some sneak peeks of the chapter spreads, but now that our book is out we can tell you a bit more about how the book is structured.

Of course, we go into detail about the process and stories behind each of our broadsides, including a “director’s cut” of each print.

The great thing about the book format, though, is the ability to expand beyond the short colophons we include on each broadside. So each chapter goes in-depth about the women we featured and the social issues we highlighted with each broadside. Each story is anchored with archival photos and vintage ephemera to paint a more complete picture of these 27 women and their lives.

To tie everything together and reinforce our letterpress roots, the pages are peppered with vintage hand-set metal and wood cuts from Jessica’s incredible collection. Each one appears like an easter egg, linking our content to our process and bringing the past to life in the present.

Major thanks to our amazing editorial and marketing team at Sasquatch Books—every member of which is a fellow woman—for getting us to this point, and for continuing to support the Dead Feminists Fund through a portion of every book sale. And last but not least, thank you for supporting our series and our book. We hope that reading the book will be as rewarding for you as it was for us to write it.

See you tomorrow with more information about our 24th broadside!

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October 6, 2016

Get gussied up

Tuesday is the day! Our book will be released worldwide on October 11, and we’re celebrating with a costume party! This is where you can be the first to get your hands on the book—and extra worth the effort if you want to see Jessica and me wearing ridiculous wigs. We don’t want to be the only ones celebrating Halloween early, so come on down and join the party. We’ll have prizes for the best outfits, Dead Feminists cake and punch, and a printing press ready to make your own keepsake. We’d love to sign a book for you, too. If you’re looking for costume ideas, you might dress up as one of the ladies in our book…

…or you might choose another favorite historical heroine, or a beloved fictional character, or even an historic feminist dude! Anything goes, and we can’t wait to see what you come up with. Here’s the skinny on the event:

Official Book Release Costume Party
Tuesday, October 11, 7 pm
Hosted by King’s Books
218 St. Helens Avenue, Tacoma, WA
Event is free, all ages welcome; more info here
Come in costume, dressed as your favorite historical feminist!

In addition to finally sharing the book with you next week, we also wanted the chance to share some of our original artwork. So for the past two years we’ve been planning a big retrospective exhibit with the 23Sandy Gallery in Portland, OR. Laura Russell, the owner and curator of the gallery, has been a major supporter of our series since the beginning—and this week it was no different, as she jumped right in and helped us install our artwork in her space!

The show features 10 original letterpress broadsides from our series, two mini-broadsides, original process materials, plus vintage ephemera from our book. This is the first time we’ve done a show like this, and 23Sandy is the only place you’ll still find some of our older, out-of-print broadsides available for sale.

The exhibit also includes our 24th and newest broadside, but since she comes out on October 11, alongside the book, we have her hidden under a black veil for now. But you can see her—and all the other artwork—unveiled at our reception and book signing later this month. Here are the details:

Make-Ready: Dead Feminists from Print to Page
A Dead Feminists retrospective exhibit
on display through October 29

Reception & book signing Saturday, October 22
4 to 6 pm, free!
23Sandy Gallery
623 NE 23rd Ave, Portland, OR

If you can’t make it to Portland, you can also learn more about the exhibit and view an online catalog on the 23Sandy website.

Make-Ready is just one of many different exhibits in the works this fall—we’ve got the Dead Feminists coming to galleries around the country for both solo and group shows. We’ll be sharing more info here on the blog soon, but as always, you can find all our events, shows, book signings and talks listed on our events page.

See you Tuesday—in costume!

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September 27, 2016

Calls to action

One of the biggest challenges of turning the Dead Feminists into a book was figuring out a way to tie all our broadsides together in a way that was engaging for the reader. Aside from the size and format of each broadside, our prints had little in common with one another. Our feminists were a diverse group without much of an underlying thread—even the style of illustration was different for each one.

Jessica came up with the solution: using action verbs to tell our story. After all, our aim with the series was to use the literal and figurative power of the press to change the world around us. The women we featured had also created change—they were active, not passive. So we divided our 24 feminists among eight action words, choosing for each chapter a trio of women who shared qualities or deeds with that particular verb. And since we’re so close to the release of the book (just two weeks!), we thought we’d share a few of those words with you.

The best part for me, of course, was being able to make more hand-lettered illustrations! Each chapter’s verb is done in a different style, and elements of that illustration are carried throughout the rest of the chapter.

Of course, shoe-horning each feminist into one of the eight action themes was sometimes a convoluted business, but we got there in the end. We’re super pleased with how it all turned out—and hopeful that it might inspire more women and girls to take the lead with some action of their own.

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September 20, 2016

In living color

Our book is not the only thing coming out on October 11—we’ll also be releasing our 24th broadside. We can’t spill the coffee beans yet, but here’s a step-by-step glimpse of the process. As you can see, there were a lot of steps involved, from detailed illustration to some tricky acrobatics on press. We think the finished product will be well worth the wait!

September 7, 2016

Cover to cover (to cover)

It’s hard to believe we’re only five weeks out from the release of our book! A few advance reader copies are making their way around to media outlets already, and several people have asked us how we came up with the cover design. Since getting to the finished cover was quite a process, we thought we’d show you a bit of the winding path that got us here.

When Sasquatch Books first signed us as authors, they offered us the chance to design, illustrate and hand-letter the cover. Needless to say we jumped at it. But designing a book cover can be very different than designing other things—the stakes are higher, for one thing. In some ways, it’s more of a science than an art: a good cover can have a lot of sway in terms of book sales, so it has to be as eye-catching, informative and readable as possible. So to make sure we got it right, it was a hugely collaborative process—not just between Jessica and me, but also with the publisher, the art director, our editors, the sales team, and lots of other people we never even met in person.

Jessica and I started brainstorming and sketching cover ideas way back in November of last year; above are a few of the concepts we sent along. We had a lot of feedback that large, legible type was key, so that was a good starting point. We also had to be really careful about the hierarchy of type. We had to make sure “Feminists” caught the eye first, followed by “Dead,” then the subhead, then the byline, etc. Later, when we got the happy news that Jill Lepore would be writing the foreword to our book, that added another level to our type hierarchy. In addition to all of this, we wanted to give the Sasquatch team plenty of options, so we tried to make each concept distinct from the others. Right away the clear favorite was the one in the lower right corner, so that was the concept we took to the next level.

Then came a long parade of versions in color. We worked closely with Sasquatch’s art director and lead designer, Anna Goldstein, to try to catch that elusive unicorn that is a cover that works. I’d mock something up and send it to Anna; she’d mock something else up and send it back to us; rinse and repeat. Each time it felt like we were getting closer, but every time it felt like something subtle was missing. So we made a million little tweaks, to color, to lettering, to texture, to contrast, to composition, to kerning, etc. Each time one of us would have what seemed like a great idea, and each time the result was lacking somehow. I don’t even remember how long we stayed in this holding pattern. (Normally I keep all the iterations of a design carefully numbered in chronological order, but at some point I just lost track. I gave up and labeled that file “VERSION WHATEVER.” It makes me laugh every time I see it.) Everybody was frustrated: the elusive unicorn had transformed into the Holy Grail.

And then I think we all finally conceded that small tweaks were never going to get us there. We needed something to change in a big way, and we needed to scrap much of the work we’d done thus far. This is a really hard thing to admit to oneself—that maybe one’s brilliant idea wasn’t so brilliant after all. But the finished product is more important than anybody’s ego, and no matter how good a kernal of an idea might be, it’s not worth bringing down the whole design over it.

So we quite literally went back to the drawing board. I knocked together a few more pencil sketches, and we asked the whole team again what elements they thought were essential. A lot of people responded to the little cameo portraits of the various historical figures, so we came up with the idea to use them as more of an overall pattern (that’s the green cover on the left, above). Then our editors gave us the feedback that maybe the cover should be more like the style of our broadsides, with bold lettering in many different styles. Anna added the suggestion of making those cameo portraits more of a faint pattern than a major focal point, and then the lightbulb seemed to go on at last. That peach version in the center, I think, was what I put together next. Jessica and I could see that the most recent advice was on the right track, but we were still worried it wouldn’t stand out when seen on a display shelf with a hundred other books. Our editor asked us if we had any ideas for how to make it pop, and in wild desperation I fished out one of our earliest pencil sketches (above), the one with the face in silhouette, and gave it another look. What didn’t seem to work in sketch form suddenly felt like the missing ingredient when paired with the cameo pattern and the bold lettering. We sent a version back to Anna, and she gave it that antique texture and the gold-grey-and-teal color scheme you see here. And that was it—it was like she’d flipped a switch, and voilà: finished cover.

Over the course of eight years of printing our broadsides, Jessica and I had grown accustomed to just doing whatever we want in terms of design and content. With small editions to print, and nobody to please but ourselves, the stakes were low—and there was always plenty of room for experimentation. This book has been an entirely different animal, and I think designing the cover has been a perfect metaphor for the whole process. Writing a 40,000-word manuscript about history and feminism was never something we thought we could do, but with the incredible help of our editors, we got there. Likewise, designing the container for that content was a massive group effort—so major props and big thanks to Anna for sticking with us. Getting to the finish line required stepping way beyond our comfort zone—and more importantly, it took the whole team. We couldn’t have done it alone, and that’s a good thing, because both book and cover are the better for it.

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February 22, 2016

Age Before Beauty

When it came time for us to find our next Dead Feminist, our thoughts turned to our own mirrors. Like every woman in our pop-culture-driven world, Jessica and I are bombarded with imagery and messages that urge us to scrutinize and criticize our own appearance. Unsurprisingly, we are taught to find ourselves lacking in one way or many, and to compare ourselves with an impossible ideal.

We were a little surprised to find courage and consolation in Ancient Greece, where they were all about the impossible ideal. Yet if you sift through the lofty architectural theory, stylized scenes and tales of the immortals, you’ll find a honey-tongued poet who speaks the plain truth: Sappho.

To be human is to grow old.

Our 23rd broadside, Age Before Beauty, reaches further back in time than we ever have before—to the 6th century BCE. As you can clearly see, the illustration is styled after the designs and motifs of ancient Greek pottery, right down to the amphora handles.

Yet even though she lived and worked thousands of years ago, Sappho’s words ring true as if they were written yesterday. We especially loved her self-reflection in the poem we chose, and the way she managed to view her aging body with kindness. It brought to mind, for me, an image of dual goddesses who are really two faces of the same woman—like the Maiden and Crone archetypes so common in other pre-Christian cultures.

Like the art of ancient Greece, the illustration is chock full of allegorical imagery. For instance, young Sappho carries Aphrodite’s mirror, while Athena’s wise owl looks over her aged self. Both figures play a seven-stringed lyre: Sappho was a lyrical poet, which means her poetry was designed to be performed to music. (Incidentally, some scholars also credit Sappho with the invention of the plectrum, a tool similar to a guitar pick that was used to pluck the lyre’s strings.) Finally, the band of dancing deer at the base references Josephine Balmer’s recent translation of Sappho’s Old Age Poem.

Compared to our previous broadsides, the composition and color scheme of this piece are fairly simple. The printing, on the other hand, was not. All those curves made it hard to line up the plates, and we had huge floods of color paired with delicate lines and text. To help her with the ink coverage and add just a tiny bit more pop to the color, Jessica ran the vase shape in a run of subtle cream first.

The cream pass helped with the super-tricky registration of the black and terracotta, as well.

All that fiddly and difficult technical stuff made the finished product that much sweeter. We’re pleased as punch about the results—we hope you will be, too.

To help all women and girls see themselves in a more positive light, we are donating a portion of our proceeds to About Face. Founded in 1995, About Face works to improve girls’ and women’s self-esteem and body image by helping them understand and resist harmful media messages.

Update: Sold out. Reproduction postcard is now available.

Age Before Beauty: No. 23 in the Dead Feminists series
Edition size: 158 prints
Poster size: 10 x 18 inches

Printed on an antique Vandercook Universal One press, on archival, 100% rag (cotton) paper. Each piece is numbered and signed by both artists.

Colophon reads:
Sappho (c. 630 – 570 BCE) is the only woman counted among the Nine Lyric Poets revered in ancient Greek culture. Plato called her “the tenth muse,” but all that remains of her work is a handful of fragments. This quote is an excerpt from Fragment 58, a mysterious Old Age Poem that can be read either as a lament or a celebration of mortality. Illustrated by Chandler O’Leary and printed by Jessica Spring, in hopes that all women might see themselves both with Aphrodite’s gaze and Athena’s wisdom.