Local History Guild: Boundless Special Collections and the Book as Art

Local History Guild: The World of Textiles in the 1800s

Tuesday, December 8th 5:30 PM on Zoom

Local History Guild is the NBWM’s quarterly Zoom program, an informal discussion about art, history, science and culture related to the museum’s mission, collection, and the surrounding region. In this edition of the program, we will be joined by experts on the book as art from the perspectives of contemporary art, special collections, and the archive. These book professionals will offer unique insight into their institutional collections and the state of this important and timely area of study. Accompanying the current exhibition Boundless: The Book as Art, we hope this program will spark curiosity and conversation about the history, materiality, and artistry of books.

John J. Garcia is Director of Scholarly Programs and Partnerships at the American Antiquarian Society, where he oversees the Program in the History of the Book in American Culture and the Center for Historic American Visual Culture. He has published widely on early American print culture in journals such as New England Quarterly, Book History, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, and Early American Studies. He is a Senior Fellow with the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography and is on the teaching faculty at UCLA’s California Rare Book School.

Angela DiVeglia is an artist, urban gardener, writer, curator and the instruction and outreach librarian, special collections in Fleet Library. Her work centers around visual and immersive research, social movement documentation, public history, post-industrial landscapes, radical cartography and the transformative power of community archives. Before joining the staff at RISD, DiVeglia served as research and outreach librarian for special collections at Providence Public Library, where she helped create the RI LGBTQ+ Community Archive; co-created PPL’s free community archives consulting program for artists, organizers and grassroots organizations; planned and taught classes for children, teens, college students and adults; curated exhibitions; and ran the library’s annual research fellowship for artists. DiVeglia is a founding member of the Papercut Zine Library in Cambridge, MA and remains a strong proponent of alternative and self-publishing. She currently serves on the Board of Dirt Palace Public Projects, the nonprofit umbrella for the Dirt Palace feminist artist-run space that offers numerous residency and exhibition programs in Providence.

John J. Garcia is Director of Scholarly Programs and Partnerships at the American Antiquarian Society, where he oversees the Program in the History of the Book in American Culture and the Center for Historic American Visual Culture. He has published widely on early American print culture in journals such as New England Quarterly, Book History, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, and Early American Studies. He is a Senior Fellow with the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography and is on the teaching faculty at UCLA’s California Rare Book School.