One tip for budding calligraphers: Don’t go into it just to improve your handwriting.
That was one of the messages floating through the halls of the Newberry Library on Saturday as members of the Chicago Calligraphy Collective packed the lobby for the start of “Exploration 2001,” their annual exhibition.
Of course, one can use the art form simply to address envelopes and invitations. But as Newberry staffers pointed out, “much of the best calligraphy can be appreciated without knowing what the actual words say.”
With its vivid colors, gestural energy and often abstract nature, modern calligraphy has come a long way since the days of cloistered monks working away on illustrated manuscripts.
To many, the art is seen as a soothing antidote to such impersonal forms of communication as voice mail, Internet messages and slimy sheets of fax paper. Using new materials and often moving beyond legibility, its disciples have been, well, pushing the envelope, looking for fresh ways to express emotions from love to grief.
The Newberry exhibition could be called the Oscars of Chicago calligraphy. It is the high point of the year for a group that in 2001, as its program proclaimed, is “Celebrating 25 years of Promoting Calligraphy in the Chicago area.”
But for the 300 calligraphers of many talents and styles who attended, the day was more of a joint celebration of a flourishing art form than a chance to go home and letter, “I’m No. 1!”
Along with the annual juried show, which this year accepted 67 works for exhibition, the collective sponsors monthly workshops on such subjects as collage, watercolor flowers, painted backgrounds, traditional gilding, experimental lettering, papermaking and bookmaking. These are arts, it appears, that once were lost–and now are found.
“To some degree, it’s been a reaction against mechanization,” said the Newberry Library’s curator for the history of printing, Paul Gehl.
Gehl gave out the day’s major prize–a $1,500 award to veteran calligrapher Robert Borja of Hyde Park for his best-in-show book, “Abraham Lincoln Thought.”
“It started with type, which was becoming less beautiful, with photo-typesetting. People also became interested in calligraphy because, with typewriters and computers, they didn’t have enough beautiful handwriting around them.”
The popularity of the art form has spawned several hundred pen-in-hand groups across the country, including Oklahoma’s Sooner Scribes, Ohio’s Guild of the Golden Quill, Montana’s Big Sky Scribes, Georgia’s Friends of the Alphabet and the Write-On Calligraphers in Edmonds, Wash.
“These days, people seem to want to save handwriting,” Gehl said. “They are kind of missionary-like in that way.”
There did seem to be a zealous buzz Saturday as the crowd moved past tables of sweets and shortbread into the gallery. The exhibits are open to the public, at 60 W. Walton St., until March 3.
As exhibit chairman Jim Chin noted, the show stays away from the commercial output of the city’s 50 or so professional calligraphers, most of them employed by university presses, fine-book publishers and religious institutions.
What jurors looked for, suggested jury foreman Anne Binder, are novel ways in which “text becomes image.”
What was notable this year, others reported, was the variety of new materials showing up in works, from copper wire to bits of glass, gold leaf, silver and carved stone. Words–once the staple of the form–go off in all directions, offering a sense of intense emotion rather than specific, legible meanings. And that’s the appeal.
Borja’s book, bound in blue chamois with snatches of speeches, letters and conversations, along with detailed portraits of Lincoln redrawn from old photographs, “will fit right in” when it is purchased for the library’s permanent collection, Gehl said.
“I think,” Gehl added, as he gave out the prize, “that I have the best job in town.”
