The Gateway Project will present “GlassBook Project: Provisions” a collaborative project by artists Nick Kline & Adrienne Wheeler with Endless Editions, Samantha Boardman and Rutgers University-Newark Book Arts Class from June 4 – August 14, 2015. The project will open with a reception Thursday, June 4, 6 – 9 pm at The Gateway Project Gallery, 2 Gateway Center, Newark, NJ.

Provisions is an exhibition of artist books inspired by the recordings of the Krueger-Scott African-American Oral History Collection, consisting of over 200 audio cassette recordings of interviews with African-American residents of Newark, NJ who migrated to the city between 1910 and 1970 during the Great Migration.  Seven of these interviews are subjects for the collaborative artworks collected here, which seek to keep the interviewees’ voices alive for a new generation through a contemporary context. The title of the collection – Provisions – is inspired by descriptions of the boxes and bags used by individuals to carry food on their long journeys northward – a custom developed in response to “Jim Crow” laws that barred African-Americans from most public accommodations and restaurants.

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The conceptual starting point for Provisions is the portrait series, Elizabeth (2015), by GlassBook Project Founder and Artist Nick Kline and Artist-in-Residence Adrienne Wheeler, whose mother migrated from the South during the Great Migration, and whose father was from a long-time Northern family. Working with Kline to re-photograph and re-focus the images from her parents’ wedding album, Wheeler examines a personal history through the focal point of her mother, the bride. Following the original sequence and visual narrative of the wedding album, Kline and Wheeler’s series is projected as a large-scale slideshow that alternates between entire images and carefully cropped details such as hand gestures, light fixtures, textures of church pews, and graphic elements of the bride’s dress. The new photographs, enhanced by photographically isolating details, help to reveal Wheeler’s mother’s forward-moving identity.
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Similarly, each of the artist books on display—created by students of Kline’s Book Arts class at Rutgers University-Newark—is an abstract, conceptual portrait based on specific details drawn from the interviews. As part of a class assignment, students participating in the project created one-of-a-kind, interactive sculptures made of glass in book form pioneered by Kline’s GlassBook Project. Using the same concepts and narratives of the glass books, NYC/NJ-based publishers Endless Editions created a limited edition, Risograph-printed publication on paper. Kline, Wheeler, and Endless Editions also worked together to produce a publication that transforms the Krueger-Scott questionnaire originally used to conduct the oral history interviews. Both celebrating this important historical document, a collaboration created by Catherine Lenix-Hooker with renowned historians Giles R. Wright II, the late Professor Clement Alexander Price and the collective wisdom of volunteers from Bethany Baptist Church, and re-framing it in a contemporary context, the new document uses colorful inks to evoke an informal and less scientifically objectifying conversation.

Other works in the exhibition include a glass reproduction of the Wheeler family album; a Risograph publishing workshop/salon; and digitizing historic photographs from the City of Newark Municipal Archive.

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