Summer in the Bookshop 

Summer has finally arrived. For the month of July and August, join us in the Carpenter Center Bookshop for lunchtime workshops. Through a series of conversations and hands-on activities, we’ll learn about publishing projects and printed material. The Carpenter Center’s Bookshop is a collaboration with Motto Books. We carry hundreds small press contemporary art books, magazines, and journals, and international publications. 

Don’t miss our other Carpenter Center summer programs including the Building Tours and Summer Summits. 

Art and the Alps  
Thursday, July 5, 12–1 pm

Jelena Martinovic, a London-based writer, scholar and educator, discusses her artist book Bold Climbers, published by Cordyceps Press in 2016. Climbers today and in the past have perceived the mountains as a theatre of aesthetic exploration and scientific experimentation. In this publication, artists and writers meet, cross, and follow trails of mythology, medical geography, narrative and cinema. Martinovic reflects on how notions of the sublime turned into embodied experiences, while also discuss her publishing project in relation to historical materials.

In collaboration with SwissNex.

Lavender
Friday, July 13, 12–1 pm

Learn how to make a handmade lavender sachet from the flowers on the Carpenter Center terrace. We’ll also read selections of poetry and prose inspired by the natural healing properties of lavender, as well as discuss Le Corbusier’s relationship to nature in his architecture, including our own building. Participants will be instructed through the creation process, and should bring a piece of soft fabric approximately 5 x 10 inches in size.

Limited space. RSVP to ccva@fas.harvard.edu

A Brief History of Print and Feminism
Fri, Aug 24, 12–1 pm

Jessica Caponigro will discuss topics related to the history of print media, including how the patriarchy weaponized the early printing press, how women kept the medium alive in the United States, and how independent publishing might be our only hope. We’ll look at images as well as publications from our Bookshop.

Jelena Martinovic

Jelena Martinovic is Research Fellow at UCL Institute of Advanced Studies/Health Humanities Centre London. Prior that that, she has been Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Harvard University, Department of the History of Science (2016-2017) and Senior Researcher at HEAD-Geneva (project ‘mind control’). Her work has been funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, Société académique vaudoise, UNIL-CHUV, HEAD-Geneva, Ville de Lausanne, Ville de Genève, and Pro Helvetia. She has taught at HEAD-Geneva, University of Lausanne, and University of Art and Industrial Design Linz; and was a participant in SOMA Summer, Mexico City, and Bibliothèque Kandinsky Summer University, Centre Georges Pompidou Paris. Over the past years, she has organised conferences and curated exhibitions at the intersection of art and science. Most recently, she has organised a scientific exchange on the material history of psychotropic substances (Institute for the History of Medicine University Berne, together with Dr. Beat Bächi). Her area of specialism is the sciences of the mind in the 19th and 20th century. Jelena’s first book, on the history of death and psychiatry, has been published in French by MetisPresses in Geneva (2017). Jelena’s second book project, funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, deals with the history of mescaline experiments in the twentieth century. She has edited and published Bold Climbers as a result of her teaching at Work.Master Contemporary Artistic Practices, HEAD-Geneva.

Jessica Caponigro

Jessica Caponigro blends egalitarian concepts with ritual, exploring ideas of restriction through repetition, reproduction, and accessibility. Before its dissolution, she was a founding member of the non-anonymous W.I.T.C.H. Chicago, as well as the feminist art collective Tracers. She frequently facilitates workshops and speaks on panels, recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the University of Kentucky, Oberlin College, and NYU Florence. Her writing has been published on the Women's Museum of California website, American Fly Trap No. 1: The Post Truth Issue, the Mid America Print Council Journal, and Chicago Artist Writers. She currently lives and works in Boston, where she operates Snake Hair Press, an independent publisher of zines, multiples, and artist books.