Beautiful Browns

BEAUTIFUL BROWNS

With handmade papers dyed with persimmon juice, ash, iron oxide, and indigo, Tia Blassingame, the artist, writer, and printer who created this series, intentionally uses shades of brown in the hope of engaging "the reader/viewer in a relationship with the book, a conversation on race." In a 2020 interview, she explains: 

Since I was a kid, I’ve been struck by how art teachers, my classmates, artists would refer to the color brown as ugly or unattractive, undesirable. I couldn’t help but look at my own hands and arms, and know they were wrong. In grad school, art school, those same flippant comments, dismissal of brown continued. I want to say it was without self-awareness, but I doubt it.

Blassingame is the founder of the Book/Print Artist/Scholar of Color Collective, which brings Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) book artists, papermakers, curators, letterpress printers, printmakers into conversation and collaboration with scholars of Book History and Print Culture to build community and support systems.

— Written by Clara Drummond (Special Collections) 

Tia Blassingame  
Black: A Handbook  
New Haven, Connecticut : Primrose Press, 2022 
Copy 24 of 40 
Purchased with funds from the Mary Ann O'Brian Malkin Endowment for Rare Books and Manuscripts, 2023