A Meditation on Plagues

The students in Antoinette LaFarge’s fall 2013 Design for Print class (Art 106c) were challenged to create a small book in the chapbook tradition as a personal meditation on the subject of plagues. The underlying thought was to create a collection in honor of International AIDS Day, addressing this important disease obliquely through the ancient trope of the plague. At the end of the course, they had an exhibition of their books hosted by Langson Library, thanks to Special Collections librarian Steve MacLeod.

The exhibition, entitled A Meditation on Plagues, opened on Dec. 11, 2013. Most of the students in this class had never made a book before or worked with print design software, but they approached the project with enthusiasm and flair, bringing to bear their competencies in related media such as photography and drawing. They took up a wide range of subjects, from historical plagues like syphilis and leprosy to plague-like outbreaks of mass hysteria. They experimented with the form of the book, creating accordion books and foldout books in addition to western codex-style booklets, looking in each case for a physical structure that would complement their book’s theme—like the fold-up book about AIDS that is structured like a quilt in honor of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, or the one whose transparent images of bacilli evoke microscope slides.

The texts are mostly factual, but there are instances of fiction and poetry as well. Sometimes funny, sometimes grim—but never despairing—these thoughtful and visually sophisticated books illuminate our long history of cohabitation with plague organisms.

For more on these projects, see this post.

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Exhibiting Artists

Martha Han

Olivia Yu

Patrick Magno

Asthrea Camilon

Lindsey Chu

Ericka Nowell

Jesus Zerpa

Lauren Fong

Jennifer Betonio

Diana Chang

Veronica Li

Tiffany Wang

Fengling Zhou

Jennifer Betonio

Diana Chang

Linny Tran

Veronica Li

Mary Painter

Barbara Presley

Patty Lin