Bea Nettles: 28 Days: A Deck of Cards
Return to Exhibition 28 Days: A Deck of Cards 2nd edition Urbana, IL: Inky Press Productions, 2000 Edition of 1,000 Deck of cards with offset lithographs Private collection The cards in 28 Days illustrate a typical menstrual cycle through stark and sometimes humorous images. Created the year her daughter turned thirteen years old, the piece was Nettles’s attempt to “open a discussion of [this] seldom mentioned aspect of a woman’s life.”As with many of her works, the images draw on natural elements, portray the biblical character Eve, and include self-portraits.
Bea Nettles: Moon Sisters
Return to Exhibition The Moon Sisters With a poem by Grace Nettles (American, 1919–2007) [Urbana, IL]: self-published, 1990 Booklet Private collection As Nettles’s daughter, Rachel, neared puberty, Nettles began to explore the topic of menstrual cycles. She confronted the subject directly in several works, including this small booklet. The images in it depict Rachel, Nettles herself, and Nettles’s mother, whose respective ages at the time corresponded to the three parts of menstrual life: menarche (the onset of menstruation), menstruation, and menopause. The moon frequently appeared as a
Bea Nettles: Events in the Water
Return to Exhibition Events in the Water [Philadelphia]: self-published, 1973 Edition of 100 Bound volume with offset lithographs and vinyl cover George Eastman Museum, Richard and Ronay Menschel Library Nettles originally assembled each of her snapshot sequences into three-ring binders or notebooks, but in 1973, she began to produce limited-edition books using the commercial printing process of offset lithography. Nettles learned how to create halftone negatives for each image and had the pages printed by a printer in Philadelphia. She then bound each copy by hand and stitched a vinyl
ONLINE—JOAN OF ARC
Virtual Dryden Theatre | Streaming Online. Following up his 2017 film Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc, director Bruno Dumont covers the final two years of Joan’s life in this film, following her defeat, capture, and trial.
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Bea Nettles: Dream Pages
Return to Exhibition Dream Pages [Rochester, NY]: self-published, 1975 Printed at Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY Edition of 100 Bound volume with offset lithographs, screen prints, and vinyl cover George Eastman Museum, purchase with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts Dreams and dreamlike imagery serve as the basis for many of Nettles’s works. Nettles recorded her dreams in a dream journal for many years. To make Dream Pages, she selected the most vivid descriptions from her journal, then paired them with illustrations. Many of the dreams involve swimming, swinging, or
Bea Nettles: Events in the Sky
Return to Exhibition Events in the Sky Philadelphia: self-published, 1973 Edition of 100 Bound volume with offset lithographs and vinyl cover George Eastman Museum, Richard and Ronay Menschel Library, purchase
Bea Nettles: Fate, Being, & Necessity
Return to Exhibition Fate, Being, & Necessity 2008 Bound volume with inkjet prints and artist papers George Eastman Museum, Richard and Ronay Menschel Library During a residency in Hafnarfjörður, Iceland, in 2007, Nettles created several books based on Norse mythology. This book focuses on the three fates who rule the destiny of gods and humans alike—Urðr (the past), Verðandi (the present), and Skuld (the future).
Bea Nettles: Hawk/Dove
Return to Exhibition Hawk/Dove 2013 Edition of seven numbered and three unnumbered books Bound volume with digital prints George Eastman Museum, Richard and Ronay Menschel Library Nettles sets constraints for each of her gravestone poetry projects, always limiting herself to proper grammar and spelling but sometimes adding other rules. For instance, in Hawk/Dove, each name is drawn from the tombstone of an American veteran. The book tells two narratives: when it is read in one direction, a story about war emerges, but when turned upside down and read the other direction, a tale about peace
Bea Nettles: Mind & Memory
Return to Exhibition Mind & Memory 2008 Bound volume with inkjet prints, cloth, and Icelandic fish leather spine George Eastman Museum, Richard and Ronay Menschel Library Mind & Memory calls upon tales about the Norse god Odin, who owned two ravens—Huginn (thought or mind) and Muninn (memory). Each day, the ravens would fly over the land and report back to Odin what they had seen and heard. The ravens brought back wisdom to Odin, but, as the traditional poems also state, the god worried that one day the ravens would not return and that he was particularly worried about losing Muninn (memory).
Bea Nettles: Mountain Dream Tarot: A Deck of 78 Photographic Cards
Return to Exhibition Mountain Dream Tarot: A Deck of 78 Photographic Cards [Rochester, NY]: self-published, 1975 Edition of 850 Deck of cards with offset lithographs George Eastman Museum, Richard and Ronay Menschel Library The idea for Mountain Dream Tarot came to Nettles in a dream while she was at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina in 1970. Inspired by the symbols found in Arthur Edward Waite’s Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Nettles spent the next five years photographing members of the Penland community and her family and friends. She then assembled the images into photomontages using
Bea Nettles: The Observer
Return to Exhibition The Observer [Urbana, IL]: self-published, 2005 Printed at the Borowsky Center for Publication Arts at the University of Arts, Philadelphia Edition of 300 Bound volume with offset lithographs George Eastman Museum, Richard and Ronay Menschel Library Nettles returned to making handmade books in the 1990s and 2000s. During this time, she developed and taught book arts classes and regularly attended meetings of the Paper and Book Intensive, a yearly two-week meet-up where book and paper artists learn new skills from one another. As was common in her work from this period
Bea Nettles: Place
Return to Exhibition Place 2013 Open edition Bound volume with electrostatic prints George Eastman Museum, Richard and Ronay Menschel Library Nettles’s gravestone poetry points to the power of photographs as symbols of language. In her earlier works, Nettles used photographic images to convey meaning, but during this later period, she reduced her images to a small set of linguistic symbols that she uses to construct narratives. These word-based works demonstrate the nuances and absurdities of the English language.
Bea Nettles: Seasonal Turns: Four Accordion Books
Return to Exhibition Seasonal Turns: Four Accordion Books Urbana, IL: Inky Press Productions, 1998 Bound volume with offset lithographs and plastic case Private collection Nettles used many of the images from her series Turning 50 and from her stitched triptychs to create the four books that make up Seasonal Turns. Each accordion section represents a season, and the images and colors symbolize the various times of year as well as stages of life, from birth to old age.
Bea Nettles: Stonecipher
Return to Exhibition Stonecipher 2011 Bound volume with electrostatic prints George Eastman Museum, Richard and Ronay Menschel Library In 2010, Nettles began photographing tombstones featuring surnames that are also ordinary words. She uses this now vast collection of photographs to assemble stories and poems, which she publishes as books. The works explore the intersection of history and language through universal themes such as seasonal change, war and peace, and the cardinal directions.
Bea Nettles: Summer Woodland ABC
Return to Exhibition Summer Woodland ABC 2011 Edition of twelve Bound volume with inkjet prints and leather covers George Eastman Museum, Richard and Ronay Menschel Library Nettles made a series of alphabet books. Each book in this series gathers images that she photographed in the same general area. Often her images transformed natural features of the landscape into letters of the alphabet.
Bea Nettles: Write Right: Card Deck
Return to Exhibition Write Right: Card Deck 2015 Deck of cards George Eastman Museum, Richard and Ronay Menschel Library This deck of cards is related to the books Nettles creates using photographs of surnames on tombstones. The cards highlight funny and often poignant observations about the English language—antonyms, homonyms, surnames doubling as occupations, or famous pairings, such as salt and pepper or Fred and Ginger (evoking iconic dance partners Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers).
ONLINE—Focus 45: A History of Photography Commemorating Ratification of the 19th Amendment
Commemorating the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment’s ratification, which granted American women the right to vote, this presentation examines how photography has portrayed, and fundamentally shaped, perceptions of women and feminist movements since the mid-1800s.
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ONLINE—Upstairs/Downstairs Tour
Members Only. Have you ever wondered what's upstairs or behind the scenes in the historic mansion? Find out on this virtual tour of George Eastman's 35,000-square-foot residence with Legacy Curator Kathy Connor.
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ONLINE—Yourself and Yours
Virtual Dryden Theatre | Streaming Online. Produced just after Hong’s masterpiece Right Now, Wrong Then, this film takes a similar absurdist tack, resulting in a mystery that exists less to be solved than to be ruminated over.
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