The Acclimatization Society

The Acclimatization Society

I made an edition of pamphlets for Wave Hill last month.

The Acclimatization Society is about birds in the city, and how they adapt, and how some birds have evolved in response to the city environment. Evolution doesn’t just happen in pristine jungle ecosystems; the urban pollution that makes cities a harsh environment for animals is known for causing genetic mutations. Birds in cities have to adapt fast to their circumstances. Genetic mutations plus adaptations equals speciation in action.

Also included is information about some of the most common bird species in New York today.

This work and Flyway are on view at Wave Hill, which you should go visit as soon as you have an appropriate spring day at your disposal. It’s a beautiful place. The magnolias are getting ready to bloom soon and there’s lots of blue flowers out right now.

Avifauna: Birds + Habitat is on view through June 24. Info is here.

A bonus: I got to see one of my favorite greenhouses around when I came to drop off the work.

Don’t even think about stealing their plants.

In other news: I caught the first whiff of spring out in Jamaica Bay a couple of weeks ago with my friend Ana.

And there’s more printing on the horizon- I’m thinking about strategic retreat this year. More soon.


Artist Talk and Flyway is done~

Artist Talk and Flyway is done~

Flyway is here:

I’ve sent copies to everyone on the list that I can think of, if you haven’t received one and would like to, let me know. Preferably in person! I’m giving an artist talk on :

Join me on Saturday, October 14th at Shoestring Press, a community-based printshop in Crown Heights, to learn more about pamphlets, Jamaica Bay, letterpress, and local history. I’ll talk about my ongoing pamphleteering project, Brain Washing from Phone Towers, and this year’s series of publications, all about the history, ecology, and communities surrounding Jamaica Bay. Refreshments will be served, and everyone will go home with some pamphlets to keep or share. Free to the public.

Saturday, October 14, 7pm
Shoestring Press
663 CLASSON AVE | CROWN HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN, NY

The Jamaica Bay Pamphleteering Project is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by the Brooklyn Arts Council. Funding is also generously provided by the Puffin Foundation.

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Floyd Bennett Field

Floyd Bennett Field

What kind of magical place combines a sanitation training center, community garden AND a remote control airfield?

Floyd Bennett Field, of course.

Floyd Bennett Field was New York City’s first municipal airport, opening in 1931. Airports are generally built on the outskirts of cities, in remote areas so that landing planes don’t hit anything. Floyd Bennett was built on land that had been known as Barren Island, one of the many bits and pieces of land in the marshes of Jamaica Bay, in the extreme southeast corner of Brooklyn. There was already a bare dirt runway used by a commercial pilot on the island, and when city planners decided that NYC needed its own airport, they chose this spot. The marshland around Barren Island was filled in with sand dredged from the bottom of Jamaica Bay, and many small bits of land were joined together and fused with the mainland. Flatbush Avenue was extended and straightened to provide pilots and passengers direct access to the rest of the city.  A state of the art, amenities-filled airport was born, complete with new features like illuminated concrete runways and comfortable terminal facilities.

Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia wanted the new airport to be THE commercial airport for NYC. Newark International, the first area airport, had opened in 1928; he wanted the city to have its own airport. But commercial aviation was new, and the number of people who paid to take commercial flights was limited. Most airports paid the bills by freight, not by passengers. Newark had an exclusive contract with the Postal Service to provide freight transport, which in turn attracted other commercial airlines to work out of Newark. Flights that didn’t sell all their seats could make up their costs through cargo shipments for the post office. LaGuardia was only able to convince American Airlines to move their operations to the new airfield, and passengers complained that the commute all the way out to the end of Brooklyn took longer than even the trip out to Newark.

But commercial aviation was only part of the story of air travel at this point. Aviators were excited about the new facility and its modern conveniences, and the airfield hosted many record-breaking flights, time records, and air races between the two World Wars. Howard Hughes and Wiley Post both used Floyd Bennett for record breaking around-the-world flights. Female pilots like Amelia Earhart, Jackie Cochran, and Laura Ingalls made historic flights out of Floyd Bennett.

Since the commercial side of the airfield didn’t, uh, take off, the airfield became a base for the aviation units of both the Coast Guard and the NYPD. During the Second World War, the Navy used Floyd Bennett as a Naval Air Station. After the war, and up until the 1970’s the field was used as a support base for Navy, Air Force, and Marine units,  as well as for the aviation units of the Coast Guard. But when the military moved their operations elsewhere, the field was decommissioned and began to decay. Control of most of the site was transferred to the National Park Service for inclusion in Gateway National Recreation Area, the sprawling multi-location National Park that encompasses many parts of Jamaica Bay as well as sites in northern New Jersey and Staten Island.

So today when you go visit Floyd Bennett, it seems a bit forgotten. It still houses an aviation base for the NYPD; the training center for the Sanitation Department is also there. There’s a public campground, as well as a hanger devoted to the restoration of Historic Aircraft. Volunteers and park rangers give tours on the weekends.  Four hangers were renovated and taken over by a commercial tenant, the Aviator Sports and Event Center, which seems awful to me but I’m sure appeals to other people.

There’s a lot of empty space. Empty runways are a great place to fly kites, or drive remote control cars. An area of the site is a great place to hike, and offers good birding opportunities. Between the runways there’s also open grassland that people are kept out of as a wildlife habitat, and it provides cover and homes for grassland birds to live undisturbed. You can spend the afternoon completely alone wandering around what’s called the North Forty. Eventually you would end up at the Bay:

Where you can apparently kayak. Next to this bit is a Remote Control Airfield area, which apparently has a devoted community:

Spring migration is beginning; the Bay is right on the Atlantic Flyway, and I’m looking forward to going back over the next several weeks. More soon.


Make it big.

Make it big.

IMG_0852

I spent most of the last month or so carving an enormous piece of wood that had taken up residence in my living room.

carving

Finally finished in time. Guttenberg Arts, the generous hosts that gave me a residency this past winter, hold an arts festival in nearby Braddock Park, with demos, vendors, steamroller prints and more.

done

I did a spoon printing demo of some of the enormous blocks in the park with my co-horts Beth Sheehan, Amanda Thackray and Ana Cordeiro.

handprinting

We had to fight some serious wind gusts but we recruited some help to make it happen.

Spoon printing #woodcuts

A video posted by Sarah Nicholls (@phosphorescentfacehighlighter) on

I finally got to see my block printed!

finished print

Both by hand and by machine.

steamroller

And Ana found a friend along the way, who cheered us on:

braddock


Whoops

Category : art, birds, book, pamphlets

Apologies for the shameful lack of blogging as of late. I’m finishing up various things, and starting various other things, and rushing around and such, as one does in fall. Having spent a sweltering summer without air conditioning I am really appreciating fall this year. Leaves! Sweaters! Squash-based dessert items!

SO, to sum up: this happened:

inside1_web

Which is the summer Brain Washing From Phone Towers publication Milky Seas. All about the wonders of bioluminescent bacteria. 100 copies in silkscreen and letterpress went out recently, if you received a copy I hope you enjoyed it. They glow in the dark!

I learned to silkscreen this summer, which is still exciting and new. I’ve been doing so at the friendly and convenient Shoestring Press on Classon Ave in Crown Heights. They are lovely people. I have been messing around with various patterns and colors, trying to get a handle on what to do next :

new print in progress

I am, miraculously, almost completely done with binding bird books. The deluxe editions of the Field Guide to Extinct Birds are now available:

book with prints_web

which include a set of hand colored additional bird prints for your enjoyment and informative benefit.

And finally, I am looking forward to starting the fall pamphlet this year. I can’t tell you what it’s about, but I can tell you that it involves FIRE.

fire_web

And that’s my whirlwind report from the last two months. I’ll make more of an effort to keep up in the future.

 


Adventures in Home Binding

Category : art, birds, book

I HAVE FINISHED PRINTING MY NEW BOOK. Folks, I can’t believe it.

2015-02-24 18.09.18

I have set and distributed and set and distributed more times than I can count, but here’s the last run:

 

 

2015-02-27 15.14.10

 

Which means only one thing: time to start binding. Here’s some signatures pressing, in the improvised studio otherwise known as a shelf in my extra room:

 

2015-03-06 08.29.25I’m sure it will work just fine. Once everything is folded and collated, it will be time for some spine lining. I plan on using a cast iron pan as a weight. Wish me luck!

 


Setting and resetting

Category : birds, book

red biled rail

Bird update: I’m mostly setting the text for each bird at this point. If all goes well I should have almost all, if not all, of the individual bird pages printed by the end of the year. (Fingers crossed). Which means all that would be left after that is the intermediate stuff (this is what happened in Hawaii, etc.) and the beginning/introductory stuff (this is why people made field guides, etc.).

Whew. In the meantime, I’ll be setting and resetting pages and pages of type. I’m pretty quick at it at this point.

If you’d like to see some of the pages so far, let me direct you to my etsy shop right here, where you can browse the finest of extinct bird prints available.

Hope you’re all having a fantastic December so far. My cohort Jasper here is glad to have me working from home today.
image

 


Kaka! Kaka!

Category : birds

image

This is the bird of the week in my house, regardless of any national holidays that may or may not have occurred.

Norfolk Island is a tiny island in the Pacific near Australia and New Zealand. He’s one of the many birds described by naturalists traveling with Captain James Cook around the world.
image

Norfork Island was turned into a penal colony in 1788, which was the beginning of the end for the bird.  In the nineteenth century the island was the place where they sent repeat colonial offenders, criminals who committed crimes after already having been sent to Australian penal colonies on the mainland.  The remote location was a way to isolate the worst of the worst.


And more printing, and more printing

Category : art, birds

No time to blog, have to get back to printing. In a mad dash to finish most of the birds by the end of the year. I’ve started printing the text, I’m going with Consort Light in 10 point.

This is how the book looks so far:

wake island rail

 

and here:

molokai creeper

I’m thinking about giving alternate views for particularly great ones:

 

ivory billed

And still trying to figure out how to deal with the major stars. Here’s the foot of the dodo, in the meantime:

 

dodo foot

In other news, if you’re in the market for a holiday card, here’s one for you:

polar bear

He’s available in my shop, here. There are some individual prints from the book there as well, I’ll be adding more as I go. Back to printing!

 


Found type, prints for sale, and the passenger pigeon

Category : art, birds, inspiration

I printed this guy this week:

He came out well, I think. A little folk arty. I caught up on my photo archiving and posted a bunch of pictures from various sign hunting expeditions:

Someday I may do something with these; at the moment photographing signs is just a way to relax.

I’m printing faster and faster in an effort to get it all done. This guy happened all in one day:

I also posted some new prints in the etsy shop this week; they’re a little something on the side I’m thinking about:

You can see them and get a copy here.  My five point solvency campaign is underway. More work is ahead. 


This week on press

Category : birds

This week I printed several lovely birds, including this one, called the Choiseul Crested Pigeon. Here he is:

The first run was inked by hand, because I didn’t want that orange color on the entire bird.

Then I did a pale blue run on top.

Then a sort of blue-gray on top of that to add some depth and detail. Then the black run on top to define everything.

And there he is.


Moas and floating libraries

Category : art, birds

Moa on press

I finished this guy this weekend. Was a bit of a struggle, like many things right now. He’s a bit off (as am I), but turned out ok.

moa proofs2 moa proofs

In better news, some water-themed pamphlets are on their way to Minnesota to take part in this year’s Floating Library. If you’re a Midwesterner, consider swimming up to it this year.

I’ll be teaching again this month, August 16-17 at ye olde Center for Book Arts. We’ve got a spanking new kitchen and bathroom you can check out while learning all about the wonders of the printed word. Register here.

Also this month: Zine Swapping and Making galore: the Center has a zine show up in the galleries and we’ve got a slew of exciting zine programs coming up. Take a look here.

 


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