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Jennifer L. Roberts, Drew Gilpin Faust Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, is joined in conversation by James Welling, photographer and professor at Princeton University's Lewis Center for the Arts, to discuss her new book, "Contact: Art and the Pull of Print," which the publisher describes as "a new grammar for understanding the meaning and significance of print."

About the Book (from the publisher):

In process and technique, printmaking is an art of physical contact. From woodcut and engraving to lithography and screenprinting, every print is the record of a contact event: the transfer of an image between surfaces, under pressure, followed by release. Contact reveals how the physical properties of print have their own poetics and politics and provides a new framework for understanding the intelligence and continuing relevance of printmaking today.

The seemingly simple physics of printmaking brings with it an array of metamorphoses that give expression to many of the social and conceptual concerns at the heart of modern and contemporary art. Exploring transformations such as reversal, separation, and interference, Jennifer Roberts explores these dynamics in the work of Christiane Baumgartner, David Hammons, Edgar Heap of Birds, Jasper Johns, Corita Kent, Glenn Ligon, Julie Mehretu, Robert Rauschenberg, and many other leading artists who work at the edge of the medium and beyond.

Focusing on the material and spatial transformations of the printmaking process rather than its reproducibility, this beautifully illustrated book explores the connections between print, painting, and sculpture, but also between the fine arts, industrial arts, decorative arts, and domestic arts. Throughout, Roberts asks what artists are learning from print, and what we, in turn, can learn from them.

Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington

In conversation:
Jennifer L. Roberts is the Drew Gilpin Faust Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. She is the author of "Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America," "Jasper Johns/In Press: The Crosshatch Works and the Logic of Print," and "Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History."

James Welling is a photographer whose work has been the subject of a number of significant survey exhibitions. In 2014, he was a recipient of the Infinity Award given by the International Center of Photography, New York, and in 2016 he received the Julius Shulman Institute Excellence in Photography Award from Woodbury University, California. From 1995 to 2016, he was Area Head of Photography at UCLA, and since 2012 he has been a Lecturer with the Rank of Professor at Princeton University.

Presented in partnership with the Princeton University Art Museum and the Arts Council of Princeton and with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this programming do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

American democracy is at an inflection point. With voting rights challenged, election results undermined, and even the US Capitol violently attacked, many Americans feel powerless to save their nation’s democratic institutions from the forces dismantling them. Yet, as founders like Benjamin Franklin knew from the start, the health of America’s democracy depends on the actions its citizens are willing to take to preserve it.

Elizabeth C. Matto's new book "To Keep the Republic: Thinking, Talking, and Acting like a Democratic Citizen" is a wake-up call about the responsibilities that come with being a citizen in a participatory democracy. It describes the many ways that individuals can make a difference on both local and national levels—and explains why they matter. Political scientist Elizabeth C. Matto highlights the multiple facets of democratic citizenship, identifies American democracy’s sometimes competing values and ideals, and explains how civic engagement can take various forms, including political conversation. Combining political philosophy with concrete suggestions for how to become a more engaged citizen, To Keep the Republic reminds us that democracy is not a spectator sport; it only works when we get off the sidelines and enter the political arena to make our voices heard.

About the Speakers:

Elizabeth C. Matto is a research professor and director of Rutgers University's Eagleton Institute of Politics. She was the lead editor for "Teaching Civic Engagement across the Disciplines" and "Teaching Civic Engagement Globally" and is the author of "Citizen Now: Engaging in Politics and Democracy."

John Farmer is a university professor and director of the Miller Center on Policing and Community Resilience at Rutgers University. He is the author of "The Ground Truth: The Story Behind America’s Defense on 9/11", which was named a New York Times notable book. From 2019-2023, he served as director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.

Presented with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this programming do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This recording is presented by Princeton Public Library. The author and UC Berkeley professor discusses his new book, "Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights" with Wallace D. Best and Hendrik Hartog of Princeton University.

From the publisher:
The familiar story of civil rights goes like this: Once, America’s legal system shut Black people out and refused to recognize their rights, their basic human dignity, or even their very lives.

In "Before the Movement," historian Dylan C. Penningroth revises the conventional story. Drawing on long-forgotten sources found in the basements of county courthouses across the nation, Penningroth reveals that African Americans, far from being ignorant about law until the middle of the twentieth century, have thought about, talked about, and used it going as far back as even the era of slavery.

Penningroth’s narrative, which stretches from the last decades of slavery to the 1970s, partly traces the history of his own family. Challenging accepted understandings of Black history framed by relations with white people, he puts Black people at the center of the story — their loves and anger and loneliness, their efforts to stay afloat, their mistakes and embarrassments, their fights, their ideas, their hopes and disappointments, in all their messy humanness. "Before the Movement" is an account of Black legal lives that looks beyond the Constitution and the criminal justice system to recover a rich, broader vision of Black life — a vision allied with, yet distinct from, “the freedom struggle.”

Dylan C. Penningroth is a professor of law and history at the University of California – Berkeley who specializes in African American history and legal history. His first book, "The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South," published by the University of North Carolina Press, won the 2004 Civil War and Reconstruction Book Award from the Organization of American Historians. His articles have appeared in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Journal of American History, and the American Historical Review. Penningroth has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the MacArthur Foundation.

Penningroth grew up in Princeton's John Street/Witherspoon neighborhood and was educated in the Princeton Public Schools. Currently serving as Associate Dean of the Program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at Berkeley, he lives in Kensington, California, with his family.

Wallace D. Best
Wallace Best specializes in 19th and 20th century African American religious history. His research and teaching focus on the areas of African American religion, religion and literature, Pentecostalism, and Womanist theology.

Hendrik Hartog
Hendrik "Dirk" Hartog is the Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty, Emeritus. For a decade, he was the director of Princeton University’s Program in American Studies.

This event was recorded April 21, 2024.

This 2004 film by Thomas Florek profiles artists who were commissioned to create art for the Sands Library Building of Princeton Public Library. Contains interviews with Ik-Joong Kang, Buzz Spector, Margaret K. Johnson, Armando Sosa, Katherine Hackl, Robert Barry, Tom Nussbaum and Mary Taylor, plus a feature of Faith Ringgold's "Tar Beach"

Library Live at Labyrinth

The author discusses his newly released "We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For" with fellow Princeton University professor Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor.

About the Book: From the author of the New York Times bestseller "Begin Again," comes a politically astute, lyrical meditation on how ordinary Black Americans can shake off their reliance on a small group of professional politicians and pursue self-cultivation and grassroots movements to achieve a more just and perfect democracy.

We are more than the circumstances of our lives, and what we do matters. In" We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For," one of the nation’s preeminent scholars and public intellectuals speaking to the Black experience in America, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., makes the case that the hard work of becoming a better person should be a critical feature of Black politics. Through virtuoso interpretations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Ella Baker, Glaude shows how ordinary people have the capacity to be the heroes that our democracy so desperately requires, rather than outsourcing their needs to leaders who purportedly represent them.

Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is the author of several books, including "Democracy in Black" and the New York Times bestseller "Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own," winner of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Book Prize. He frequently appears in the media as an MSNBC contributor on programs like "Morning Joe" and "Deadline: White House." A native of Moss Point, Mississippi, Glaude is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton University.

Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor’s "Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership" was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She is the author, in addition, of "From #Blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation." Yamahtta-Taylor is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.

This event is co-presented by Labyrinth Books and the library and co-sponsored by Princeton University’s Humanities Council and the Departments of African American Studies and Religion with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This event was recorded April 17, 2024.

Three key figures in making the Sands Library Building a reality — Leslie Burger, Harry Levine and Nick Garrison — discuss the challenges and opportunities of creating a new library in Princeton.