Nancy Kuhl and Margaret Woodward
Room 26 Discrete Notions Exhibition series 16 #2
5 x stamped and addressed digitally printed postcards. Dimensions: 110mmx 140mm.
These five postcards are part of the Room 26 Discrete Notions Exhibition series curated by Nancy Kuhl. This set of postcards pays homage to Babson’s boulders. During the Great Depression, Roger Babson a businessman, notable for predicting the Wall Street crash, commissioned a team of unemployed Finnish Stone Cutters to carve inspirational words as inscriptions on large glacially transported ‘erratic’ boulders located on on Dogtown Common, near Gloucester, Massachusetts. These inscribed boulders which Babson referred to as his ‘final and permanent book” sit published in a woodland to be read and contemplated in light of the ‘erraticness’ of contemporary times. The photographs were taken by Margaret Woodward during a field trip in Fall 2019, during her research fellowship at The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University where Nancy Kuhl is curator of poetry.
Room 26 Discrete Notions postcard series documents the frequently-changing, semi-private installation of single artworks, objects, and texts in Nancy Kuhl’s office (Room 26, Beinecke Library). Beginning in 2004, this project has featured more than 120 made and found artworks, commentaries, cultural documents, and literary and artistic records. It has also included personal obsessions, inside jokes, and secret communications. Through the post, Nancy shares these Discrete Notions with some 50 beloved friends and admired strangers, many of whom have become series contributors, guest curators, and advisors. Though the exhibitions themselves take place at a kind of remove, the postcards are a more public project, drawn from a community of writers, artists, editors, and thinkers, broadcast and rebroadcast as they travel to new exhibition sites on desks, mantles, refrigerators.
Nancy Kuhl’s recent books include Pine to Sound (Shearsman 2015) and The Birds of the Year (Grenfell Press 2017). She is co-editor of Phylum Press, a small poetry publisher, and Curator of Poetry for the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
Margaret Woodward is an artist, writer and publisher and Adjunct Professor and member of the Institute for Land, Water and Society at Charles Sturt University, NSW. Margaret collaborates with Justy Phillips as artist duo A Published Event.
