Blake at Union

2000 Blake Fest

This public event in the College Arts building welcomed “friends and guests” to a showcase of student creativity in response to Blake’s work, presented in the form of brief talks on a variety of subjects, dramatic readings, music, and other interpretive material. A program guide distributed at the event is available below. The Blake@Union website is designed to capture and preserve such events more fully in future.

2001 Exhibit: William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience

This exhibit in Schaffer Library featured a facsimiles of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience in particular. Sample images from different publishers were displayed along with material from Blake scholar and printmaker Michael Phillips. Student essays in the catalog for this exhibit, available below, focus primarily on the printing techniques used by Blake himself as well as those making the various facsimiles.

2003 Exhibit: Books of Fire, Books of Gold: William Blake’s Works in Illuminated Printing

This exhibit in Schaffer Library showcased Blake’s illuminated books in a number of contexts. Facsimiles made by the Trianon Press were featured heavily; student essays in the accompanying catalog, often discuss how the choices of binding material or the format of the reproduction affected their encounter with Blake’s work. Each essay addresses the overall themes or imagery of the selected book, some in relation to other works by Blake. Facsimiles from the Manchester Workshop and Granary Books were also on display.

2018 Library Exhibit: Blake@Union: From Print to Digital to Print

This exhibit in Schaffer Library was curated by student assistant Caitlin Williams’18 as a companion to the release of this website. With a focus on the three themes of the website (showcasing the library’s collection, celebrating Blake as a “maker,” and preserving and promoting student research and creativity), the exhibit features material from the library’s collections as well as its archive of student work to demonstrate the on-going relevance of print in a digital age. Like the website, the goal of the exhibit is to show how the advantages of digitization can be used to create a greater awareness of the library’s physical collection of works by Blake, draw researchers to it, and perpetuate conversations among students for years to come. It is also the occasion for a “Blake@Union” student prize competition to create additional material for the exhibit and website.