On Mohawk Vellum paper and other archival papers and clothes.

With different vintage ‘portraits’ of the artists taken from the original The Galaxy yearbook, in a slipcover.

Souvenir is a deconstruction of The Galaxy, Marion Rudiwitz’s 1969 High School Yearbook (from Francis Lewis High School in Fresh Meadows New York, on Long Island) into an old stamp album. One night early in 1999 I found the yearbook in a pile of (Marion’s?) belongings, which had been tossed onto the curb on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. It was an obvious eviction/split quick/death/illness/landlord-threw-stuff-into-the-street situation. I took the book home and my friends and I cruelly laughed at it for a few days. Then in an act of nostalgic piety and apology I spent the next three years tearing the yearbook apart and reassembling it into a vintage stamp album.

Souvenir is a simulacrum of the acclaimed unique collage book of the same name. The original collages were digitally scanned at a high resolution, color corrected so that the high quality Fiery Laser Jet printed pages match the unique book’s pages. It is constructed with cellophane interleaves that visually and tactilely recreate the reading experience of the unique book.

Illustrated on p61 of "Creating Artists' Books" by Sarah Bodman.

Souvenir is a talismanic antidote to revisionist attempts to diminish the legacy of the 60’s; a decade which still holds a revealing ethical mirror to our present consumer culture’s brutality and arrogance. It recalls a time when college students in the United States had class-consciousness with interests different from those of their parents. The student class had idealistic goals beyond securing a super-sized version of their parent’s lifestyle. That traditional class-consciousness (heir to the ‘Fourth Estate’ of Revolutionary France) survives in fragments, but has been greatly degraded. Oops - there goes the generation gap, easily crossed and taped over by SUV and MTV.

In the collections of:

Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH

Long Island University, NY,

Stanford University, CA

University of Minnesota, Minneapolis,

University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee,

University Of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN

The Waskowmium, Burlington, VT (along with the original unique edition)

Wesleyan College, Middletown, CT

Wellesley College, MA

Exhibited at:

2005 Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA (Also in the Exhibition Catalog)

2004 Third Space Gallery, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Red linen boards with gold metal corner tabs. In green slipcase.