Barbara Tetenbaum

Mining My Antonia: Excerpts, Drawings & A Map, 2012
Etchings printed by Katherine Kuehn
Letterpress and etching
Triangular Press, Portland, Oregon and The Hartford Art School Print Workshop, West Hartford, Connecticut
Edition of 30

After creating an exhibition at Reed College about Willa Cather’s novel, My Antonia, Tetenbaum reconnected with the topic in the creation of this book. It contains excerpts from the text, a map, and prints of automatic drawings that the artist made while listening to a recording of the novel, and a collaged fragment of the Reed College installation. The introduction reads: “In the summer of 2010 I spent a month in the gallery of Reed College listening to a recording of Willa Cather’s 1918 novel, ‘My Antonia.’ I had wanted to put myself in the position of a first-time reader and respond to the story however it moved me…I was amazed and captivated by the pure gorgeousness of Cather’s writing. What took me by surprise was how emotional this experience became. Listening each day to her descriptions of the landscape and the sky brought me to tears, the kind that have no root in sadness or nostalgia but came from a place deep in my being.”