Tender Buttons: Gertrude Stein’s Vintage Verses About Objects, Illustrated by Lisa Congdon

A book is a book is a book. Or is it?

Given my affinity for all things Gertrude Stein and my enduring admiration for the art of my frequent collaborator and talented friend Lisa Congdon, I was instantly enamored with Tender Buttons: Objects (public library) — Stein’s 1914 collection of avant-garde verses celebrating everyday objects in her signature style of semantic somersaults, brought to fresh life with Lisa’s vibrant illustrations of birds, boxes, cups, clocks, umbrellas, and other ordinary objects made extraordinary.

A FEATHER.

A feather is trimmed, it is trimmed by the light and the bug and the post, it is trimmed by little leaning and by all sorts of mounted reserves and loud volumes. It is surely cohesive.

I asked Lisa about the project’s particular mesmerism:

Every now and again an illustration project comes your way that feels like sheer kismet. I’ve had an infatuation with the life of Gertrude Stein since I was in my early 20s, and I’ve always been intrigued by her bizarre poetry. Chronicle Books gave me an extreme amount of creative freedom to illustrate Tender Buttons — which was at the same time both glorious and extremely challenging.

Hope in gates, hope in spoons, hope in doors, hope in tables, no hope in daintiness and determination. Hope in dates.

In the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling.

Tender Buttons, which comes on the heels of Lisa’s equally but very differently delightful A Collection a Day, is an absolute joy from cover to cover. Some of the artwork from it is available in Lisa’s shop.

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Sister Corita Kent’s Timeless Rules for Learning and Life, Hand-Lettered by Lisa Congdon

“It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.”

Last year, while knee-deep in the fantastic recent John Cage biography, a stray strand of related research led me to a wonderful ten-point compendium of advice for students and teachers, misattributed to John Cage but in factuality created by artist and educator Sister Corita Kent for a class she taught at Immaculate Heart College in 1967-1968, originally titled Immaculate Heart College Art Department Rules and lettered by David Mekelburg.

Over the months that followed, I was overwhelmed with emails from readers — mostly educators, some students — asking how and where they could purchase a print of the list for their classrooms and homes. Unable to find anything online, I decided to ask artist Lisa Congdon — my collaborator in the Reconstructionists project celebrating notable women and a master of exquisite lettering — to create a modern version of Sister Corita’s rules. Perhaps naively, I thought we’d make a beautiful large-format letterpress print of it, offer it up for people to buy, and donate all proceeds to the Corita Art Center — a seeming win-win.

Alas, the folks at the Center were less than amenable and slashed the idea. But Lisa, at the time confined to bed recovering from surgery, illustrated the list anyway, if only for our own delight. Now, she’s posted it online — and though still not available as a print, it’s here for your digital delight as well:

Sister Corita’s original list can be found in the altogether wonderful Learning by Heart: Teachings to Free the Creative Spirit (public library).

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Introducing The Reconstructionists: A Yearlong Celebration of History’s Remarkable Women

Illustrated portraits of trailblazing women across art, science, and literature.

It can be extraordinarily challenging to write about notable women without ghettoizing it as “women’s issues,” and yet some of the most remarkable hearts and minds to drive humanity forward have come equipped with two X chromosomes. It gives me enormous pleasure to announce a new collaboration with artist Lisa Congdon, titled The Reconstructionists — a yearlong celebration of remarkable women across art, science, and literature, both famous and esoteric, who have changed the way we define ourselves as a culture and live our lives as individuals of any gender.

Every Monday in 2013, we’ll be publishing an illustrated portrait of one such trailblazing woman, along with a hand-lettered quote that captures her spirit and a short micro-essay about her life and legacy. We’re launching with four portraits — writers Anaïs Nin and Gertrude Stein, artist Agnes Martin, and inventor/actor Hedy Lamarr — for a taste of the project’s scope and sensibility, but will be publishing one per week for the remainder of the year.

The project borrows its title from Anaïs Nin, one of the 52 female icons, who wrote of “woman’s role in the reconstruction of the world” in a poetic 1944 diary entry — a sentiment that encapsulates the heart of what this undertaking is about: women who have reconstructed, in ways big and small, famous and infamous, timeless and timely, our understanding of ourselves, the world, and our place in it. (Nin’s work was also how Lisa and I first crossed paths creatively, which adds a private celebratory element to the public project.)

The site was generously and thoughtfully designed by wonder-worker Kelli Anderson, my collaborator on the Curator’s Code project and one remarkable woman herself.

Please enjoy.

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