Happenings

Workshops

Our design workshops are aimed at exploring greeting card design within the project constraints of letterpress printing. We’ve held numerous workshops at the Design Lab at UT Austin. We’ve also put it on the road and held workshops in the Printmaking department at the University of Saskatchewan as well as English and of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State University.

We’ve received considerable support over the years from Henry Smith, fabrication manager and lecturer in Design.

Over the years many students, faculty, and community members have joined us in designing and printing greeting cards.

Flyer for Natalie Loveless's Talk — Detail from poster for Dr. Loveless’ lecture (image ft. member of Fluxus)

Public Talk

How to Make Art at the End of the World

Dr. Natalie Loveless
November 14, 2019
Texas Union (UNB 2.102)
Eastwoods Room
Everyone Welcome – Free Admissionx

Followed by the final design workshop of the year, flyer pictured at right.

Flyer for Natalie Loveless workshop
Dr. Natalie Loveless

Natalie Loveless, Assistant Professor in History of Art, Design and Visual Culture (HADVC), University of Alberta, Canada.

Natalie Loveless is an internationally recognized scholar of contemporary feminist art and theory and an acknowledged leader in the area of research-creation. She is the founder and Director of the University of Alberta’s Research-Creation and Social Justice CoLABoratory, a site for experimental research-creation focused on social and ecological justice, through which she fosters intersectional, interdisciplinary, and collaborative research-creation practices across the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences.

Loveless, Natalie. How to Make Art at the End of the World. Duke University Press. 2019.

Natalie Loveless operating the Vandercook printing press — Dr. Loveless operates the Vandercook press, UT Austin.

Face of card: "'Bout Time!"
Interior of card. Text reads "To End Petro Capitalism"

Book Club

In Fall of 2019, a small group of us met to discuss Aleandra Jaffe’s 1999 “Packaged Sentiments; The Social Meanings of Greeting Cards.” This article has been an important influence on the thinking behind this project.

Mother reading to her children with smokestacks spewing in the background

Select Bibliography

Chadwick, H. Joseph. 1975. The Greeting Card Writer’s Handbook. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest.

D’Angelo, Frank. 1992. “The Rhetoric of Sentimental Greeting Card Verse.” Rhetoric Review 10 (2): 337–45.

Duranti, Alessandro. 1997. “Universal and Culture-Specific Properties of Greetings.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 7 (1): 63–97.

Ehrenberg, Jennifer. 1996. “Beyond Cute: Hallmark Greeting Cards.” Print 50 (August): 52.

Jaffe, Alexandra. 1999. “Packaged Sentiments: The Social Meanings of Greeting Cards.” Journal of Material Culture 4 (2): 115–41.

Potowski, Kim. 2011. “Linguistic and Cultural Authenticity of ‘Spanglish’Greeting Cards.” International Journal of Multilingualism 8 (4): 324–44.

Shank, Barry. 2006. A Token of My Affection: Greeting Cards and American Business Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.