Conversations from the Cullman Center: Amalgam: Frances Jetter with Peter Kuper

Visual artist Frances Jetter connects her own life to her ancestors’ and their interweaving ties to the twentieth-century labor movement.

A uniquely told immigrant story, Amalgam is populated by impressionistic figures, rendered with piercing faces that stare down the reader as if out of an old photograph. The narrative follows Abram, or “Abe,” a Polish Jew who immigrates to America for economic opportunity. He is a passionate arbitrator and advocate in his union but an unyielding patriarchal tyrant at home. In a patchwork of linocuts, keyholes, and hinges, Frances Jetter uncovers the convictions and contradictions that make up the tapestry of Abe’s life and so many others’. In these pages are mini epics depicting the struggle of workers; haunting vignettes of abandoned dolls and forgotten friends; and a love letter to Jetter’s mother, Rose, who hovers in the artist’s mind like a ghost. Twelve years in the making, Amalgam is a profound, multimedia meditation on memory and legacy.

Frances Jetter worked on Amalgam: An Immigrant, His Labor Union, and His American Family in Brooklyn during her 2017-2018 Fellowship at the Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. She will discuss her book with award-winning graphic novelist Peter Kuper.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Frances Jetter is an illustrator and printmaker whose linocut prints, often with political and social subject matter, have illustrated articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, TIME Magazine, the Nation, and the Village Voice, among other publications. Jetter’s prints are included in the collections of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, the Detroit Institute of Arts, The New York Public Library, and the Grinnell College Print and Drawing Study Room. In 2016, the Library of Congress acquired twenty-four of her relief prints for “The Frances Jetter Illustration Collection.” In 2019, the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA, exhibited more than sixty-five prints from Amalgam. Jetter has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and grants from the Puffin Foundation. She teaches at the School of Visual Arts.

Peter Kuper is a regular contributor to the New Yorker, the Nation, and MAD Magazine and teaches comics at Harvard University. He was the Jean Strouse Fellow at the Cullman Center in 2020-2021, and his exhibition INterSECTS was on display at the NYPL in 2022. His upcoming graphic novel, Insectopolis, will be published by W. W. Norton in May.
 

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