Broadsides
About the Broadside
CBA 2021 Workspace Artist-in-Residence Rhonda Khalifeh drew inspiration from her own personal experience of being told to “cover-up” as a starting point when designing a broadside for the poem Cover Up by poet Kyle Carrero Lopez for CBA’s Fall 2021 Broadside Reading Series: Black Spirits.
Khalifeh felt that many other people could relate to the experience of being required to wear modest clothing in order to enter a sacred space. At one point during the Covid-19 pandemic, Kahlifeh had to choose whether to don a communal headscarf so she could enter a mosque in Istanbul’s Taksim square or to forgo the experience entirely and wait outside. In the end, she chose the latter option.
For this broadside, Khalifeh created a digital collage from a scan of a textile and a photograph she took in 2010 of a Christian monastery near the village of Rankus, which is located north of Damascus. Khalifeh then transferred the image onto a polymer plate and printed it alongside handset type on a Vandercook letterpress proof press.
Although some of the details of the collage were lost in this process, Kahlifeh feels that the fuzzy, fragmented quality lends itself nicely to the overall mood of Carrero Lopez’s poem.
Colophon
Designed and printed by Rhonda Khalifeh at Center for Book Arts in honor of the poet’s reading on November 11, 2021. The text was handset in Verona, Goudy Oldstyle, and Lightline Gothic. Letterpress printed on Astrobrights paper. Edition of 100.
