Features
- Cover Type: Paperback with 140 pages
- Published by: Quack!Media March 18, 2008
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 098008900X
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0980089004
-
Book Dimensions:
8.3 x 8.3 x 0.6 inches
- Weighs: 12 ounces
Product Description
I WISH TO SAY (THE BIRTHDAY PROJECT) presents an uncensored glance at American public opinion on presidential politics. The book features letters to the President by people across the country and photographic portraits of the letter-writers. The book is the creation of Brooklyn-based artist and author Sheryl Oring, who typed the letters as they were dictated to her by people who stopped by her public office during a 2006 tour of her public performance project. Dressed in vintage clothing, Oring typed the messages verbatim on her manual typewriter, sending the original to the White House and keeping a carbon copy for her archive. While Oring typed the letters, photographer Dhanraj Emanuel took portraits of each human being who participated in shows in Brooklyn; Indianapolis; Raleigh; Tampa; Houston; Des Moines; Albuquerque and Yosemite National Park.
About The Author
Sheryl Oring grew up in Grand Forks, N.D., and graduated from the University of Colorado in 1987 with a degree in journalism. She headed west to California and spent a decade working as a newspaper reporter and editor before moving to Berlin in 1997 to focus on art. There, she created an installation called Writer s Block by collecting hundreds of antique typewriters and caging them in steel sculptures. This was first displayed on the site of the Nazi book burning in Berlin and has since been shown at the Jewish Museum Berlin; at the Buda Castle in Budapest; the Boston Public Library and the New York Public Library s Bryant Park. After six years in Berlin, she returned to the United States in 2003 and conceived of I Wish to Say as a way to document the diversity of political viewpoints at a crucial point in U.S. history and to offer regular people a chance to speak their minds. A belief in the power of free speech and the sanctity of the First Amendment are at foundations of her work Oring has worked as a reporter and editor at publications including the
New York Times; the International Herald Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle. She is the recipient of a 2006 grant from the Creative Capital Foundation; a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship; a European Journalism Fellowship at the Free University in Berlin; a Robert Bosch Foundation fellowship; and an Arthur F. Burns Fellowship for Journalists. In September 2004, she was profiled by Peter Jennings as human being of the Week on ABC s World News Tonight. Her artwork has been shown at galleries and museums in Europe, the United States and India and her artist books are in the permanent collections of institutions including the Museum of Modern Art; the Tate Britain; the Brooklyn Museum; Cornell University; Yale University; Smith College; Skidmore College; and the University of California-Santa Barbara. Oring met photographer Dhanraj Emanuel while doing an I Wish to Say show in Memphis, Tenn. In 2006, they traveled 11,000 miles across the United States to gather cards and photographs for the I Wish to Say book. Oring and Emanuel live in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Reader ReviewsThis is the kind of civic engagement that we desperately need in art. Oring has taken the roots of conceptual art from the 1960's and grafted onto them a breathing, living, voting, public conscience that is so needed in our current climate of cyberapathy. This project takes the virtual interconnections that happen on the internet, the MoveOn.org type caucusing, and strips it down to a gritty, face to face, typewriter-key-to carbon-to-card-to-mailbox human conversation. And it is exactly these increasingly rare and endangered conversations with strangers, of the type that Oring initiates (and Emanuel's photographs beautifully document) that are exactly what allow democracy to exist. I show this book to my students and it serves as a model for a new kind of art, a new kind of art teaching, that is very ripe for our times. I have found that it is so timely that my students take to it like fish to water, they crave this kind of work without having even known that it existed. The photographs (which fill this very visual book) are beautiful, humanizing portraits of very specific American citizens. They are respectful and inspire the viewer to respect these people, even when we might not agree with their politics.
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