Interview with John Risseeuw

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM Interview # JOHN RISSEEUW RISSEEUW, JOHN (19-) At UW: Interviewed: 2018 Interviewer: Sarah Lang Index by: Transcribed by: Teresa Bergen Length: 3 hours, 6 minutes First Interview Session (August 23, 2018): Digital File 00:00:01 SL: So today is Friday, August 3, 2018. I'm Sarah Lang with the oral history program at UW Madison. I'm talking with John Risseeuw, printmaker, book and paper artist, UW alum, and founder of Cabbage Head Press. John is speaking from Tempe, Arizona. And I'm at the university archives in Steenbock Library. So, John, I understand that you grew up in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Can you tell us a little bit about what that was like? bit about where you grew up. JR: Well, yes. I was born in Sheboygan. And my family lived there. My father was born on a farm outside of Oostburg, Wisconsin. And he was the second son. And so his brother got the farm. And my dad moved to the city and got a job there with the gas company as a meter reader. And over the years he worked his way up to when he retired he was the accounting supervisor. My mother was from Cedar Grove, Wisconsin, in Sheboygan County, not too far from my dad's farm. And she, back in the '30s, went to Milwaukee, became a nurse, and she worked in the hospital in Sheboygan. And so that's the home that I grew up in. I have an older brother, four years older than I am, David. And a younger brother, Mary, a younger sister, Mary, who's eight years younger than I am. So that was our household. Well, both of my parents came from the Dutch part of Sheboygan County and both our lineage in both sides of the family is solid Dutch going back to the 15th century and beyond. My sister has done a lot of genealogical study on the family, so she's sort of confirmed that. So the name, which people always ask about, is Dutch. That's why it's spelled the way it is. 00:02:48 SL: Okay. 00:01:00JR: Yeah. So, you know, I grew up and went to the public schools. And I think when I went to junior high, I took my first art classes, although I had obviously done the usual art projects in elementary school. And I remember in that art lass, which I thought it was pretty cool to have a class of art. I remember, one thing I remember was learning how to do linoleum cut. So it was my first printmaking. And at the same time, they had a school newspaper that was printed in the shop, in the [arts?] area. And it was all printed letterpress. And so my teacher encouraged me to, I was also drawing cartoons at the time. And he encouraged me to do a cartoon for the paper. 00:02:00 And it had to be cut in reverse in a linoleum block if it was going to be printed in the paper. So I did that. When I got to high school, I found that, or one of my teachers found, that my two aptitudes were science and math. Or sorry, science and art. And so I took both. I also had, in junior high, I was in the orchestra. I played in the band and I played flute. But I dropped music when I went to high school, because I couldn't do music, art and science at the same time. But I took art classes all through high school. And my art teacher was John Bergman. And I remember him for a number of reasons. He was very encouraging in all different ways. One thing I remember is that he had had polio. And he walked with these crutches. And his hand shook constantly. I remember watching him, because he also drew cartoons, which I was really interested in. And he could take a pen and dip it in the ink. And his hand would be shaking and as it approached the paper, it would just stop and he would draw a straight line or whatever line he 00:03:00 wanted to. He could control the shaking by pure force of will. Another thing in high school that was, I think, was pretty important to my sort of self-definition was that I was chosen with a number of other students to be part of something called the Berg Science Seminar. So we were the better science students. And once a month they got us together for a talk by somebody from industry or science or something. And we took field trips. And we were treated like we were special. Like there was some reason for giving us extra information. And I guess it kind of let me know that I had something going that was important. So between that and the art classes, I was sort of starting as an adolescent boy, totally unformed brain still out there, I was figuring out 00:04:00 who I was. 00:07:13 I don't know if we want more information about Sheboygan. I remember, I was born in 1945 and I graduated high school in 1963. So I remember Sheboygan, a city of about fifty thousand people. And it was a successful, bustling city with industry of furniture making and metal parts, factories, tanneries and shoe factories and Wigwam socks, which is still there. And it was a lively city on Lake Michigan, which was also really important. My whole sense of direction is all based on water. I know that from my youth east meant the lake, Lake Michigan. And since then, I've always defined myself in space by where is the water. Yeah. And another thing about growing up there was that Kohler, the city of Kohler, was two miles outside of 00:05:00 Sheboygan. And the Kohler strike went on during my youth. The longest strike in American history. Thirteen years. And it affected the community. People who were either pro-strikers or anti-strikers. There were divisions in families. There were incidents. And it was constantly in the news. Although as a kid, I didn't follow news much. But I knew about that. And the guy across the street who had worked there and was out of work. So anyway, all that stuff was going on. SL: John, when was the Kohler strike going on? 00:09:33 JR: I think that it started in '52. But somebody would have to check that. SL: Sure. So in the '50s. JR: Yeah. It was 00:06:00 through the '50s into the '60s. SL: Okay. And what did you do for fun in Sheboygan with your family and with your friends? Do you remember? JR: One thing I did was I went to the public library. Our parents would let us get on the bus, which happened to go down our street. We could walk across to the corner and wait for the bus and go downtown. And the library was this, just this revelation of so much knowledge out there. And I would get on kicks of reading plays, I read a lot of plays for a while. And then actually in, I guess it was fifth and sixth grade I remember, elementary school, there was a library in the basement. I started reading a lot of 00:07:00 science fiction at that time. And biographies, you know. I just loved going to the library and walking in the stacks and just looking at stuff and seeing what was there. So that was one thing. I was never big on sports. Sometimes played with neighborhood kids in vacant lots, played ball. Our house was sort of on the edge of development at the time. We could go a couple of blocks further out and there were natural fields where we would pick strawberries, I remember, at a certain time of the year. Sometimes go fishing in little creeks. Not catching anything. And then 00:08:00 sometime, I don't remember the date, but in, I think when I was in high school, maybe junior high, my parents bought a small cottage on Lake Michigan south of Sheboygan from a family-related person who had moved into a bigger project. And this was a self-built cottage. It was a real just very simple frame building. And it was down on this beach 15 miles south of Sheboygan. And we started going down there and spending most of the summer there. My dad would drive into town to work and we would stay there. So I had lots and lots of hours on the beach. It was called Smies' Beach. 00:12:55 SL: Can you spell that? JR: I'm sorry? SL: Can you spell that? 00:09:00JR: Oh, S-m-i-e-s. SL: Okay. Thank you. JR: Yeah. And it's actually another Dutch name. And this beach is an area that was settled by the Dutch. It's again, not too far from Oostburg and Cedar Grove. And at one time there was a fishery at Smies' Beach. And I remember when I was small going with my mother over to the fishery and buying a freshly caught fish. And I think it was the disaster in the early '60s, maybe, when the lamprey eels came through the Saint Lawrence Seaway into Lake Michigan and killed off all the whitefish. And the fishing industry just collapsed. And I remember the small rivers and creeks that fed into Lake Michigan, they put in these electrified fences in the water to stop the lampreys from going in and reproducing. SL: Wow. You had mentioned earlier that you were, as a student in high school, trying to figure out who you were, and you were interested in art and science. At that point, were you feeling drawn to certain artistic techniques or areas of science? 00:14:52 JR: Hmm. Actually I loved cartooning. And when I was in high school, I drew cartoons and I sold them to magazines. I would draw them up, you know, aimed at a certain type of magazine and put them in the mail. And sometimes they would buy them for 25 dollars, and sometimes not. Most of the time not. But I did sell some. The first one I sold was to a magazine called Pipeline News. SL: And what was that about, Pipeline News? JR: It was for companies that dug ditches and laid pipes for who knows what. SL: How did you find out about that magazine? JR: I remember, I guess I got a publication for cartoonists that listed all these specialist magazines that would buy cartoons to fill space 00:10:00 in their magazines. And you know, there were men's magazines and industrial magazines. Just all kinds. Sporting magazines and things. So I would just look at them and try to think up jokes. That kept me going for a long time. My mother talked about how I would, as I was falling asleep at night, I would suddenly jump up and write down these jokes and start laughing. Because I had paper and pen next to the bed. SL: And how did you, how did you come upon the idea of selling your work? Did somebody suggest that to you, or- 00:17:10 JR: Well, I really don't know. It might have been Mr. Bergman who encouraged me in that way. I can't say for sure. SL: So do 00:11:00 you know how many or so cartoons you had published in magazines when you were in high school? JR: No, I don't. Not that many. SL: Okay. But you were submitting and getting practice that way. JR: Yeah. I was. SL: So after-oh, I guess I'm curious to know how you decided to go to UW Madison for your bachelor's degree. Did you look at a number of different schools? JR: Well, let's say my family looked at a number of different schools. SL: Okay. 00:17:58 JR: My brother had gone to a small church college in Iowa that's related, because my family is Dutch, the church we went to is called the Reformed Church in America. And it's the Protestant church that the Dutch brought over with them. Not quite as conservative as what's 00:12:00 called the Dutch Reformed, or the Christian Reformed, or the Netherlands Reformed. But it's in that same category a Calvinist-based Protestant church. And so they have some schools of higher education around the country. And my brother went to Central College in Pella, Iowa and studied chemistry. And my parents really wanted me to go there, or to go to a college in Michigan called Hope College, because they were church schools. And they were pretty strong in their faith, in their attachment to the church. On the other hand, somehow in my learning in high school, maybe connected to the science and art, I don't know, I just knew that I wanted a bigger school. And I had friends who were going to apply to Madison. And I just decided that that's where I was going to apply. And I didn't apply anywhere else. SL: Did your parents know that you didn't apply at those other schools? JR: Yeah. Yeah. There were some tears. Yeah. But I knew, somehow I knew, that that's the place that I should be going. So I did. And I ended up getting three scholarships, which helped ease the pain quite a bit. One of them was a local company scholarship that was awarded through the high school. A large metal parts factory gave me, oh, I can't remember how much it was. I think it was a thousand dollars for my freshman year. And it was a freshman-only scholarship. And then I had another scholarship, a tuition scholarship, from the university. And in addition, I was chosen to be in a 00:13:00 scholarship dorm at Madison called Rust House. At the time there were four scholarship dorms, which actually still exist. But they're waiting to be torn down. The two women's dorms are on Johnson, on Johnson and Park. And the men's dorms are on Orchard Street. Rust House and Schreiner House. And so at Rust House, we paid 500 dollars at the beginning of the year for room and board. And it was a cooperative where we did the cleaning and worked in the kitchen. And the only employees were the house mother and the cook. And I think the older students worked as floor RAs and so on. And at the end of the year, we got money back. So they collected 500 dollars at the beginning of the year from everybody. Paid all the expenses for the year. And at the end, whatever was left over they divided up and they gave it to us back. 00:22:27 SL: Oh, that's nice. JR: And I stayed in that dorm for three years. And every year, the rebate at the end of the 00:14:00 year got a little smaller, as prices went up. But with that and a tuition scholarship, it was really inexpensive education. Something no one can match, no kid going to school can find. SL: John, I'm curious. Did you have to apply to get into the scholarship dorm? JR: Yeah. I think I did a general application at that time for scholarship assistance at UW. And then I was put into the system. And that's where they put me. SL: And do you know if the other scholarship dorms had a similar setup, where the students would be contributing and cleaning and that sort of thing? JR: Yeah. All four of these dorms worked that way. Rust and Schreiner and Zoe Bayliss and Susan Davis, those are the names of the women's dorms. And they're not very big. I forget how many students were in each one. But next time you're on the street you can drive by. Look at them and you'll see. And in both cases, there was an eating hall that joins the 00:15:00 two buildings. So residents in both buildings would have all of our meals jointly in the eating hall and work in the kitchen. 00:24:31 SL: Okay. So I understand that you were originally focused on science when you got here. Could you tell us a little bit about the first classes that you were taking here? JR: Sure. Well when I applied to Madison and thought about my future in education, I was thinking of my two main aptitudes, science and art. And really they always had been about equal with me in interest. And I just thought at the time I'd have to go into science, because a person couldn't make a living as an artist. And so I became a chemistry major. And so I started taking, getting chemistry and physics and math I took, I think I started with calculus. I think I had three semesters of calculus. And also I took German. I think I had four semesters of German. Because foreign language was required for the science curriculum. And I hadn't had any language in high school at all. So actually I dove in and I loved the gathering of knowledge and being challenged. That approach to teaching and learning. And high 00:16:00 school was never a real challenge for me. So I found I had to adjust to the higher standards of university teaching and learning. But I think my first semester, my grades maybe weren't too great. But they got better. And I was doing well. I think in my sophomore year, no, maybe my first semester of junior year, sometime in there, I was in organic chemistry lab, four and a half hour labs in the afternoon. And I was doing the work. And I was doing okay in these courses. But I sort of thought to myself, you know if I continue and get this degree, this is what I'll be doing for the rest of my life. And you know, it's actually, it's a little boring. And it's silly that my adolescent brain was still not totally formed. It was a not very bright conclusion. But it's what drove me to rethink what I was doing. Because now I realize 00:17:00 a degree in chemistry could have lead in lots of different directions. But at the time I realized that what I was enjoying the most was an art history course I was taking to fulfill a humanities credit. And so I thought, I kind of struggled for a month or two and decided I was going to change my degree to an art major. And I did that. So I think it was two and a half years of science. And then when I entered the art program, I had to start at the very beginning with all of the first required courses that freshmen take. So it added another year to my undergraduate degree. It took five years. And so I graduated in '68. And I graduated with a B.S. in art because I had so many science credits, instead of a B.A. SL: Oh, okay. 00:29:25 JR: Yeah. So that's what it says on my resume. So about the art department, at that time it was in the education building. And so where basic drawing courses, design and painting were there. I had, I took, I forget which semester, second or third semester, I took the required course of letter, everyone had to take this course in lettering. And I discovered that I loved alphabets, I loved calligraphy, and I loved drawing letters. And I really liked the professor who taught this course. He was Phil Hamilton. And so that semester, the next course that he taught, which was called typography design. And it was actually a letterpress course. Taught in the letterpress shop. SL: John, I'm going to stop you for a minute. JR: Sure. SL: The phone is kind of going in and out a little bit. JR: Oh, okay. SL: Did you move around a little bit, by chance? JR: No. I've been sitting in the same place. SL: You are. Okay. Well, maybe we can just kind of go back a little bit. I got the part where you said that you were taking lettering with Phil Hamilton. And maybe you can kind of start from there. JR: Okay. SL: Is that okay? JR: Sure. So I 00:18:00 took this required course that was called Lettering, required of all art students at the time. And I discovered that I loved alphabets. I loved calligraphy. Drawing letters. Drawing type. And it was, and I loved using text as a visual image. And I really liked the teacher, which was Professor Phil Hamilton. And so the following semester, I took the next course that he taught, which was called Typography and Graphic Design. And it was a letterpress class. It was taught in the letterpress shop. And that shop was in the former journalism building, which is where Ellen C. White Library is now located. And there were two buildings there, the former journalism building and I forget the name of the other one that was actually right on the corner. Anyway, the art department had rooms in these old buildings. And printmaking was in those buildings. And so the same semester that I took Phil's typography and graphic design course, I signed up for screen print and lithography. And I now tell people in speeches that I felt like I had come home when I took those print courses. And realized that printmaking was where I belonged. Before that, really, I started taking art courses. But I had no idea what kind of art I wanted to do. I 00:19:00 didn't know what kind of art really was out there. It was a very limited knowledge. And so when I got into printmaking, it just felt right. And I loved learning screen printing and doing that. That was with Dean Meeker. And lithography with Jack Damer. 00:34:04 And I had previously had a drawing class with Jack Damer. And he was really tough, but really smart. So that semester, I loved taking those courses. So after that, I just took all of the printmaking courses that I could. I took an additional letterpress class with Phil. And I took etching with Warrington Colescott. And it was, and I think I took extra semesters of screen printing. And I can't remember what else. It was like the world opening up for me. I liked them all. SL: Sure. What was it about printmaking that you loved so much? JR: You know, its' really hard to put into words. There's the graphic aspect of putting ink on paper. And the multiples. I loved 00:20:00 printmaking because you made multiples. And they were original, but there's more than one copy. And in the long run, you can make a print and you can sell it and then you can sell it again. And you can show it, and you can show it in more than one place at one time. Your visual ideas on paper can be disseminated to a wider audience, because it's not just a one-off, like a drawing or a painting. And I think, you know, there's a technical aspect to printmaking. There's also a chemical aspect to printmaking. The solvents and inks and things 00:21:00 like that. So maybe with my science background I was naturally drawn to that as well. 00:36:12 SL: Can you talk a little bit more about that? JR: Well, lithography, for instance, printing from limestone. When it was invented by Alois Senefelder, he called it chemical printing. Because the stone surface can accept greasy ink, or it accepts water. We know that water and oil don't mix. And so you establish an image on a stone with greasy crayon or liquid grease and so on, make an image. And then the rest of the stone is treated with water, with gum Arabic and a touch of acid to bite into the stone and establish the non-image area as not accepting oil or grease. And when you wipe the stone with a sponge, you put a thin layer of water fill over it. And when you 00:22:00 roll the brayer or the roller with greasy ink on it, it picks up where the drawing was, only. And you ink it and then dry it, put paper on it, put it through the press, and then do it again. And it's a touchy but marvelous process. So, yeah, all of those things. And etching, of course, taking a plate of metal, coating it with wax, drawing through it with a stylus, putting it in an acid bath so the acid eats down the line that you drew into the metal, making a groove. Later on, the wax is removed, the ink is rubbed into the groove, the depressions in the metal wiped off the surface. And then printed on damp paper under high pressure. And you get a different kind of print than you do with lithography or screen print. Anyway, I loved learning those things. I loved doing them. And the interesting thing about UW Madison's printmaking department, it was called graphics, not printmaking. And it included typography, letterpress, bookmaking and papermaking, and photography. So that all of those media were like grouped under graphics. And as far as I'm concerned, all of visual art is like a spectrum. And you have all of these 00:23:00 different things, which includes Phil's teaching graphic design. It's just the application of letter form and printing to a different purpose. And so as I learned as a student, there were no walls between one kind of art and another kind of art. It was just a spectrum. And I found out later in some schools, the people who teach and learn graphic design don't see themselves as artists. And the people who are artists who would never touch letterforms and type and doing that kind of work. And you find that books and book arts kind of fall in that gray area, so that some people with antiquated ideas about visual art and having the century's old hierarchy of painting, sculpture and ceramics on top of everything else. They can't get their heads around the art of bookmaking involved. But for me, I was lucky. In fact, in some recent lectures that I've given in the last few years about my career, I talked about how lucky I was. When I was in Sheboygan, I went to South High School. We had two high schools. I lived on the south side, so I went there. After I left a couple of years, I read that that high 00:24:00 school was ranked the best one in the state. But what did I know? It was my high school. I went to UW Madison. I knew it was a good school. But when I entered as a chemistry major, I was in one of the top ten chemistry programs in the country. And when I switched to art, I was in one of the top ten art programs in the country. It was my state school. And I sort of lucked out. 00:42:02 SL: Well speaking of going to Madison, what was it like for you coming from Sheboygan to going to school in Madison? What did you think of Madison when you got here? JR: Oh, well, you know, it's this big opening up of going from one city of one type to a very different city. And I guess it has a lot to do, when you first go to college, with having such a huge number of youth around you. People of the same age. And I just found that Madison was this example of what the world offered. That is, there's so many different, so many things to learn. And from a young student's standpoint, somebody on campus was teaching one of those things, no matter what it was. We had all these different people, all these other students. And you realize some are 00:25:00 studying business and some are studying English and writing. And some are this and that. And it's like the spectrum of humanity is sort of opened up to you. So you see it every day. Which doesn't always happen in a small hometown where you stick to people you know. So it was just, as happens to most young college students, it was an opening up for me. You get close to, in the dorm, all these guys from other places and with other interests. Actually, most of the guys in the scholarship dorm were in the sciences. And if we had known about the Asperger's spectrum at the time, we could have identified a number of people there that were on the spectrum 00:26:00 in different places. So they had these odd personalities. And instead of sort of seeing them at school and then going home, like you do when you're at your hometown, here you're living with them. And it's all [unclear] the education doesn't stop. It's all the time. And it was fun. SL: Can you talk a little bit more about that? What were you learning from the people you were living with? 00:45:21 JR: Well, I sort of remember some of the dorm members 00:27:00 who were a year or two years ahead of me. And seeing how they set about studying for, I had to learn how to study, I think, when I went to Madison. Really study in-depth and hard, repeatedly. So I would see how they did that. And how they talked about their disciplines and how they talked about things in general. It was that. There was, because it was a coop, we would work together. And we'd have jobs assigned for cleaning, and jobs for in the kitchen. And you'd have to work with other people. And I had worked in some jobs before, but not in a coop kind of situation. So that was a good learning experience. SL: Thanks, John. I wonder if maybe we could 00:28:00 talk now about what was going on on campus during your undergraduate career. And specifically in October of 1967, there was the demonstration to protest Dow Chemicals' involvement in Vietnam, and I know you were here. Could you talk a little bit about that? 00:47:09 JR: Yeah. I can. And I have to say that I came from a home that was very apolitical. My parents didn't talk much about politics. And I was sort of aware of things in the news, but not a lot. And so my reaction to those first things before the Dow protest there were some free speech things on campus. And that kind of thing was very foreign to me. I responded in a very conservative kind of 00:29:00 way. Reactionary. Because it was disturbing the peace, disturbing the way things should go, should be. That is, everyone's there to study, go to school and so on. And so things like those early protests, which disturbed the, disturbing the peace, just seemed wrong to me. And during this time, I didn't mention before, I was drawing cartoons for the Daily Cardinal. And I did a lot of gag type cartoons, joke cartoons. And sometimes, when those protests happened, I made cartoons that were a negative reaction to the protests. That were non-supportive. And my personal political conversion happened after I left in '68. But before that, I just didn't get what was going on. I didn't have enough knowledge about the Vietnam War and about military. My father wasn't in the military, so we were not a family that had any relation to the military. So I didn't understand that. And I do remember in, I think it was '67 I was taking a photography course. And I went one time for one of those protests, one of 00:30:00 the demonstrations on Baskin Hill, I went up on the roof of Baskin Hall. And I took some photographs of the crowd from up there. And I was just looking at them recently because we went to Madison for the Madison reunion in June. And I remember there's one of the statue of Abraham Lincoln with people all around it, and another one of the crowd. This was black and white photography. So the black and white of the heads so the crowd blends into the black and white of the leaves on the trees. I really like the photograph. But I was there. I was looking down at it. And my understanding of that came, actually, the summer of '68. But before we go there, you had wanted to talk a little bit about the instructors and mentors that I had. SL: Yeah. 00:51:21 JR: I mentioned Phil Hamilton, who became really important to me later on. Deana Meeker. Again, all of these, when I went back for grad school, were teaching, and I worked with them again. Warrington Colescott, Jack Damer. When I was an undergraduate, Bill Weege was working on his master's degree. He was a master's student working on the flatbed litho press. And I hung around and watched him print and watched him do stuff. And one thing that became important to me was during '67, '68, I don't know if it was earlier or not when they were building the humanities building. They had torn down everything on those two blocks, and then put a big construction fence around that whole area. And I remember that construction fence being up with the plywood. And it was several weeks where it was just a plywood fence. And then one night, some guy went down and spray painted a Buddha on-no, I take that back. Somebody had a stencil and they spray painted, "Mourn for Sterling Court," which was the street that got eliminated in the middle of that. And they spray painted that around. And about a day after that, 00:31:00 it was like permission had been given. And all these people went down and started painting on the fence, graffiti. And this one guy did this huge Buddha and all these cartoon characters. And all these other phrases and stuff. And Bill went down and photographed the fence. And documented it. And then he made a long accordion book. He printed these pages and made a very long accordion book of all the phrases on the fence. And that example showed me that art could be about immediate things around me. Not about abstract ideas of form and color and composition and stuff like that, but could be about the news. And the other thing that Bill was doing at the time was a series of offset lithographs that were collages he did of news photographs and diagrams from books. All kinds of stuff that were attacking the administration's waging of the Vietnam War. And he was doing "Impeach Johnson" prints and attacking McNamara. And I saw him do these. It was like things would break in the news one day in the morning. And that night, Bill would be in the shops working on a print, using facts and images from that day's news. And 00:32:00 that told me that art could also be about political ideas, and really immediate things. So those were kind of formative times for me. 00:55:21 I also wanted to mention Jim Watrous, who taught art history. And I had several courses with him, including one that was the art and satire, the art and satire in prints. And we went through the history of printmaking, and how artists in different centuries used printmaking to make social and political statements. And he let me do a paper, a required paper, on the art of Pogo, which was my favorite comic at the time. Which also got political quite often. And that added a lot to my, again, my understanding of graphic art in 00:33:00 all these different dimensions. It involved social, political and other contemporary actions happening with people. And then the last thing about professors there is Walter Hamady. I remember being there when Walter came for his first year. I was in Phil Hamilton's type shop. And Walter set up his own type shop in another room. And he started doing some papermaking. And he was such a confrontational, words fail me, grumpy guy, that-he didn't get along with almost anybody. And he immediately set up this adversarial thing with Phil and his shop. So then Walter would have students working in printing with him. And I remember that he did a satire on the portfolio of prints that the class that I had with Phil did. And it was like, who does that? 00:34:00 Who makes fun of another instructor's class? But that was Walter. And then we can talk later about when I went back for grad school. I think it involved with Walter. But I never took a class from him. SL: How did you feel when you saw that your class' work was being satirized? 00:58:19 JR: It was just kind of, I can't say I was overwhelmed or anything. But it was like, what?! I think I was perceiving mainly that Phil was really offended by that. He was trying to laugh it off, because Phil was always a good-natured guy. But I think I could tell that he was actually offended by that. As he should have been. SL: Well, John, you mentioned that you saw Bill Weege doing an accordion book. And there was papermaking that Walter Hamady was starting. Did you do anything really book-focused when you were an undergraduate? JR: I did one thing with Phil in an advanced class where he printed individual pages. And they were held in a paper 00:35:00 folder. So it was sort of booklike. But there was no binding involved. And I think, yeah. I had classmates who did small single signature sewn booklets in that class. And I happened to do this other one, which wasn't bound. And so, you know, at the end of the class when we presented these projects, we traded with each other those. And I still have one or two of those from the other people. But I didn't do any actual bookmaking at that time. SL: How are you feeling? Do you want to keep going? Or are you getting a little tired? JR: No, I'm good. SL: Okay. 01:00:35 JR: You have my mind back in that time so we might as well go with it. SL: Okay. Great. 00:36:00 So I wonder, then, if you could talk a little bit about what you did in between graduating and then deciding to go back to get your master's. JR: Sure. Well by the spring of 1968, I had accumulated so many credits that I had to graduate with a bachelor's. And all I really wanted to do was continue taking printmaking classes. Because I knew I didn't know enough. But I did finish in June of '68. Bobby Kennedy was shot on my birthday. And I learned about it as I was coming back to my apartment after taking a final. Those were pretty incredible times. And because I graduated, I was called up by the Selective Service for my physical. And so I went to Milwaukee and I had my physical. And I was classified 1A. And if I had, I couldn't go to graduate school that fall because it didn't provide a, what's the word, an exemption from the draft. For undergraduate, you could get an exemption, but not for graduate school. And so I didn't know what I was going to do. And I was scared. I actually, while I was still on campus, I went to a job fair, a career fair, that was in, I don't know where it was. Maybe 00:37:00 in the union. And I happened to stop at this table where there was a junior high principal from Kenosha. And he was looking for someone to teach two classes of art and one class of industrial arts printing. And I was his guy. Because I was graduating with a degree in art. I had done all this art, and I had taken letterpress. And I could teach printing. But I had never taken a class in education. Because I didn't want to be a teacher. So he told me that state law said that if a principal at that time could not find a certified teacher by August first, that they could 00:38:00 hire an uncertified but qualified person to teach. And so in the meantime, I had my physical. I got classified. And I painted houses for, with another guy, for two months. And on August second he called me and said I had the job. And that gave me a deferment from my draft board for being a school teacher. Because the Sheboygan draft board had no problems meeting their quotas of young men. So they gave that deferment for teachers. Some draft boards didn't. I was lucky. I was lucky that I ran into this guy. I was lucky that I was able to get the deferment. 01:04:51 And so in the end of August, I think the last week in August, I was in Kenosha, in a house that was occupied by other male teachers from the Kenosha Public Schools. They weren't here, but I 00:39:00 was there early for the orientation that new teachers have to undergo. And so I'm sitting in this house in the last week of August 1968 watching the Democratic Convention in Chicago live, and I'm seeing people being beaten by the police in the street for protesting the war. And that was my political conversion. I saw that happening and I didn't know what to do. I very nearly jumped in my car and drove to Chicago, because it's 30 miles away, to join in what was going on down there. And then, at the junior high where I taught, there was a history professor, or a history teacher, who was a pretty progressive guy. And he and I became friends. 00:40:00 And he sort of helped me along in the development of a political attitude with this young guy who's just sort of come to his senses and realized what's going on. And a year later, maybe two years later, he and I organized the moratorium march in Kenosha. When all over the country there were moratorium marches, the purpose of which was to demand a moratorium on the war after they had revealed that we had been bombing Cambodia for a long time. And there was an outage and an uproar about that. So I taught at Washington Junior High in Kenosha for a year. And at the end of the year, or actually earlier than that, I found out that I could get my certificate renewed if I took education courses. So in the spring of '69, I took two courses 00:41:00 at UW Parkside at night. And my certificate was renewed for the following year. My deferment was renewed. I got married in July of '69. And for a honeymoon, we traveled in Europe for six weeks. The first time I flew. The first time I was abroad. So that was an eye opener. We went to London, Brussels, Amsterdam, Cologne, Rhine, Munich, Salzburg, Vienna, Venice, Vicenza, Rome, Paris, London and home. I taught again that year. Took two more courses at UW Parkside. Got my deferment renewed and my certificate renewed for a third year. And at the end of my third year of teaching, I turned 26 and I was no longer eligible for the draft. And that's when I planned to come back to Madison for grad school. So I entered in fall of '71. And do you want to 00:42:00 pause here or anything? Or do you have questions before I go on? 01:09:25 SL: Well I wondered if you want to talk a little bit about how you met your wife? JR: We met in Madison, late in '66. And we dated. She's a year younger than I am. She's two years younger than I am. So she graduated with her bachelor's in history in June of 1969. And a common friend of ours from Rust House introduced us and set up our first date. So we saw each other. Before I graduated, I went and taught in Kenosha while she finished her last year. I would drive back and forth to Madison every now and then on weekends to see her. And then after she graduated, we got married. SL: And it sounds like there's a lot of stuff going on at the time. When did you decide to get married? How did you decide that? JR: (laughs) I think, yeah, I think it was the fall of 1968 we decided to. And then we got married in July of '69. SL: Okay. And I'm curious. That honeymoon was pretty elaborate. Did you go on a tour? Or did one of you or both of 00:43:00 you plan it? JR: We did it together. We had the books Europe on $5 a Day, and we were so naive. There were some days when we actually did five dollars a day. But we ran out of money at one point and had to wire for more. And it was a time before cell phones and the internet and everything. So we would just get to a city and look in the book for, and the map, for where hotels were located. And we'd find the hotel, find out how much it cost, decide whether we could stay there or not. Often, not. Walk around to find another one until we found a price that we felt we could afford. It was the same thing with restaurants. We would go from one to another 00:44:00 and look at the menus. Did a lot of walking. And we were in Belgium, we got married on July fifth. And then drove to New Jersey where my brother was living at the time. And left our car there. And flew from New York to London. So we were in Brussels on July, I forget the date, July 16th, maybe? Fifteenth, sixteenth, when we walked out on the street and saw a newspaper stand that said, "Men on the Moon." So all of America watched these guys go to the moon and step out, and we missed it. Yeah. It was quite a time. SL: And did you, from the get go, plan on going to all of the different cities? Or did you kind of, how did it happen? Because it sounds like you visited quite a lot of places. JR: Yeah. (laughs) You know, I don't remember the 00:45:00 planning. But we did. We had planned it, for instance, from Cologne we took the boat on the Rheine. And we were going to take it all the way to Munich. But we got off in a little town called Bingen, because it was very picturesque. And we stayed overnight there. And then we took the train to, because we had Euro passes. We went to Munich and there was something going on in Munich at the time that we didn't know about. And all of the lodging prices were like triple what they had been listed in the book. And we realized that we couldn't stay there. So we got on the train, we never stayed, we got on the train and went to our next stop, which was Salzburg. And spent an extra day or two there. So it was sort of planned. And also, Linda's older brother was in the army. He was a dentist in the army. And he was stationed in Vicenza, Italy at the time, where there's an American base. So the plan was for us to eventually get to, I think they met us in Venice when we got there and then took us to Vicenza. We spent some 00:46:00 days with them and drove with them to Rome and back again. Which saved our budget immensely. 01:15:20 And then when we left him, we went to Paris. And Linda's brother Mac was married to a Vietnamese woman. And her uncle lived in Paris and was a musical performer. Performed in bars and nightclubs. So when we got there, we were met by him and his family. And they just treated us like celebrities. So we had a place to stay, and they had big meals for us and everything. And that was our introduction to Paris. It was the Vietnamese community in Paris. SL: That makes me wonder in general how did you feel people received you in Europe as an American traveling during all of the kind of tumultuous times and what was going on? JR: There weren't any problems in all of Europe. When we got to Paris, once we established with them that we did not support the 00:47:00 war, everything was good. Yeah. SL: Okay. Well, thank you. This was really interesting to hear about your trip, your honeymoon trip. Do you want to talk a little bit about how then you got into grad school? I know you're talking about kind of waiting until you could actually apply. Can you talk a little bit more about like then finally getting there? JR: Yeah. Well I actually applied to grad school in my last semester of undergrad. And I was accepted. And then when I realized that I couldn't go, I deferred. And they said that was fine. And they sort of held my acceptance for three years until I came back. And then I was, I entered. SL: Okay. And did you kind of have a plan for what you wanted to start, what kind of classes or who you wanted to study with right away? 01:18:02 JR: Well I knew that I wanted to do more of everything. So I 00:48:00 contacted Phil right away and he eventually became my major professor for my committee, the chair of my committee. And I worked again, I did more screen printing. So that meant I was under Meeker. I did more litho with Jack and I did more etching with Warrington. And I took classes with Weege, because he was now on the faculty. And he was teaching dark room techniques, photo technology and offset lithography. So I took classes with him. And at this point, I should talk about when I was teaching junior high. I did some of my own work. I just experimented. Because I 00:49:00 just had these ideas. So for instance when I had to teach ceramics to my ninth grade class, there were actually two and a half art teachers at this junior high school. And the other fulltime teacher had been a ceramics major. So when I got to the unit on ceramics, Bill came and did all of the introductory explanations and demonstrations with my students. And then I just supervised them as they made their ceramics. And I think Bill did the firing. SL: Bill was the other teacher at the junior high? JR: The other teacher, yeah. Bill [Hoppy?], yeah. So while my students were 00:50:00 making their ceramic pieces, you know, ashtrays and other stuff, I rolled out clay slabs. Because I had never had ceramics as an undergrad. So I was learning along with my students. And I made slab clay and then I cut it in the shape of comic balloons. And I made these sort of comic balloon plaques and fired them. And then I did underglaze and fired them. And I started screen printing glaze on these plaques, because they were flat. And so I experimented with screen printing and ceramics. And I made a whole, actually a whole body of work of screen printed ceramic comic balloons that would hang on the wall. 01:21:22 And then in the shop in this school, they had a vacuform machine for vacuforming plastic in the shapes that they would show the 00:51:00 students and have them do little trays and things like that. So I started investigating screen printing inks that were made for vacuforming. And I screen printed on flat plastic, put it into the machine, and formed it over shapes that I had made. So I did dimensional plastic screen prints. And I also did some where there were plastic shapes that poked out of paper prints that I had printed and then cut shapes and holes out of, so that the plastic could stick out from the back. And I did a whole series of those prints. And one summer, I didn't have the money for paper. So I bought a box of 100 Band-Aids. And I used that special plastic ink and I screen printed four different editions of Band-Aid prints, little tiny things. SL: Oh, wow. JR: Yeah. So one of them had a little [hut?] landscape on it that was actually a Vietnamese landscape, and the words on it said "Heal and care." And then I did one with three images of Salvador Dali in different colors. And I did one that, let's see, what was it like, I can't remember. So I had these Band-Aid prints. And with all of this stuff, I was just experimenting. Taking what I had learned previously and trying out new stuff. Oh, and then, I was reading in this 00:52:00 professional printing magazine that a company in Pennsylvania had developed an edible ink for screen printing. And it was for the candy industry. So, you know, the Valentine hearts that say "Love Me" on them in some cases is screen printed. And that's an ink that's edible. And my mind just got taken by that idea. So I wrote to the company and they sent me a free sample jar of red edible ink. And so I found, I did some experiments and I found a sugar cookie recipe that you rolled so it's pretty flat. And I would bake them. And then I would screen print with this edible ink on them. And I made edible prints. So I did a number of those. And just about that point, came to the end of my third year of teaching. And I went back to 00:53:00 Madison. And when I did, that fall semester of '71, I was talking to Phil one day and he said, "You know, the gallery on the seventh floor is empty right now. There's nothing scheduled." He said, "Do you have anything that you can show?" So I put all of my ceramic pieces in there. I put the vacuform pieces and a couple of other screen prints, and I think the Band-Aids. And I think the edibles. And it was, you know, I had just done all these pieces. But to see them all together in a show was something else. Phil still jokes that I came for grad school and I put up what could have been a master's exhibition the first week. Which isn't true, of course, it wasn't that good. But it was pretty interesting for all 00:54:00 the other new grads who were there at the time for them to see what I was coming in with. With all this work. Because I was a little bit older than some of them. And a sort of side story that I heard years later is in New York City there's this press run by-oh, man, names are, I'm losing the names. The Purgatory Pie Press. And it's Esther Smith and Dikko Faust. And Dikko, who's I think from New York, was in Madison that fall, looking at the school to consider going there for his undergraduate. And he said that when he walked into the gallery and he saw that show of work and he saw my name, he said, "I want to go to this school." And he did. And years later he told me that that's what made him go to Madison. 01:27:37 SL: 00:55:00 That's very nice. JR: Yeah. Anyway, so that was sort of my preparation. And so when I went into my graduate study, and I guess I should say by the way that while I was teaching school, my wife Linda was teaching at the public library in Kenosha. And then when we moved to Madison, she got a job at the Madison Public Library. And because I had worked those years and Linda was working, I just went to grad school. I didn't worry about the finances the way students today do. Loans and side jobs and everything just wasn't a question of that. So I started my 00:56:00 classes that fall. And I had, I kept doing what I had been doing. I started a whole series of new edible prints. I think the first set that I did were six-inch circles that I cut with like a coffee can. And they were called Heal and Care as a series. And I screen printed a box, a square box that I bought from a box company with the words Heal and Care on it. And each one had those words and then a different image. One image was two US fighter planes dropping bombs over Vietnam. And another image was an aerial view of a traffic interchange that was just totally 00:57:00 jumbled up. And there was one that had an image of a Band-Aid, a pink Band-Aid printed on this round cookie. And it said Heal and Care. And on the Band-Aid there were red spots where they'd filled with blood. And when I showed those at one point I remember people saying they actually got physically nauseous looking at a cookie that they knew was edible printed with edible ink and it had a bloody bandage on it. It just made them sick. And I remembered that because it just struck me that something could have that kind of power, a visual image of a material source could have that kind of power. And as you'll see when we talk about work 00:58:00 that I did later on, that comes into play again. SL: Yeah. Well I think that's a good stopping point, John. JR: Okay. 01:31:02 First Interview Session (August 6, 2018): Digital File 00:00:00 SL: Today is Monday, August 6, 2018. I'm Sarah Lang with the oral history program at UW Madison. I'm talking with John Risseeuw, printmaker, book and paper artist, UW alum, and founder of Cabbage Head Press. John is speaking from Tempe, Arizona. And I'm at the University Archives in Steenbock Library. This is the second session we're recording for the project UW Madison Book Arts and Oral History. So, John, last time we talked you were talking about the edible print, or edible ink that you were using in your printmaking. And you were talking about an exhibition that you put on kind of at the very beginning of your graduate studies here at UW Madison. Could you tell us a little bit more about what you did as a grad student here? JR: Sure. So when I entered grad school at Madison, and I put up that exhibit of work I'd been doing in the meantime, the thing I was most excited about was the edible inks and the edible prints. So I started screen printing a number of series of edible prints held in boxes and in plastic bags. And I did one series where the cookies were shaped like gingerbread 00:59:00 men. And I vacuum formed plastic trays to hold those gingerbread men shaped cookies so that they wouldn't break, because they're a little fragile. And on each of them, there were three of these cookies per tray. I printed the name of the person that was depicted. And then under the head I printed, screen printed on plastic, the face of the person who was printed on the cookie in edible ink. And I did a hand-wrapped box that held three trays of people cookies, and then there was one large rectangular cookie that was a title cookie. And it said, "These are some people I really admire. I really eat them up." (laughter) And that was my people box. And around that time, I took my gingerbread men cookie cutter made some cookies, and I printed a 01:00:00 Nixon cookie with his face. He was wearing jockey shorts and he had a bomb for a tie and bombs on his legs and arms. And a button on his chest that said "Me in '72." And I went down to the campus mall, to the library mall, and I made a little stand with a sign that said, "Eat Nixon. $1." And a lot of people stopped to look at him. And they really liked him. But I didn't sell very many. Because at that time, a dollar was way too much to pay for a cookie. And people told me if I had dipped them in plastic, they would have bought them. And I said, "That's not the idea. The idea here is that it's totally edible, and you should eat this guy and then get rid of him." So that was my foray into campus politics. With my art. And then, I also learned from Bill Weege to use the flatbed offset press. And I did a series of four very large prints that were giant photo collages. And they were folded up and went into a hand-wrapped slip case that I made. So I was doing a little bit of box making, learning some of the techniques of binding by doing those projects. SL: John, when you said those prints were very large, like do you have a rough idea of how big they were? 00:04:48 JR: Yeah. I'm pretty sure they were 30 inches by 40 inches. Maybe a little bigger. Maybe 36 by 50. SL: Okay. JR: It was sort of the maximum size of the bed of that press. And then I did some other lithographs while working with Jack Damer again in lithography. Oh, and also, I did a series of collagraphs in the etching studio with screen print and embossment. And then in the summer after my first year in grad school, I had an exhibit of all of that mixed work in Union South. And that 01:01:00 was my MA exhibit. I chose to do the MA. Then I continued doing oral work for the following year when I got my MFA. And I started doing more vacuum forming because I found that Ernie Mall, who taught sculpture up on the seventh floor, had built a vacuum form machine from his own design. And after I had looked at it, I figured out how I could make my own wooden device that clamped into the frame of his machine, so I could put my printed plastic into my frame, clamp it down in place, and bring it down over a mold. And I could do multiples in that way. So I was still doing edibles at the time. So the first print I did was the shape of a textured moon bulging out of 01:02:00 this 20 by 24 inch plastic. And below it, there was a four-cookie sequence of a moon rocket taking off. And the cookies were in two rectangular depressions that were formed into plastic. So the idea was that the print could hang on the wall. You could eat the cookies and you would still have the print. So I did the moon. And the next one I did was the earth. So I formed this bulging hemicircle that came out of plastic with depressions for the continents. And my cookies were the different continents that could be removed. And underneath there were fingertips sticking out 01:03:00 with string that formed a cat's cradle. And there was a quote from Kurt Vonnegut in there that said no damn cat, no damn cradle. And a third one was a similar print with a galaxy and a sky or starts. And I had star cookies in there. And I was starting to feel like the prints were becoming more important than the cookies. But I did do another print that was called, actually I don't remember what it was called offhand. But it was a three-dimensional landscape of Vietnam. And in the sky there's a B-52 bomber dropping bombs. And in depressions, there are bomb cookies. And on the road in the foreground, there's a depression with a dead baby 01:04:00 cookie. And I was working with that idea that I talked about last time of printing something in edible inks on a cookie that's edible that is repulsive. A lot of people reacted to that. SL: Can you talk a little bit more about that, John? Did you get any responses directly from people? 00:09:25 JR: Yeah. Well, people would often just react with kind of revulsion. And the idea, I could see that it was all mental. Looking at, just like looking at that Band-Aid cookie that I talked about last time. Looking at these cookies that had bombs or a dead baby, the whole mental image of an edible object that was so repulsive brought all of those issues of the war and the atrocities and everything right to the surface. And people didn't necessarily talk about 01:05:00 it at the time, but I knew that that connection had been made. And I think in some later work that we may have time to talk about, I did the same kind of thing. Where there's a visceral connection to a visual image and knowledge of where it's come from or what it's made out of that has quite a bit of impact on a person's thinking. So I continued, at that time I dropped making the cookies and I just made a whole series of vacuform prints with screen printing and with offset lithography. And they became my MFA show in July of, or maybe it was August, of 2013. Or 1973. And I did do one final set of edible cookies for that show. Round, six-inch round circles. And I pressed type into the cookie before it was baked. So I impressed type and put 01:06:00 words into the cookie. And after they were baked, I screen printed onto them. And those cookies were all treated as if they were letters to different people. And one of them said, let's see, "Dear Dick," and it was to Nixon, and it said, in the embossed, impressed letters, it said, "Up yours." And then screen printed underneath, it said, "Sincerely." There were, I think, six or eight of those. So the other thing that was in my show was my first book. In the previous summer, I had been friends with Walter Hamady. I didn't take any class with him, but I had hung around his studio, and we were friends. And 01:07:00 he offered, made a deal with me, if over that summer of '72 if I would build him a new vat and a [couching stool?], he would give me sort of the basics of using the Hollander beater and making paper. So I did that, and he gave me the real rudiments of making handmade paper. And then in the fall semester, he was on leave and Joe Wilfer took his place. And Joe also allowed me to make paper. Which was all done in the sixth floor corner room where Walter had his studio at that time. The beater was in a closet. And the press was in a niche in the wall. And the vat was out 01:08:00 in the room where the presses were. And Walter's rule for paper making was that there would be no water on the floor. And all the water had to be caught. That was drained off and so on. So I learned to make paper very efficiently and cleanly. And I really didn't know what I was doing, I have to say. It was years later, when I started teaching papermaking myself, that I learned the science of paper making and a lot of other things. But that's a different story. So I made paper from blue jeans after I had made first batches of rag paper that was greatly 01:09:00 underbeaten. Very raggy, thready papers, which I printed letterpress anyway, and had great fun making some broadsides. And I took the denim paper and I printed with photo offset and I embossed images in it from underwear. And I made a book called The Politics of Underwear. And each page, or every other page, had either an embossment or a printed image of underwear. And throughout the book it said things like, "The bra strap of America is broken. Please fix it." "America's underpants have brown stains in the back. Please change them." And so on and so on. And at the end it says, "America needs help. Please help. Please fix it." Or something like that. And it was kind of a big format book. Some of the first binding that I had ever done. And it was an artist book when I didn't even know the term "artist book." And so that book was in my MFA show. And for the printing of that book, I came up 01:10:00 with the name Cabbage Head Press because I wanted to have a press name either on the title page or on the colophon page. And the name came about as, I guess I was at home saying I need a name for this press and talking with my wife. And for some reason, she was talking about how when she was a kid with her sisters and brothers, they had all these names for each other. Noodle Head and Space Head and things like that. And Cabbage Head was one of them. It just kind of grabbed me. I thought it was a great sort of, it's a catchy name. As I find through the years, I've found people really remember Cabbage Head. And it's sort of a reminder of not to take this enterprise too seriously. So I stuck with it. And that's the beginning. SL: So then you finished your MFA degree. What did you do next? 00:17:27 JR: Well, I applied for a number of 01:11:00 printmaking positions at various colleges and universities. And I didn't get any bites. So that fall, Bill Weege hired me to be studio assistant out at his Jones Road print shop, because he had some collaborative projects going with other artists. So I went out there just about every day. And I helped him build a studio in the barn, and finish building his dark room. I helped him do some prints with Jack [Beetle?] and Sam Richardson, some really beautiful prints on shaped handmade paper. And a few other things. And then, I think it was by the end of that year, by Christmas, he was sort of out of projects and he couldn't keep me on. So I got a job at a commercial printing company in Madison, Strauss Printing on East Washington. And I worked in the bindery running folding machines, mainly. And I did that job for about a year. And through that job, I learned a great deal about the commercial printing industry. The press room, the bindery. 01:12:00 We did books, paperback books, folded the sections for books and stacked them together. And all of the operations of a large commercial printing company. And after a year of that, I quit and I became the staff artist at the Madison Public Library. And at the library, I used most of the skills that I acquired up to that point. I hand lettered signs that went in the library telling patrons of something or other. The library had a couple of branches, so I screen printed signs and posters that would be used in all of the libraries. I used a small offset litho press they had there to run off lists of, book lists that the librarians came up with that were handed out 01:13:00 at the desk, and newsletters and things like that. And it happened that the library was celebrating its centennial that year. And they had commissioned a woman to write the history of the Madison Public Library. And I designed it for printing. So I designed the format and everything. It went to the printers, it came back. And they had made some errors in the way it had been both printed and the way the sections had been folded before it was bound. And I could see the flaws in it because I had been in the print shop for a year. So when I showed it to the director of the library and I pointed out these flaws, it got sent back to the printer and they had to reprint. And it was done right the second time. So I got all of this sort of experience at the more commercial design-oriented applications of the graphic processes. Finally, after six or eight months at the library, I got an interview. And in summer of 1975, I got my first teaching job at the University of South Dakota. SL: And John, was it your intention, I think last time you mentioned that you wanted to teach. Were you looking for teaching jobs in particular? JR: Yeah. I 01:14:00 think last time I mentioned that after my bachelor's degree, I didn't want to teach. And the idea of teaching in public school was kind of foreign to me until it just kind of happened. By the time I finished my graduate degree, I realized that I wanted to teach at that level. So that's when I started applying for university and college level teaching job. SL: Okay. Thank you for clearing that up. Could you tell us a little bit, then, about your position and move to South Dakota, and what that was like? 00:22:52 JR: Sure. Actually, when I was hired at South Dakota, it was a split hire. I was hired to work half time in the university media center doing graphic design. And the other half was teaching printmaking in the School of Art, department of art in the College of Fine Arts. And after a year of doing that, the chair of the 01:15:00 art department told the director of the media program that I was too valuable, and he wanted me to work fulltime as a teacher. And in that first year, I designed and manually assembled the graduate catalog and the undergraduate catalog for University of South Dakota. And they actually won prizes at a collegiate design competition. SL: Nice. JR: Yeah. And the other story is that when I got to South Dakota, they sort of wanted me to teach design. And because I had worked with Phil Hamilton, I wanted to teach it from a letterpress shop. And they didn't have any there. 01:16:00 So I had sent out letters to all of the printers in quite a large circumference of Vermilion looking for used equipment. And I got a letter back from a large printing company in Sioux Falls. And they said that they had a printing company that they had purchased in another city in South Dakota. And that the lithographic part of it was running, but that the letterpress part had been basically just mothballed. And that I could go up there and take all of the letterpress equipment I wanted for free. SL: Wow. 00:25:14 JR: And when I went to the dean's office with that, they said, "Well, that's great. But we don't have any money for moving." But what they did was South Dakota has a prisons industry program for their prisons. And they have a semi-truck that takes the products that they make in prisons, whatever that is, and moves them around. And they said, "We can arrange for the prison's semi to be in Aberdeen for three days. And then it will bring whatever you put in it to Vermilion." And so I went up there with another faculty member and four students. And we loaded up this semi with presses, 01:17:00 type, paper cutter and all kinds of stuff. It was a letterpress shop that had been in existence since 1889. And had done all of the printing and binding for the state of South Dakota, which was in Pierre. So there was so much equipment, we couldn't bring it all back. But we brought 33 tons' worth. And they brought it back to Vermilion. And then we had to unload it as well. So that was the first letterpress shop that I set up. And I started teaching that and I also taught screen print at South Dakota. SL: And were you teaching undergraduate students or graduate students or kind of a mix of both? JR: It was all undergraduate students, because at that time, USD did not have a graduate art program. SL: Okay. And had, what were the students like? Did they have printmaking, previous printmaking experience? JR: No. It was really interesting. The state, at that time, the state of South Dakota had 750,000 residents total. And it's a huge state. 01:18:00 A lot of small towns. Not even cities, just towns. And very small schools, or school systems. Some of them didn't have art. So we would have students coming in to the university as freshmen, entering as art majors, who had either little or no art training before. They simply had the idea that they had some art talent. And the great thing about that was that they knew they didn't know anything. And they were like open books. You could just pour information into them. You could just give them all of this experience and knowledge in various media, and they just soaked it up. And they also had great work ethic. So we worked the undergraduate almost like grad students at time. The better students were in the studios all the time making stuff. And some of them just had terrific BFA shows. And then went on to do MFAs at other schools. And some of them are teaching elsewhere today, or they're working in the arts. SL: And John, how 01:19:00 long did you end up staying at the University of South Dakota? 00:29:22 JR: I taught there for three years. And then Bill Weege went on sabbatical in Madison. And I applied for and got his replacement position for the year. So we moved back to Madison. And I taught Bill's classes in photo techniques and offset. And I also taught lettering, interestingly. And my wife took the opportunity to take courses in library science and worked on her master's in library. Because she had worked, as I said, at the Madison Public Library. When we went to Vermilion, she worked at the Vermilion Public Library. So we did that for a year and then moved back to South 01:20:00 Dakota. And I taught for one more year. And during the time I was in South Dakota, the other printmaker was Lloyd Menard, who many people know as organizing and founding the Frogman's Print Symposium. And Lloyd managed to arrange for having two visiting printmakers a semester come to South Dakota. And we, the two of us and the students would work with the visiting artists to produce a print edition. And the students just learned so much by printing with an artist like that. And one of them was Wayne Kimball, who I knew from Madison, who had taught for Jack Damer for one semester when I was in grad school. And Wayne came and at the time I think he was, he had just started teaching at ASU. And so we sort of renewed our friendship. And after he left, he phoned me in the fall, sorry, the spring of 1980. And he said ASU just created a new position in print for a typographer. He said, "I think you'd be great for the position, and you 01:21:00 should apply." SL: John, could you say that again? What was the position? JR: The position was actually identified on paper as typographer, parentheses, fine art. SL: Okay. JR: And what they wanted was someone to teach letterpress and book arts within the printmaking program. So they didn't want typographer as graphic designer; they wanted it as book artist. And I should say that that position was created by the dean, who was Jules Heller, a printmaker himself, and a paper maker. And the chair of the art department was Leonard Lehrer, who was a printmaker. And they created this new position for the art department. And I interviewed for the 01:22:00 job. I flew in on Memorial Day, I remember. So no one was on campus. They interviewed me. And the next day I flew out. And I got the job. I spent the summer painting our house in Vermilion to sell it. And then we moved. SL: So that must have been pretty exciting to be able to start a new program at Arizona State University. Could you talk a little bit more about that? JR: Sure. So when I came to Arizona State, there was an empty basement room that they said was my room. They gave me capital expenditure money for three years in order to acquire equipment. And I started finding used presses and type and other things, like a printer's saw and paper cutter and so on. And I gradually started putting together a letterpress shop. While I was doing that, I taught screen printing and I taught a typography class for the graphic design department. And I think it was a year and a half later, I taught my first class in letterpress, which we titled Fine 01:23:00 Printing and Book Making. And that's the course that I taught for [unclear] gradually adding more and more equipment to that inventory of presses and such. There was a local newspaper that I visited in Tempe that had an old, had a Vandercook proof press and some type that they had used to use, and of course weren't using at the time. And they had just pushed it to the back of their press room. And when I came around asking, they said I could have it. So that moved in. There was a typographer in Phoenix, metal typographer, who had lots of stuff. And he was just starting to get rid of type and other things as he was converting to computer composition. 00:36:10 SL: And what year is this, about? JR: Well, I started here in 1980. So I think it was 01:24:00 1981 or two when I taught my first class. And continued then after that. And then after about five years or so, turned out that there was a paper mill on campus that Jules Heller had set up when he came. Because when he came to the campus in 1976, he was working on his book called Paper Making, the first book on contemporary hand paper making. And when he came as a new dean, he found this room and he got beaters and presses and other equipment. And he taught paper making to grad students for a few semesters. And then stopped and the grad students taught other students until I came. And so once I got the type shop going, I started teaching paper making on an annual 01:25:00 basis. And had, you know, a full book arts program going. SL: Did you have other staff then, also, in the book arts program? Or were you teaching most of the classes? JR: I was teaching them all myself. And in 1987, the chair said I really needed assistance. And he created a staff position for the press. And that was filled by Dan Mayer, who's still at ASU. And I guess I should mention that in 1982, when the letterpress shop was fully functional, I fulfilled the other charge that I'd been given when I got the job. And that was to found a publishing press in the School of Art. And that's when I founded the Pyracantha Press. And in 1984, we published the first publication from Pyracantha Press. And that was a new edition of 01:26:00 Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. SL: And can you talk a little bit more about the kind of projects that Pyracantha Press produced? Because there was the Silver Buckle Press here at UW Madison. I don't know if it did similar projects, or what kinds of projects you did in Arizona. JR: Yeah, I don't think so. The projects that I undertook were, first of all, I made it really clear when I started the press that the press functioned in part as my research activity. So I was responsible for the decisions on what the publications would be. And I would 01:27:00 carry them out. They weren't, as happens at some colleges, where the students as part of their classwork participate in producing publications under the press name. And in our case, all of the publications were executed by me and later by Dan and sometimes with a graduate assistant. But the students, the undergraduate students, didn't have any hand in the press work. They sometimes saw what we were doing. But they didn't participate in the publication. And the ideas for the publications came up by, sometimes by serendipity. It happened shortly after I started the press that the university was celebrating its centennial. And the president had set up a fund of money to celebrate, to fund centennial projects on campus. And they were kind of different, depending on where they came from on campus. But I applied for it and the first one, the Venus and Adonis, was applied jointly with the professor in the department of English who was a Shakespeare specialist. And he did a new editing of the original text for our edition. And that was funded by the president's office. And there was another project that came was an edition 01:28:00 of poems by James Dickey. And there was a woman in the communications department who knew Dickey and was doing a stage production of his poetry with new music and recitation. And then when she found out that the press was in operation, she got Dickey's permission for me to print the limited edition of this new body of work. And that was funded in that way, too. And for both of those projects, I used the funding to buy new type- SL: Okay. JR: --for the printing of the projects. And then when they were done, the type went into the inventory of the shop for 01:29:00 teaching. And I did that several times throughout the career of the press. There was another book by a creative writer at ASU, Alberto Rios was a- 00:42:37 SL: (noise) Sorry about that. JR: --young writer who had gotten some awards, and we did a book with him. And at the same time, in the printmaking area, there were also collaborations going on where we would bring artists, sometimes printmakers, sometimes not, into working the print studios with, we had a staff printer who did lithography and other media. And they did editions of prints as well. And at some point, 01:30:00 and then we also had Mark Klett, who was a nationally known photographer who at the time was running a photo studio that was a collaborative photo studio. And we would work with visiting photographers to do editions of photographs, photo media. And at some point, we combined all three of those, photo, Pyracantha and printmaking, and called it the Visual Arts Research Studios. And we got some grants in 1987, we got some National Endowment grants, for dual artist collaborations. We found that we were actually looking at the process of collaboration and documenting it while these people were working with us and with each other to do sets of prints, photographs, portfolios, and the press provided folios and binding and letterpress editions through the work that was being done. So that's where one of the pieces that the UW Libraries holds in the Kohler Art Library, by Walter Askin comes from. It's A Briefer 01:31:00 History of the Greeks. And that's a portfolio of lithographic prints with letterpress added to each print. And so a joint media collaboration with Walter. 00:45:11 SL: And did you share your insights into the collaborative process with other artists? JR: Well, yeah. We documented that. We did some publications, some catalogs of collaborative work from the research studios. And I wrote a brief essay for one. [Jules?] wrote an essay. I think Leonard wrote an essay, and so on, about collaboration. SL: And was this part of the agreement to receive the funding that you would do that? JR: Yeah. SL: Yeah. JR: Yeah. SL: And you mentioned that you were in charge of choosing the projects for the Pyracantha Press. JR: Mm hmm. SL: I'm just kind of curious like if you had any, other than like certain projects coming to you, did you have kind of a vision or direction for the press that you wanted to go in? JR: At the beginning, I chose projects that were sort of basically, and book arts would fall under fine printing. Like the edition of Shakespeare, and James Dickey's poems. And I also early on did a play that was written for the ASU Theater Department about an incident in Arizona history. So it had not been published before. The writer came to ASU, worked with the theater department, and then produced this play. And then I designed it, set it by hand, and printed it in a limited edition. So it's literature in fine print. And at some point, I sort of realized that with the other artists who were coming in, we were doing much more experimental and more conceptual ideas were going on. And I also realized that at that time, there were a fair number of other presses in the country doing fine printing. Really good, substantial work in that kind of work. And it came to 01:32:00 me that a press within the university should be doing more than that. We should be pushing some boundaries and making the publication of book work and book arts with however, whatever form that takes, making that into research. So I remember at one point a development officer from the dean's office came to the press. And he got a little tour and saw the things that we did. And he was all excited. And he said, "You know, you could probably print bookmarks for us that we could give to donors." And I said to him, "You know, that's like telling someone who has a chemistry lab that they should make Silly Putty." (SL laughs) "It doesn't have any value, any academic research value." And he never came back. So in the 01:33:00 '90s, we kind of moved into projects that were publications, a little more experimental. Like in 1990, actually before 1990, Dan Mayer had gone to Hungary to visit relatives. And he met some artists there and a poet. And this was right after the Soviet Union had fallen apart and the communist control of Hungary had fractured. And so we got a grant to bring in the poet and two visual artists from Hungary to spend a month with us and do a collaboration. And when they came, we said, "It's wide open. We work with you and your ideas, and we'll figure out what to do." And it turned out that they were the worst collaborators in the world. And what we learned was that even artists under socialism become very self-protective and closed off, and 01:34:00 they don't collaborate with other people. They don't share ideas. Because you have to protect everything you can. So I won't go into a long detail about that. But in the end, we sort of forced them into a situation where we produced three booklets that went into a slipcase that visually and textually represented each of their conceptual ideas. And it was painful. And then after they left, it took four years for us to produce this rather large project. And in 1994, Dan took the edition to Budapest, met with them for the signing, gave them each their portion of the edition and then brought our portion back. And it was a valuable learning experience on our search for evaluating collaboration. And a great project, actually. SL: How did 01:35:00 they respond when they saw the editions that Dan brought? 00:51:54 JR: They liked it, but they immediately started fighting amongst themselves over who was going to control the distribution of the books. Because they saw some kind of power there. And the idea, when we collaborate, we divide the edition between us and the artist. Or if it's multiple artists, they all get part of it. And then it's up to them to sell, distribute, give away, whatever they want to do with their edition. And they weren't about to see it that way. So at that point, Dan walked out of the room and made his way home. SL: (laughs) Do you have a story about maybe a really successful collaboration? It doesn't have to be with Pyracantha Press. I mean, it could be a book that you worked on that you were really happy with how it went. JR: Sure. Yeah. There are several projects in the '90s that I'm really pleased with. One of them was in 1995, I think, I was invited by, I think it was the Friends of Dard Hunter, which is the national paper making group, association, to produce a collaboration in handmade paper for a conference that 01:36:00 happened in New York at Cooper Union in '96. And there were five different invitations that went out. And for mine, I asked Margaret Prentiss, who makes paper and teaches printmaking, at that time, anyway, at the University of Oregon, to be my collaborator. And together, we came up with, after throwing several different ideas around, we came up with a book idea called Spirit Land. And in the book, it has sort of like two halves. And it's on handmade paper. My paper is made from Arizona plant fibers. And hers are made from Oregon plant fibers. And then I sent all of my paper to her. And on both papers, she printed multi-color, multi-block woodcut prints that are landscapes of the two different states. Then she sent it back to me. And on other panels in the book, I printed in letterpress lists of endangered plant species of Arizona and of Oregon. And then on other panels, I printed a poem by an Arizona poet, Gary Nabhan, about the 01:37:00 environment, and a poem by an Oregon poet, Kim Stafford. And then they're sewn together. And I made paper for a paper folder from a combination of fibers and dirt from both places, that also includes broken shells from the Oregon shore and pine needles. So that this handmade paper that holds the book is very rough. And your fingertips tell you immediately to pay attention to the material that this thing is made from. And the edition was fifty, which Peggy and I split. And it's been shown I don't know how many times. Multiple exhibitions. Well-received. And it's in quite a few collections. And in fact the edition, my part of the edition sold out, 01:38:00 and Peggy's is nearly sold out. So that was a great project. It was conceptually whole. And it really involves, as an artist book, it really demands something, but it involves the viewer tactilely and intellectually. So I like that one a lot. SL: Thank you. I'm curious. Do you always make paper for your artist books that you work on? I imagine not for when you were working on the Pyracantha Press. But for Cabbage Head Press? 00:57:12 JR: I don't always. No. I did a book in, I think it was 2000, I was a guest artist at University of Tennessee for a week. And they wanted me to come and do a collaboration print with them in their print program. And I said before I went, I said well how about instead of that, I told, my invitation was from Beauvais Lyons, who's actually a former student of the ASU print program from the early '80s. 01:39:00 Been teaching at Tennessee for years and years. And I told Beauvais, I said, "I want you to find a third collaborator." And he got a guy who teaches philosophy at UT with a specialty on the environment. And the effects of, he's contributed a chapter to a book on the effects of modern life on the ecology of East Tennessee. So when I arrived, we came up with this book. And it's printed on [unclear] paper. It's called Roadkill. Actually I think there's too much to take the time to explain now. But that book also is, by the end of the week, we had an edition of fifty. It's a complicated accordion book. And we had students working with us the whole time. On Saturday, we finished binding the book and had copies for 01:40:00 every student that helped for their library and so on. And split the remainders. And it's been sold out for years now. But a really strong, another strong piece that has, had both scientific and political, social meaning to it. And it's a real fun book to unfold and see it develop. SL: Yes. The Kohler Art Library has a copy of that one as well. JR: That's right. That's right. It's in Kohler. And to answer, to refer to your question about handmade paper, a couple of years later, in 2002, I think, maybe three, I was really, really upset and fed up with the US government's response to 9/11, and charging into Afghanistan and Iraq. And my students were going to have an exhibition of artist books in our gallery. And I didn't have anything at the time to put in, except for old work. And I woke up one night with this idea. And ten days later I had this book called Total Fucking Idiots. And I made it from leftover handmade paper, from batches I had made for other projects. And I figured out the number of pages I could get by the number of sheets of this paper that I had. And I could make 01:41:00 two copies. And it's an accordion book with wrapped boards at both ends. And the subtitle of it is 13 Portraits. And on the pages, there are newspaper images of certain elected officials Xeroxed onto Japanese paper and then [shinkolleted?] and pressed into the handmade paper. And below each one, I hand wrote with colored pencils, text that was basically stream of consciousness off the top of my head about each of them. And when the book was all done, I took pencils of different kinds and scribbled over the faces and cancelled them off. So there was a great deal of anger that generated that book. But I've always felt that was a successful political statement and there were only two copies. One of them is in the Library of Congress and 01:42:00 the other one is at the library at Yale. SL: Okay. So you don't have a copy of that one anymore. 01:02:29 JR: No. SL: Well I wondered if you could talk a little bit about the Paper Landmine Print Project that you worked on. And I know that it kind of stemmed from another project. So if you want to talk about how you got there, how you got to that place? JR: Sure. So my work with handmade papers really developed in the '80s as I was teaching myself and learning a lot. I guess I can mention that in 1989, my father's family farm that his brother 01:43:00 had run for his lifetime was sold. Because my uncle went into a nursing home. Three days before the property changed hands, my brother and sister and I went there just to take one last look at it. It was completely vacant. The auction had been held. And as we walked into the barn, I was thinking to myself, I would like to print some kind of keepsake for the family about this place. And I walked in and the first thing I saw was a big wad of binder twine on a nail. Binder twine is the stuff that holds bales of straw together. SL: Okay. JR: And it's made from sisal. And 01:44:00 on the floor below it, there was a burlap feed sack and straw. So I put the twine and the straw into the sack. And then next door in the shed, there were hemp ropes from when they had horses, and there were cotton seed sacks from when they went to the coop every spring to get seed for planting. And I brought all those back and I made paper out of it, because they're all papermaking fibers. And then on it, I printed an image of the farm from an old, old photograph from the '30s, the legal description of the land, and the history of when someone in our family bought it in 1857 to 1988, when it was sold. And then the colophon has the information about the materials that went into the paper. So for that piece, it becomes not just a keepsake 01:45:00 about the farm, it's a keepsake of the farm. It is the stuff of the farm. And I found that people, I didn't see it necessarily as a work of art. But I found that people emotionally responded to that, because the substance means something, and they get it. So in 1996, Hand Paper Making was doing one of their portfolios that they do every other year for fundraising. SL: John, can I interrupt you just for a moment? Did you title the book that you worked on that was about the farm? JR: Oh, it wasn't a book. It was just a broadside. 01:05:55 SL: Okay, got it. JR: And it was called "A Keepsake of the Risseeuw Family Farm." SL: Nice. JR: Yeah. So in 1996, Hand Paper Making did a portfolio that was called, the theme of this one was letterpress on 01:46:00 handmade paper. So I applied to be included in that. And my proposal took into account the idea that I thought was intended for it. That is, that the letterpress and the handmade paper would be somehow intertwined. And so my piece is about the world arms trade. And I did it as a folio. So it's a vertical eight by ten that you lift up to look inside. And on the front side it says "Arms Trade/Victims." And there's a list of the top ten arms exporting nations in the world at that time. And the US is number one. Still is. And on the other side, there's a list of arms that are sold by the US to other countries. Planes, bazookas, rifles, you name it. And then when you open it up, on one side there are images taken from the money of the top ten 01:47:00 arms exporting nations. And more facts about the money. The total value sold in a certain time period. And more weapons running down the right side. And then in the middle, there are some paragraphs giving incidents of, stories of victims of armed conflict. And then there also are some woodcuts and other images. Visual images. At the bottom, the colophon says, "The paper you are holding was made from the cut up currency of the top ten arms-exporting nations mixed with the clothing of the victims of armed conflict mentioned above." And within a very short period of time, I found that I could get the skirt of a South African woman who was murdered by the security police, for instance. And there was a man teaching mathematics at ASU who was an 01:48:00 Iraqi Kurd. And his people were still in southern Turkey. They'd been driven out of their village by the Iraqi Army. And he was able to give me clothing of people who died. And for me, it was kind of an intellectual activity, like the farm piece was. Because I'm a paper maker, I can get stuff and I can do that. But what I found was that people reading that colophon sometimes dropped the piece because they couldn't any longer hold this physical evidence of the connection between arms, money and death. And so four years later, when I had a sabbatical coming up and I wanted to find a new project to work on, I thought I could take that powerful idea and do it with landmines. So I traveled to Cambodia and later to Mozambique and to Bosnia. And I interviewed landmine victims, some of whom gave me articles of their clothing. I also got bamboo from the minefields in Cambodia and money from the nations that make or use the landmines in those different locations. When I got home, I made paper out of those materials. And then on it, I printed facts about landmines, facts about the victims' stories. All kinds of things. And 01:49:00 I did a series of 15 landmine prints in several years. And again, exhibiting them. And they all sell for 500 dollars. And when they sell, I turn around and I give that money to the organizations that work with landmine victims or do the demining and the mine education. Many of the organizations that helped me on my travels. Two thousand ten, I decided that I was, I couldn't keep doing that project for the rest of my life because there are 63 nations in the world with landmines. So to bring it to a close, I decided to do a book that would update all of the facts that I had gathered to that point. And I made it on paper that was handmade paper made 01:50:00 from the leftovers of all that stuff that I had used to make the 15 prints. And the book's an accordion book. And the pairs of panels are about the different countries that are represented in my prints with updated facts, and images that are selected from the prints and then changed and so on. So the book is sort of a new version of all of that. SL: And that was about like ten years after you started the project, right, that you did the book? JR: Yeah. The publishing date, I think, is 2011. And the name of the book is Boom! With an exclamation point. The edition was 30. And that sells for $1500. And the same thing applies. When they sell, I give that money to the organizations. So to date, I'm somewhere over $28,000 of donations from that landmine 01:51:00 project. SL: Wow, that's great. Is there, are there any other works that you want to talk about? Whether they be books or other projects? Before we kind of talk about your role at the College Book Art Association? JR: Mm hmm. Well, I think you had mentioned wanting to talk about the social and political content of my work. SL: Yes. Yes. JR: So a project, another piece that I did in 2012, I think it was, was for another hand papermaking portfolio called "Fibers Revealed," I think? And I was asked to be one of three jurors for it. And as jurors, we also got to make a piece for the portfolio. So for that one, I made paper from three biographies of 01:52:00 Ronald Reagan that were shredded, along with clothing from the homeless people. And documents of, what do you call it when someone's kicked out of their house? SL: Oh, evictions? JR: Eviction papers. And also copies of the Glass Steagall Banking Act, which was systematically dismantled by congressional acts from 1978 to 1999. And my point is that it caused the economic crisis of 2008, that put a lot of people out of their homes and on the street. And on it, I printed the cloth image of a t-shirt from a homeless person, printed directly from the t-shirt. And large type that says, "Postmodern banking is deconstruction." So it's another 01:53:00 statement piece using material as we've been talking about. The substance of the piece carries the idea. And you know, it reminds me of a piece that we printed in Pyracantha Press that I forgot to mention. Back in 1991, Dan and I wanted to do a piece for the bicentennial of the signing of the Bill of Rights. And we collaborated with a lawyer in the law school who teaches courses on the amendments. And we were trying to figure out what was the best way to present the text of the Bill of Rights after 200 years. Are some amendments more important than others? Should they be in bigger type, different colors? And we ended up with his contention that the first five words are the most important. It says, "Congress shall make no law." And we had that done by a calligrapher in the pen style of the 18th century. And then printed the rest of the text of the Bill of Rights underneath. And below that was the phrase, "Nor shall any state," from the 14th amendment, which transfers all the proscriptions from the federal government to the state, and actually makes the Bill of Rights work. And the whole thing is printed on paper that we made from cotton American flags and blue jeans, which I call two quintessential American fibers. And when that piece was first shown in the early '90s, and I would explain what the paper was made from, someone in the audience [unclear] would say, "Can you do that?" And then I would point to the first amendment. I'd say, "Yeah. It says so right here." So it was another example of that, the content of the 01:54:00 paper being representative of the content of the piece. SL: Would you say that some of your students kind of carried on with that idea that you've used in your work? Do you have, or I know that you're retired now, but when you were teaching, were your paper making students choosing materials like that? Or not necessarily. 01:18:07 JR: (laughs) I sometimes would charge them with the idea of making paper that means something. And for some students, it was a real challenge to come up with an idea that fit into that challenge. I did have one student who, for a final project in paper making, went to her closet and pulled out clothing left behind by five 01:55:00 former lovers. And pulped it and made paper, and note paper and envelopes. And then she wrote letters to each of the five explaining what she had done, and how it was a symbolic and final end of the relationship. And then she put the letters in the envelope along with the rest of the paper for me to examine and grade. And after I had graded, I put the envelopes, stamped envelopes, in the mailbox and mailed them for her. (laughter) So that was kind of a fun example. But there were others. Yeah. SL: Is there anything else? You mentioned one of your projects, your collaborative project, was focused on the environment. Is there anything else that you wanted to touch on in terms of the content of your work? JR: In my printmaking, I've also hit a number of different subject matters. Back in 1990 I did a piece about Oliver North and the Iran Contra scandal, which was still working out of the courts at that time. And it was what I saw as inherent fascism. So somewhere it says that my work has been involved with examining the 01:56:00 environment, fascism, political idiocy and other things for a long time. It's kind of hard to pick out specific pieces without getting into the whole spectrum. SL: Sure. I just didn't know if there's anything you wanted to add. But I think we covered a lot of ground already. What about current projects? Are you working on anything right now? JR: I guess after I, or as I retired, I was working on, hmm, three things. One of them is a project that I'm just about done with. And it's a scientific project looking at the alloys of metal types. Lead, tin and antimony. Examining samples of lead type from different time periods, from different foundries. Mostly in America, but I've also done some from England to determine exactly how much lead, tin and antimony they use. It's kind of a historical project just to find out what the fact is. Printers know that the higher the lead, the softer the type is, and it doesn't last as long. And there are sort of optimal percentages that make the best type, certain types hard and good. And there's an analysis in a laboratory that I do on ASU campus called PIXE, proton-induced x-ray emission. Which is nondestructive. I can put a piece of type in. It bombards it with protons, and then the resultant x-rays that bounce off are collected and the machine tells what the percentage of different metals present are without destroying the type. And so 01:57:00 I've gotten samples from all over the place. And I'm just about done running samples, and I'll be writing up the results of that soon. That's just, the science part of me really likes that project. SL: Yeah. You're going back to the chemistry. 01:23:08 JR: Chemistry. Yeah. I also, the year before I retired, I started doing collaboration prints under the Pyracantha imprint with other professors on campus. I would invite a senior professor from somewhere and ask them to come to the print shop with a student of their choice. And I would show what we print and how we print and so on, and then challenge them to collaborate with each other 01:58:00 on a print project about interdiscipline or about their research. And then they would come to me and we would collaborate on how to make that into an actual print, whether it required special paper or not and images and so on. So for instance, I did one with a music professor who taught oboe. And he and his student wanted a piece that was about the difference in what's in the performer's head at the same moment and in the audience's head. And I made paper from old music scores so that there are bits of music notation floating in the paper. And I took photographs of them playing their oboes. On the left side, they're just standing playing. And it's kind of fuzzed out in Photoshop. And on top of that, in several colors, are these phrases and words that are in their head when they're playing, like "Push the air" and "Stay inside the music" and "listen." SL: Oh, interesting. JR: On the other side, there's an image of an audience with the two of them down on the stage playing kind of small. And over that, there's a collection of words in different colors that we collected from concert goers about music. Like, "uplifting" and also about the oboe, so 01:59:00 it's "duck" from Peter and the Wolf, and "Middle Eastern" and different phrases and stuff like that. I did one with a physics professor who's a cosmologist. And it's about the origin of the universe printed on black cotton paper that I made with shreds of Einstein's 1905 and 1915 relativity papers floating in it. I did one with an engineer who, she and her students work with carbon fibers that make parts of airplanes and other vehicles. And they're looking at the safety of airplane parts. Anyway, I could go on. But there was a whole series of prints with different faculty. Philosopher, a women's studies, and so on. SL: And for how many years were you doing that, about? JR: Well, that was about two 02:00:00 and a half years. SL: Okay. 01:26:44 JR: I ended that this spring. And those are in the collection of the press, and the president of the university has a set, and the dean has a set. And then I did a series of prints in the last couple of years about jazz, because I have done a book and some other prints relating to jazz. These are quotations from various jazz artists. And they're printed on handmade papers that I had, again, left over from other projects. And I would choose kind of matched type of handmade paper and type of quotation it was. And then the challenge was to do it in typography that spoke to the content of the quotation. Kind of minimally. So there's very little imagery involved with these. But each one seems to be complete by itself. And I did eventually 14 of those. SL: And are you a fan of jazz? JR: Yeah. Sure am. SL: Well, what about your role with the College Book Art Association, John? I know you were the founding president. Could you talk a little bit about how you got that role? JR: Well, since 1984 there have been a number of us in collegiate presses around the country, and getting 02:01:00 together every few years to share ideas and see what we've been doing. And for the longest time, whenever we got together, people would say, "I don't want another organization to belong to." SL: (laughs) Okay. JR: "I don't want more membership dues" and so on. And in 1991, I hosted that group here at ASU for one of our meetings. And it just kind of continued. And in 2000, I think it was, Steve Miller at University of Alabama asked everybody to come. And the idea, again, came up about an organization. And it was more positive this time. So a couple of years later, he had another meeting of people for the specific purpose of creating an 02:02:00 organization. And he had, the meeting was a set of sessions, of breakout session with people talking about the different structural things that were necessary to make such an organization. And there was a little time after that and in 2007, I think, I ended up on an organizing committee with Harry Reese from Santa Barbara, and Kathy Walkup from Mills College. And at that time, basically, the three of us created the constitution and bylaws for the College Book Art Association. SL: Okay. JR: Working with all of the discussions that had happened, I think, in three different meetings before that. And in 2008, we met in Tucson at University of Arizona and 02:03:00 we were incorporated as a nonprofit that year. And when we started filling the roles of the organization, I sort of ended up as the founding president. Partly because I had done so much with writing the constitution and bylaws. So I led it for three years. And then Richard Zauft took over and eventually, and other people. And it's been, I'm really happy to say, it's been a great success. It was exactly what we all needed at the right time. SL: And they have an annual conference. So that's what the meeting is now, right? 01:31:42 JR: We actually have a biannual conference. SL: Oh, biannual. Okay. JR: Yeah. SL: And then there's an annual meeting that's sort of required by the rules of incorporation. So in between our conferences, we have an annual meeting. Which is intended to be a smaller kind of business-related operation. There might be one exhibit, for instance, but not a whole bunch of them. And usually the invited speakers and the awards that the organization gives out, those are done at the biannual conferences. JR: Okay. And how many members, do you know how many members the College Book Art Association has? SL: I don't know the current membership. I'm guessing between four and five hundred. JR: Okay. SL: Well, thank you, John. I think we're 02:04:00 getting to the end of this session here. Is there anything that you'd like to talk about that we haven't yet? Anything, maybe, about how the UW has impacted your career over all? JR: You know, it's hard to put into words. I have a lot of pride coming from University of Wisconsin. And as I said early on in our discussion, when I realized after I had been there that I had been in a top ten chemistry program and in a top ten art printmaking program, I felt really lucky and honored to have been there. When I realized it, when I got to other schools and other programs and I compared them and I saw the limitations that exist at some places compared to what went on in Madison the years I was there, I just feel like it was all to my benefit. I learned so much. I grew as a person and as an artist so much. And it just, that I wouldn't be what I am today if I hadn't been there. SL: Thank you so much, John. I appreciate your time. JR: 02:05:00 You're welcome. And happy to do this. 01:34:28 End of Second Interview Session End of Oral