The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.    -- Julia Cameron

We invite you to surrender a week’s time to waken, explore and unleash the creative forces within you. For its fourth annual Summer Institute, the Wells Book Arts Center has once again arranged for some of the most important contemporary book artists to offer weeklong courses in our idyllic lakeside campus. Come join the hands-on experiences we offer in bookbinding, printing, calligraphy and type design that have brought some participants back to the shores of Lake Cayuga for three years in a row.

Our 2008 Summer Institute will be one with a couple of firsts. For the first time, we will offer a full week of book arts courses for novices, and for the first time we will have faculty from abroad, Ewan Clayton from the United Kingdom. 

Our first session, July 6-12, will be dedicated to introductory courses taught by faculty returning to our Summer Institute for a second time. You can explore letterpress printing with Katherine McCanless Ruffin, hand bookbinding with Shanna Leino, italic calligraphy with Cheryl Jacobsen, or typeface design on paper and at the computer with Peter Bain. 

Session II, July 13-19, is for novices and advanced students alike. Dolph Smith will teach a binding course whose end products will be books that are kinetic sculpture. Keiji Shinohara’s course will introduce students to traditional Japanese wood block printing with Western adaptations. Ewan Clayton’s class will create a portfolio of pieces calligraphed in uncials.

The courses in our third session, 20-26 July, do not exactly mirror those of Session II. Inge Bruggeman will teach a printing course that explores the interaction of text and image on the page. Students in Anna Embree’s course in box making will go beyond the mundane and into layering and partitioning. Sara Soskolne’s students will explore the rhythm of black and white as they use computers to adapt or design a typeface.

Whether you join us for one session or four, we know your time with us will be fun and informative. If you have any questions, contact me at 315-364-3420 or at bookartscenter@wells.edu. We look forward to seeing you in July.

Nancy Gil 
Summer Institute Director

2008 Summer Institute Brochure (PDF)