Ever since the University of Iowa libraries became home to the Sackner Archive in 2019, their collection of works has continued to inspire many around campus and the world.
This year, some of their works have been selected for a new exhibit, “A Roll of the Dice,” which opened on Feb. 4 in the Main Library Gallery. The exhibit focuses on a specific area of symbolism in the Sackner Archive.
“There are 75,000 items [in the archive]. We’ve been working on organizing it for over five years now, and we still have some work to do,” archive curator Rich Dana said.
The archive gives way to sparkling glass cases full of different media including books, colored comic strips, and bold prints.
It is enveloped in a red, white, and tan color scheme, hand-selected by Lauren Coghlan, the graphic designer for the library, to offset the works. She also noted the poem’s cover for inspiration, a white-tan shade with fonts alternating between black and red.
“Those were the colors that printers used a lot of in those days. Also, the traditional volumes of poetry in France were always usually a white cover with black type and a red border. I really like how those red backgrounds made the works stand out because some of them are kind of stark,” Dana said.
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This exhibit took inspiration from French culture, drawing from French Symbolist — someone who uses complex symbols to represent emotional experiences — Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem called “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard,” which roughly translates to “A throw of the dice will never abolish chance.”
“It was quite revolutionary for the time,” Dana said. “In the late 1800s to the early 1900s, Paris was a center of culture. People came from all over Europe and the United States. For a time, it was the center of European art, modern art, in particular. Mallarmé’s apartment was a gathering place on Tuesday nights for artists, composers, and writers to share and debate ideas.”
A lot of artists reinterpreted Mallarmé’s poem over the years, mainly because it had permanently altered the way artists used language in their work. Dana explained how visual symbols alongside text could bring a deeper meaning to some works.
“To see different ways that artists have responded to that one creation from over 120 years ago is really inspiring and pretty fascinating,” John Kenyon, the executive director of the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature organization, said. “Now that I’m more aware of the poem in a more concrete way, I’ll probably see all the references [about it] and it’s nice to have that reinforced.”
The archive’s Exhibition and Engagement Coordinator Sara Pinkham said one of her favorite works was a piece called “Fur Music,” an open booklet-like work featuring varying bars of synthetic fur seemingly broken up into different sections by sets of symbols.
“I think there’s a lot of really unique pieces in here, and a lot of unique mediums to look at,” Pinkham said. “There’s a lot to take in.”