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Registration for the full APHA 2019 annual conference is closed, but you can still check out this year’s annual Lieberman Lecture, which is free and open to the public. The 2019 Lieberman Lecture will be a talk from Professor Colette Gaiter, featured as our Friday conference keynote address.  

“One press, many hands” conjures up the range of diverse Americans who worked to distribute their own stories in images and words. Looking back to the turn of the twentieth century through to the present, print culture in the United States represents voices from every group including the original Native people and every kind of immigrant—voluntary or forced. It is important to trace how the texts and design of publications and ephemera spread ideas about adapting, belonging, patriotism, isolation, and resistance—still resonating in the nation’s consciousness today. Combining careful words and skillful imagery ensured that some of these printed objects would be valued and preserved. Our legacy is to look at them with insights possible through distance and social progress. We can study the human desire to record the past and imagine a future, absorbing lessons learned to guide our current path on the long arc of history.

Colette Gaiter—a multimedia artist, graphic designer, and writer—is a Professor of Visual Communications and Visual Studies at the University of Delaware’s Department of Art & Design and the Department of Africana Studies. Her work spans multiple creative practices, including photographic digital prints mixed with other media, artist books, websites, video, and interactive installations. She also writes about artists and designers, particularly the work of Emory Douglas, current activist and former artist and designer for the Black Panther Party. She wrote a new introduction to the second edition of Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas, which includes her essay on the messages embedded in his work. Always investigating creative activism, her writing appears in various publications and books.