Tia Blassingame expertly uses the crafts of print, paper, and book arts to bear witness to the historic and contemporary stories of African Americans. The body of her work taken as a whole creates an undeniable cacophony of stories that highlights the complexity of race in America and provides an unflinching look that holds space in your consciousness long after experiencing the artwork. Each print/book is a master class in form and function.

Tia Blassingame, who has a background in architecture and design, is an associate professor of art at Scripps College. She is also the director of Scripps College Press, founder of Book/Print Artist/Scholar of Color Collective, and a book artist printing under the title of Primrose Press. Blassingame says that she is interested in “…using printmaking in the book form/ artist books to seduce the reader to slow their initial impulse to avoid or flee a conversation about race.”1

Settled: African American Sediment or Constant Middle Passage (2015) is one such book. The long-stitch book, bound in blue leather, features letterpress-printed concrete and original poems on an assortment of Nepalese lokta papers. The papers alternate from cream with blue-green speckles, a golden tea brown, a natural tan, light blue, deep indigo, and aquamarine. The texts relay historic records from the 1764–65 voyage of the Salty, a Brown family slaving ship, which traveled from West Africa to the West Indies and lost 109 enslaved Africans out of 196 to suicide, disease, starvation, and a failed insurrection. The historic references are interspersed with poems of violence and indifference towards contemporary African Americans such as Trayvon Martin, Renisha McBride, Tamir Rice, Marissa Alexander, Eric Garner, Cornel Young, Jr., Marlene Pinnock, and Relisha Rudd. According to Blassingame, “Each loss is mourned, each absence felt. All are connected. We came over in the same ships. Today as yesterday, we are stuck in this constant middle passage.”2

Each account, back to back, hits the reader like waves crashing the shore. The combination of these waves of mourning results in a feeling of unrelenting attack. They echo the constant news of injustices committed throughout the country towards Black bodies. The book even literally illustrates the Black bodies with the silhouettes and outlines created with concrete poetry and forms made from the repetitive printing of historic entries of the ship log. The entries that Blassingame highlights—such as “August 15, 1765 1 Boy Slave and 1 Girl Slave Dyed N. 18 N.19”—reinforce the conscious decisions made to dehumanize people of color and heighten the reader’s awareness of the continued practice.

Blassingame includes the stories of victims beyond the mega names of Trayvon, Tamir, and Eric. She reminds us of Relisha Rudd, an eight-year-old girl who went missing in March 2014 from a homeless shelter in Washington, DC and for whom no amber alert was released for 19 days of her disappearance. She remains missing. Blassingame’s mention of Marissa Alexander asks the reader to question why Marissa would have been sentenced to twenty years after firing a warning shot to protect herself from her estranged and abusive husband who threatened to kill her in front of her children. “As a nation,” remarks Blassingame, “we continue this long history of re-victimization of Black victims and their loved ones, and of a justice system that does not provide justice if the crime is committed by a White American against a Black American….We accept this as tragic, but almost inevitable. Though both are constructs, Blackness does not exist without Whiteness. Whiteness cannot exist without Blackness. It’s fascinating how that relationship plays out; like the biggest threat to White supremacy is just being, existing in this skin.”3

Justice is clearly absent in these pages and we are called to bear witness to the injustice. Works like Settled: African American sediment or Constant Middle Passage and many of Tia Blassingame’s other prints and artist books do the important job of recording the situations that too often have lethal consequences for African Americans. This witnessing/remembering has the power to make known an alternative perspective that, at its best, has the potential to build empathy, create change, and, at the very least, balance the narrative.

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I encourage you to enter a dialogue with Tia Blassingame’s artworks;

it’s a conversation worth having. In addition, you can hear

Tia Blassingame in her own words at the following links:

https://www.primrosepress.com/lectures-1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Xz9RCGtR_M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjzst2Y0hDg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AmwHjJMSco

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NOTES

1. Tia Blassingame, “The Texture of Racism & Slavery in the United States,” posted June 4, 2020 on Design Indaba YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Xz9RCGtR_M (accessed April 2021).

2. Tia Blassingame, Primrose Press website, https://www.primrosepress.com/#/settled/ (accessed April 2021).

3. Jordan Okumura, “An Interview: Tia Blassingame, Book Artist and Woman Behind Primrose Press,” posted December 18, 2017 on Entropy online magazine, https://entropymag.org/an-interview-tia-blassingame-book-artist-andwoman-behind-primrose-press/ (accessed April 2021).

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Title page from Tia Blassingame, Settled: African American Sediment or Constant Middle Passage, 2015, 15. x 19. inches open, artist book of original poetry letterpress printed on Nepalese lokta paper; longstitch bound in goatskin leather, with title letterpress printed on the cover. Collection of Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum, Providence, Rhode Island. Courtesy of RISD Museum. below: Tia Blassingame, working on I AM, at Scripps Press, Claremont, California, 2018. Photo by and courtesy of Tia Blassingame.

Two spreads from Tia Blassingame, Settled: African American Sediment or Constant Middle Passage, 2015, 15. x 19. inches open, artist book of original poetry letterpress printed on Nepalese lokta paper; long-stitch bound in goatskin leather, with title letterpress printed on the cover. Collection of Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum, Providence, Rhode Island. Courtesy of RISD Museum. Settled explores the mistreatment and devaluation of persons of African descent at the height of the Atlantic slave trade and today. This artist book is located within the actual and metaphorical waters of Middle Passage, where slaves that perished on the Sally, one of the Brown family’s slaving ships, mingle with contemporary figures such as Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Akai Gurley. The text vacillates between expressing the splendor of being of African descent and the horrors of historical and contemporary American racism.

Close detail from Tia Blassingame, Settled: African American Sediment or Constant Middle Passage, 2015, 15. x 19. inches open, artist book of original poetry letterpress printed on Nepalese lokta paper. Collection of Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum, Providence, Rhode Island. Courtesy of RISD Museum.

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