Selections from the Jane Wodening and Stan Brakhage Scrapbooks, 1962–1966. Jane Wodening. Granary Books. 2021.
Selections from the Jane Wodening and Stan Brakhage Scrapbooks, 1962–1966. Jane Wodening. Granary Books. 2021.
Selections from the Jane Wodening and Stan Brakhage Scrapbooks, 1962–1966. Jane Wodening. Granary Books. 2021.
Selections from the Jane Wodening and Stan Brakhage Scrapbooks, 1962–1966. Jane Wodening. Granary Books. 2021.
Selections from the Jane Wodening and Stan Brakhage Scrapbooks, 1962–1966. Jane Wodening. Granary Books. 2021.
Selections from the Jane Wodening and Stan Brakhage Scrapbooks, 1962–1966. Jane Wodening. Granary Books. 2021.
Selections from the Jane Wodening and Stan Brakhage Scrapbooks, 1962–1966. Jane Wodening. Granary Books. 2021.
Selections from the Jane Wodening and Stan Brakhage Scrapbooks, 1962–1966. Jane Wodening. Granary Books. 2021.
Selections from the Jane Wodening and Stan Brakhage Scrapbooks, 1962–1966. Jane Wodening. Granary Books. 2021.

Selections from the Jane Wodening and Stan Brakhage Scrapbooks, 1962–1966.

Granary Books, 2021. Item #2822

Granary Books is pleased to announce Selections from the Jane Wodening and Stan Brakhage Scrapbooks, 1962–1966. This limited-edition book comprises thirty-three page spreads in full color facsimile, selected from Jane Wodening’s extraordinary three-volume set of scrapbooks, now housed in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. As a testament to the intersection of the domestic and creative life that Wodening and Brakhage led, these scrapbooks engage collage as an artistic practice within the act of archiving and storytelling.


The scrapbooks document the early- to mid-sixties as Wodening spent with her then-husband, avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage and their children, during a particularly productive and important creative era in their lives. She began creating the books after collecting materials for several years and later recalled:


“I started the Scrapbooks I think in 1962 when we left San Francisco. I had such a wonderful collection by then of pictures and poetry and memorabilia and pretty things, a box of paper jewels. And when we were about to move, I brought them out at a party and everyone looked at my collection. Should I just throw these away, now that we're leaving? I asked, and I think it was Michael McClure who said, 'No, make a scrapbook!' and he gave me many copies of himself naked as The Beast. Others agreed with him, even Stan. Then in our travels I collected such things and I remember working on them, page by page, here and there in our travels, at Hooker Street [Denver], in South Dakota, in New York City, and in Lump Gulch [Colorado], people swimming through the life like angels. I finished them perhaps in about 1966. I ran out of material. It seemed that we had been blessed with a great time of idealism and energy, but that it was over and no more came in that was magical enough to be useable.” 


Wodening combines textual and visual material in meticulous arrangement on each page, with elements created by Stan Brakhage, the Brakhage children, as well as friends and correspondents from the era who were active in the 1950s and 1960s avant-garde movements. She collaged together letters, poems, and artworks by Robert Kelly, Carolee Schneemann, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Kenneth Anger, Jack Collom, Jonas Mekas, Robert Branaman, Michael McClure, Joseph Cornell, Wallace Berman, Guy Davenport, Philip Whalen, Ed Dorn, Denise Levertov, and others, creating her own narrative from the voices of friends in her life. She would often combine found images of saints, snowflakes, butterflies, tigers, landscapes, and other evocative terrain with newspaper and magazine clippings, children’s drawings, postcards, photographs, cards, stickers, stamps, notes, pamphlets, film strips, broadsides, family photographs, and other media.


While the scrapbooks reflect on one of the most significant and productive times in Stan Brakhage’s filmmaking career, they remain an artistic accomplishment by Wodening in her own right (as poet Richard Deming has noted). Wodening’s collages might be viewed alongside other comparable artists such as Jess and Helen Adam, particularly for the ways they reveal the contours of Wodening’s domestic, artistic, and intellectual life.


Granary Books is particularly pleased to offer this book given our history with Jane Wodening and long-time admiration of her work. Wodening was one of the first Granary Books authors, with From the Book of Legends (1989), which explored the work of Maya Deren, Joseph Cornell, and Charles Olson. Granary Books also published Wodening’s Brakhage’s Childhood (2015), the story of Stan Brakhage’s life up to age twelve. Jane Wodening has published numerous other books including Lump Gulch Tales (Grackle Books, 1993), Living Up There (Baksun Books, 2009), Driveabout (Sockwood Press, 2016), and Animals I’ve Neglected to Mention (Sockwood Press, 2019). Her writing reflects close relationships with animals, adventurous living off the grid, and an artistic sensibility that is straightforwardly attentive to daily life for its equal measures of beauty and struggle. We might consider these scrapbooks some of her first efforts in this type of observation that would later come to define her crucial work.


Selections from the Jane Wodening and Stan Brakhage Scrapbooks, 1962–1966 comprises thirty-three full-color page spreads printed by Jason Walz at Uncommon Bindery as archival giclee prints. Naomi Harrison-Clay contributed the lettering, and Steve Clay and M.C. Kinniburgh developed the design. Judith Ivry hand-hinged the french-fold prints and bound the book in brass post bindings, with green cloth covered boards debossed in gold foil. Conservation Resources created the metal-edge archival boxes in which the books are housed. The book is published in a limited edition of 25 numbered copies, signed by the artist.


The original scrapbooks were acquired by Nancy Kuhl at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and have since been digitized in full. The digitized scrapbooks may be accessed here.

Photographs of book by Jason Walz, © Uncommon Bindery.


Further reading:


Deming, Richard. “Collage, Collaboration, and Material Quotation: The Scrapbooks of Jane Wodening and Stan Brakhage, 1962–66, in the Beinecke Library.” The Yale University Library Gazette, October 2006, Vol. 81, No. 1/2 (October 2006), pp. 27–41.




ABOUT JANE WODENING

ABOUT STAN BRAKHAGE

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