Title | My Elusive Cockney Family |
Artist / Creator | Angela Lorenz |
Artist's Nationality | American |
Place of Publication | Bologna, Italy |
Publication Date | 2012 |
Process / Technique | Offset printed in Italy on acid-free paper by Stamperia Valdonega Group in Baskerville typeface. |
Structure / Binding | Accordion |
Dimensions (WxHxD) | 4.45 x 7 inches closed, 38 x 7 inches fully extended |
Edition Size | Edition of 2000 |
Signed & Numbered | No |
Cockney rhyming slang has been around in East London and beyond from Victorian times. Whether or not it served as secret speech to confuse outsiders may never be known. That it displays a playful love of language is certain. New terms, often connected to celebrities, may be found in online dictionaries.
The two volumes in this series each introduce six words in cockney rhyming slang, defined within a rhyming couplet, and illustrated in watercolor. Every image is a composite of Victorian ephemera: card games, cut-outs, fashion plates, tourist items and early children's books printed in the mid-19th century. The original sources, all in the author's collection, show the startling range in quality of early color illustrations, from crude hand-coloring with stencils to exquisitely printed chromolithography.
Artist Bio
Angela Lorenz (bUSA) has been creating highly sculptural, mixed-media limited-edition artists' books in Bologna, Italy since 1989. Her training in drawing, 2-D and printmaking took place at Phillips Academy, Andover, where she made her first artists' books. She apprenticed to an Italian bookbinder on a year abroad from Brown University where she received a B.A. in fine arts and semiotics. While at Brown, where Lorenz learned papermaking and worked in the bindery of the John Hay library, she took three courses at RISD: glass sculpture, Concrete Books with Janet Zweig and Printed Books with Jan Baker, executing her first two editioned letterpress books. Lorenz's work may be found in over 100 public collections in North America and Europe, such as the Graphische Sammlung Albertina in Vienna, the Victoria&Albert's National Art Library, the British Library and Tate Library. In the US, collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art(Prints and Drawings Dept), the Fogg Art Museum(Prints and Drawings, Photography Depts), the Clark Art Museum, the National Gallery, the Walker Art Center, and the Getty Research Center, as well as numerous university collections, such as Reed College, which has the most complete collection of Lorenz's works on the West Coast. She has lectured and exhibited frequently in the US and abroad, at beaux arts academies, universities, museums, libraries and academic conferences, at MASS MoCA, Yale, Dartmouth, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, NYU and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Lorenz has critiqued at the graduate and undergraduate level at Stanford, Wellesley, Colorado College, Mills College, RISD, Camberwell College and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture where she was resident faculty in 2007. Solo exhibitions have taken place at the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Farnsworth Art Museum, Houghton Library, the Fleet Library and Davis&Langdale, with group exhibitions at Yale University Art Gallery, the Met, New York Public Library, the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Oregon, and the Portland Art Museum in Maine.