Excerpts from Mourning/Warning

Stripping the maritime alphabet of its primary colors and replacing them with muted browns and blacks, Mourning/Warning highlights the relationship of Americans of African diaspora to water, maritime travel and the need for an alternate means of communication in times of emergency and duress. How do you send a warning call that hatred comes constantly in waves?

M/W serves as a method of honoring, mourning, and remembering the slain and wronged as well as teaching our children and ourselves to be vigilant and wary in hostile terrain, where your skin color makes you an easy target.









Combining printmaking techniques with papermaking, bookbinding, and letterpress printing, Tia Blassingame explores the relationship between race, history, and perception. She publishes artists' books and collaborations with writers, composers, visual artists and designers under the Primrose Press imprint. Blassingame received her BA in Architecture from Princeton University, MFA in Printmaking from Rhode Island School of Design. Currently a visiting artist teaching in California College of the Arts' Printmaking, Diversity Studies, and Graduate Studies Programs, Blassingame is represented in the special collections of Library of Congress, Harvard University, Tate Britain among other institutions. You can see more of her work at Booklyn Artists Alliance: http://booklyn.org