Reading Paul Landacre’s Archive with the Clark: California Landscape and the Erasure of Indigeneity

Second Annual Spotlight Talk by Johanna Drucker, Distinguished Professor and Breslauer Professor Emerita, Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles

Paul Landacre was a wood engraver and artist whose first published work, California Hills (1931), established his reputation within the Fine Press community of Los Angeles. Highly skilled as an engraver, he produced a considerable corpus of acclaimed work, and he also kept scrupulous records of all aspects of his activity—account books, correspondence, sketches, and personal memorabilia. These materials provide an in-depth look at his professional life, and his connections to a singular network of artists and intellectuals in the region. But the images, particularly in California Hills, raise their own issues in relation to the longer traditions of representations of the “pristine” and “uninhabited” landscape, thus participating in an erasure of indigenous peoples that had been part of landscape painting. The additional collections of the Clark Library include many useful materials for establishing the background for this erasure in documents from the 19th century onward in which the struggles for recognition, sovereignty, and identity are recorded. This talk presents an approach to reading Landacre’s archive in relation to this rich historical material.

Johanna Drucker, Distinguished Professor and Breslauer Professor Emerita in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA, is internationally known for her work in graphic design history, typography, experimental poetry, and digital humanities. Drucker’s artist’s books are widely represented in museum and library collections and were the subject of a travelling retrospective, Druckworks: 40 years of books and projects. Recent titles include Diagrammatic Writing (Onomatopée, 2014), The General Theory of Social Relativity, (The Elephants, 2018), Inventing the Alphabet (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Visualization and Interpretation (MIT Press, 2020), and Iliazd: Meta-Biography of a Modernist (Johns Hopkins University Press 2020). In Fall 2022 she taught the Ahmanson Undergraduate Seminar focused on the Paul Landacre materials at the William Andrews Clark Jr. Library.

The Clark Library is pleased to display a selection of relevant materials from the collection at the lecture.