Join the Digitization and Special Collections Department and the LA Public Library for a talk and reading by Felicia Rice and Theresa Whitehill, a screening of the short film On Heavy Lifting, and audience questions. The limited edition book Heavy Lifting, a recent addition to the Book Arts Collection, is the work of a multi-year project by our guests, Felicia Rice and Theresa Whitehill. The program is part of the year-long series of events at the Library Looking at Art – The Book, celebrating artists’ books.

Heavy Lifting is the outcome of a close collaboration between artist/printer Felicia Rice of Moving Parts Press and poet Theresa Whitehill. It began in 2019 with an exchange in which a poem sparked a drawing, which sparked a poem, which led to a book structure, and then spiraled back around again. In 2020, during their early work on the project, Felicia lost her letterpress shop of over 40 years to a devastating mega-fire in the Santa Cruz Mountains just as the death of George Floyd trained a blazing light on the many deep-seated inequities in this country amid the global pandemic and threat of political totalitarianism. Heavy Lifting took flight despite and because of our personal and collective crises of this terrible time and tackles these issues in book form, performance, and dialogue in search of a tenable future.

This will be a Zoom presentation which will stream live on the Library’s YouTube channel. This program will be recorded.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY-r8cQ7_Sk
https://lapl.org/whats-on/events/heavy-lifting-rising-ashes

To learn more about the entire Heavy Lifting Project, see https://theresawhitehill.com/books-broadsides/heavy-lifting/

To see the full lineup of events for the Heavy Listening Tour, see: https://theresawhitehill.com/books-broadsides/heavy-lifting/#About-Tour