In 2022, two artists' books by Sauda Mitchell were acquired for the Juneteenth celebration: Finding Aid and Voyage.
About the artist: "Sauda Mitchell is an American printmaker, archivist, and educator from Winston-Salem, NC. She holds an Associate of Arts in Elementary Education from the University of Phoenix, a Bachelor of Arts in Communication Art with a minor in Art History from the Savannah College of Art and Design, a Master’s in Library and Information Science with a concentration in Archival Studies from Drexel University, and is certified by the Academy of Certified Archivists" (from the artist's website).
All images are courtesy of the artist and Booklyn.
Finding Aid
Finding Aid (Savannah, GA, 2021).
The author writes about Finding Aid: "In 2016 I was sifting through hundreds of archival collection materials from the W.W. Law Collection, a collection dedicated to prominent Civil Rights leader Westley Wallace Law (1923–2002). I began to contemplate the challenges that patrons often encounter when conducting archival research for the first time. Finding Aid is my creative response to sharing stories and connections pertaining to local Civil Rights activist in Savannah utilizing QR code technology and digitized primary sources."
Voyage
Voyage (Savannah, GA, 2021) is one in an edition of five artists' books.
Artist's description: "Voyage intends to link viewers to history through type, text, and image. I want the wind sails, artist book, and poem to take viewers on a visual journey of the Middle Passage, the forced voyage of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean and to the Americas. The symbolism of the prints corresponds to lines in the poem, which I wrote while I was in graduate school. Here, you can see a family on a hazardous journey across the sea, leading to the separation of a mother and her child and the continued journey of the son away from the warmth of his mother and homeland to unwelcome shores."
Prints from this project include a QR code to SlaveVoyages.org, a digital project which makes publicly available primary materials documenting the forced relocation over 12 million people from Africa across the Atlantic, and the subsequent trafficking of hundreds of thousands across the Americas.
