Warren Lehrer will engage graduate and undergraduate students in his latest multimedia book project
Design-author Warren Lehrer with an exhibit of his work at Dana Library.
'... The goal is to help them discover their own voice, to give them room to find their own way into the stories.'– Warren Lehrer
Warren Lehrer tells stories in multiple mediums, drawing on a skillset that is as deep as it is varied. But the story that stands out is the one that crystalized his eclectic career path.
As an undergraduate at CUNY Queens College, he majored in painting and drawing. He’d also penned poetry and short stories and had written for the school newspaper. At some point, words started to leap into his paintings, much to the chagrin of one of his professors, who admonished him that words and images should not go together.
“When I left his office, I knew I had a mission,” says Lehrer. “I would combine words and images, for better or for worse. It could be no other way.”
Lehrer, a graphic designer, writer and performer – known as a pioneer in the fields of visual literature and design authorship – is bringing his special brand of storytelling to Rutgers-Newark as part of a semester-long residency this spring.
The residency includes an exhibition of Lehrer’s work at Dana Library that runs through mid-May – along with a performance reading by Lehrer, followed by a panel discussion on the future of the book April 7 at the Robeson Campus Center.
But at the heart of the residency is what Lehrer brings to the classroom: an opportunity for students to become part of the creative process. As a guest instructor, Lehrer will work with undergraduates in the graphic-design and interactive-design classes as well as MFA candidates in the creative writing program – all of whom will contribute to Lehrer’s latest book, A Life in Books: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley.
Residency à la Bleu Mobley
To understand what it means to be “contributing” to A Life in Books, it’s essential to understand Lehrer’s latest work, which illuminates the creativity and depth of the design-author’s oeuvre.
A Life in Books is not one book but 101 books written by Lehrer’s alter-ego, Bleu Mobley, a prolific author who, while serving a prison sentences, decides to write a memoir, and then aborts the project, leaving a stash of cassette tapes onto which he’s poured his deepest thoughts. Lehrer the author starts A Life in Books by playing a kind of Truman Capote to Mobley, contacting the writer through his lawyer to ask if he can listen to the tapes (permission granted), and then edit a book that would be one part memoir, based largely on the tapes, and one part retrospective of Mobley’s works.
The result is a graphical novel that plumbs the depths of Mobley’s career and issues ranging from growing up, marriage and fatherhood to capital punishment and the death of the book in the digital age, while pushing the boundaries of the book form in the spirit of Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware and Ben Katchor.
During his residency, Lehrer will have the design and writing students flesh out two of Mobley’s 101 books and build a website for one of them.
“It’s a natural for me to teach. I love working with students and giving them the inspiration and investigative space to hatch their own ideas,” says Lehrer, who is the younger brother of Brian Lehrer, a talk show host on public radio station WYNC.
Though the students are using the framework from his book, the goal, Lehrer says, is “to help them discover their own voice, to give them room to find their own way into the stories.”
Silo-busting and Other Tricks of the Trade
This is Lehrer’s second residency at Rutgers-Newark; his first was in 2009. Tim Raphael, professor and director of the Center for Migration and the Global City, brought him to campus after meeting Lehrer and his wife, Judith Sloan, in 2003 at a panel, where the couple was speaking about their multimedia oral-history project, “Crossing the Boulevard,” which documents post-1965 immigrants in the borough of Queens, the most ethnically diverse urban area in the world.
When Raphael read a recent article in The Atlantic about Lehrer’s new book, he felt it was time to get him back to campus. He’s always been drawn to Lehrer’s use of multimedia – graphical books, performances, film and video, animations – on projects that are at once whimsical and thematically serious. He believes the multidisciplinary aspect of Lehrer’s work is especially germane to the times.
“Warren does a great job of silo-busting, of getting students from various disciplines to collaborate on projects; it’s the nature of his work,” says Raphael. “At the same time, he’s getting our MFA Creative Writing students, who are already looking for the next place that poetry and the novel are going, to expand their toolkit and think about new ways of telling stories. He’s a terrific role model.”
Lehrer’s Rutgers-Newark residency is but one stop on a grand tour for A Life in Books, which includes performance readings, film screenings and stints at many other universities across the country.
And while Lehrer’s work takes him all over the map – media-wise, thematically and geographically – he is no stranger to academia. He did his graduate work in graphic design at Yale University and is a professor at Purchase College, SUNY. He is also a founding faculty member of the Designer as Author graduate program at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
The panel he’ll be part of on the future of the book, on April 7, will include Nick Kline, a photography professor at Rutgers-Newark; Andrew Losowsky, a fellow at Stanford University who is working on a community pop-up publishing toolkit for crisis situations; and Beth Anderson, executive vice-president and publisher at Audible.com.