The Maier Museum of Art
at Randolph College

Claire Van Vliet – Dido & Aeneas

Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College’s 112th Annual Exhibition
Back to Front: Artists’ Books by Women

Claire Van Vliet, Dido & Aeneas, Janus Press: 1989, accordion structure with attachments; letterpress printed, irregularly shaped pages, monoprint, collage, handmade paper; housed in a custom, cloth-wrapped clamshell with interior pockets, an applied title on the spine, and includes a music CD, book: 6 ¾ x 14 ⅝ x ¾ in.; box 6 ⅞ x 15 ¼ x 1 ½ in. Courtesy of Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Cynthia Sears Collection

Claire Van Vliet, Dido & Aeneas, Janus Press: 1989, accordion structure with attachments; letterpress printed, irregularly shaped pages, monoprint, collage, handmade paper; housed in a custom, cloth-wrapped clamshell with interior pockets, an applied title on the spine, and includes a music CD, book: 6 ¾ x 14 ⅝ x ¾ in.; box 6 ⅞ x 15 ¼ x 1 ½ in. Courtesy of Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Cynthia Sears Collection

Dido and Aeneas celebrates the 300th anniversary of the Baroque opera by Henry Purcell, which was first performed in London in 1689. Nahum Tate’s libretto tells the drama of Dido, the betrayed and abandoned queen of Carthage who throws herself on a funerary pyre as the ship of her lover, Aeneas, leaves the harbor.

Each scene of the opera has text from the libretto sewn into the accordion book structure. The dark sky reflects the turbulent feelings of the despairing queen; the tops of the trees are symbolic of the grove where the lovers meet; and the masts of the ships signal the departure of Aeneas. The last section of the book takes us back to the royal palace, where the story begins, the sky in Carthage once again quiet. The book includes a CD of the opera performed by the Taverner Choir and Taverner Players.

BIOGRAPHY

Artist Claire Van Vliet

Van Vliet spent her childhood in the area of England near Stonehenge, where her father served in the Air Force. “We had an English nanny, and she took us on a long walk every day…so I was in the landscape a lot. I suspect that those walks were most formative,” she remembers.

The artist lost both parents before turning 14 and was raised by her aunt in California. An exceptionally gifted child, she graduated from high school at 15 before continuing her university education. In 1955, she moved to Philadelphia to work as an apprentice at Pickering Press. That same year, Van Vliet’s first artist book of wood engravings, The Oxford Odyssey, was published.

Van Vliet started Janus Press, presently located in Newark, Vermont. The press embodies the age-old tradition of book making, yet it also experiments with innovative book formats and structures. In addition to the more than 90 artist’s books that Van Vliet has published, she has also created hundreds of drawings, prints, pulp paintings, and broadsides. Van Vliet exhibits and lectures around the world, in universities and museums, and has led multiple book-art workshops. She has been a recipient of many awards and honors, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1989.