Brick By Brick is a collection of artists books created by undergraduates in a Newest Americans class co-taught by Newest Americans co-founder Tim Raphael with Newark artists paulA Neves and Adrienne Wheeler.
In the first half of the semester students researched the life histories of Portuguese, Brazilian and other Lusophone immigrants in Newark’s Ironbound neighborhood. In the second half of the semester, inspired by some of the over 300 interviews in the Ironbound Oral History Archive, each student chose a story and made a glass book – an abstract portrait inspired by one of the oral histories.
This class-collection-exhibition model using oral histories as primary sources builds on the previous Newest Americans and GlassBook Project class and collection, Provisions, which was exhibited at the Gateway Gallery in Newark in 2015.
