Last week Special Collections the Ida Cordelia Beam Distinguished Visiting Professors Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Felicia Rice stopped by Special Collections for a performance and their collaborative work Doc/Undoc is now on display.
Rice performed “DOC/UNDOC: Collaboration and Metamorphosis,” followed by a conversation with Guillermo Gómez-Peña on March 31st.
Gómez-Peña is a performance artist whose live art, video, radio, photography, and writing have earned acclaim — and many awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship — over the past thirty years. He is the artistic director of the transnational performance collective La Pocha Nostra.
Rice’s design, printing, and publication work for her Moving Parts Press (Santa Cruz, CA) has been exhibited at major book fairs in New York and Frankfurt, and collected by the Whitney Museum, the Bodleian Library, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, among others. Rice is also an educator who teaches courses in letterpress printing, typography, printmaking, typography, and bookmaking at institutions ranging from UC-Santa Cruz to the Santa Cruz YWCA.
Together with their collaborators, Gómez-Peña and Rice have published artists’ books including DOC/UNDOC: Documentado/Undocumented, Ars Shamánica Performática (2014), a copy of which is held by UI’s Special Collections.
Doc/Undoc as well as selections of work from the Moving Parts Press on loan from Felicia Rice are on display in the third floor hallway gallery cases outside of Special Collections until May 20th, 2016.
Event 3/31:
Doc/Undoc Exhibition:
Display created by Ellen Wrede.
DOC/UNDOC : Documentado/Undocumented Ars Shamánica Performática / texts Guillermo Gómez-Peña, images & bookwork Felicia Rice, video Guillermo Gómez-Peña & Gustavo Vazquez, critical commentary Jennifer González, sound art Zachary Watkins. Santa Cruz, CA : Moving Parts Press, 2014.
Special Collections x-Collection N7433.4.G644 D63 2014
Thanks to the UI Deparment of English, The Department of Theater Arts, The University of Iowa Center for the Book, The Obermann Center, Jennifer Buckley, Tim Barrett, Ellen Wrede, Giselle Simón, Candida Pagan, Heidi Bartlett and everyone from Special Collections who worked to make the event and exhibition possible.
Wednesday, 3/30: Felicia Rice, Doc/Undoc (lecture performance), followed by a public conversation with Guillermo Gόmez-Pẽna (5 PM, Special Collections Reading Room). 
Spring Break week we had two class sessions: one from Grinnell and one from Coe College. Special collections staff co-taught a one credit museums studies spring break course with campus museum curators.
The Iowa Women’s Archives had a post featured by Tumblr as part of a special curated group of posts for Women’s History Month. Consequently, the post now has nearly 1000 likes and reblogs. See the post about Gwendolyn Fowler and life after graduating as a certified pharmacist from the State University of Iowa in 1936 here: 
On Tuesday March 22, 2016 Special Collections welcomed 28 students from Norwalk High School, Norwalk, IA. The students were those of art teacher Maggie Harlow-Vogt. They had traveled all the way from Norwalk to Iowa City seeking inspiration from Special Collections and the Library’s Conservation Lab for their next art projects!
Heather Wacha, a graduate student in the Department of History, has been working to introduce area high school students to the value and importance of resources held in Special Collections. The Norwalk visit is part of a larger project that involves University of Iowa students transcribing and translating a 1699 Spanish will held in Special Collections for digital publication. The art students from Norwalk High School, along with Spanish students from Central Academy in Des Moines, are interacting with the Spanish will in a variety of ways that both fit their class curriculum and simultaneously generate enthusiasm and creativity. Each student’s final project will be able to be published on the same website that will hold the manuscript’s digital publication created by the UI students.
From Harlow-Vogt’s perspective, Tuesday’s visit sparked amazing conversations in the bus on the way home. The following day in their art classes, Harlow-Vogt noted that “The students who did not go to the University of Iowa were a bit overwhelmed by the passion and excitement that the other students brought back with them. Those that could not go felt that they had really missed out on a great adventure!”
