Today marks the end of a public art project spanning 26 days to celebrate 26 glorious letters. Conceived by artist Anna Schuleit Haber, “The Alphabet” is an ode to print publishing.
Every day since July 13, Sentinel & Enterprise, a small, historic daily newspaper based in Fitchburg, MA, has featured work by an international typographer and a select group of writers on its front page.
A commission from the Fitchburg Museum of Art (FAM), in collaboration with the City of Fitchburg, Fitchburg State University, and the Sentinel & Enterprise, and with support from a National Endowment for the Arts “Our Town” Grant, the artist sought to engage Fitchburg’s local readership through this project.
The FAM states that “the aim [was] to assemble the most diverse and far-reaching collaborative alphabet that has ever been created for a daily newspaper. Letters as big and bold as the entire newspaper page, reminiscent of illuminated letters, will inspire a second and third glance from readers. After twenty-six days, any loyal reader of the paper will have a complete limited-edition set of front pages.”
A reader looks through the “A” issue.
And why the alphabet as a theme? Schuleit Haber explains in an interview with Kurt Andersen on WNYC’s Studio 360 that “a five-year-old knows the alphabet and a 95-year-old knows it.”
As Schuleit Haber told Andersen, the project has created “an urgency to collecting the paper.”
And so goes another chapter in the ever-evolving story of print culture. See each front page from the series below.
Related stories: