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85.
IDCA 71: SPECIAL EDITION OF ASPEN TIMES (June 20-24, 1971).
Sheila Levrant de Bretteville & Keith Godard. Tabloid newspaper format. 20pp. Cover logo by Ron Barnett. A special edition of The Aspen Times, created as a participatory record of the 1971 International Design Conference in Aspen, Colorado, and conceived, assembled and designed by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville with fellow California Institute of the Arts faculty member, Keith Godard.
The newspaper's pages are organised by days (Sunday to Thursday), with sections on Design Games, Films, and Miscellaneous, and it was made available at the end of the week after the comments and drawings it printed had been solicited from the conference's attendees. The innovative layout features (mainly) anonymously-written texts oriented in multiple positions, most of them handwritten (reproduced using The Aspen Times offset press), with the underlying intention for the end result to be non-hierarchical and as inclusive as possible.
Illustrated throughout, including several photographs from the conference (R. Buckminster Fuller; Group Experience in Women's and Men's Liberation; Kaprow Communications Happening; Gene Youngblood; etc.).
The 1971 conference was intended to address critiques from design students and environmental activists (including Sim Van der Ryn) who had protested at the previous year's event in an ideological collision with the so-called design elite who had organised it. De Bretteville, who gave a talk at the conference and whose feminist approach helped embody the shift towards pluralism and diversity, also founded the first design programme for women at CalArts in 1971 (two years later she co-founded the Woman's Building in Los Angeles, where she established the Women's Graphic Center and co-founded the Feminist Studio Workshop with Judy Chicago and Arlene Raven).
Old central horizontal fold, with wear and rubbing to fold; some edgewear and minor creasing; newsprint slightly age-toned; o/w a Very Good copy of a scarce document and an early example of De Bretteville's work.
