Tim Brookes is bringing the Endangered Alphabets
How can we make the most of his visit?
About Tim Brookes
Tim Brookes is the founder of the Endangered Alphabets Project, which makes him an artist, a writer, a painter and wood carver. He is also the award-winning author of 16 books, a 20-year commentator for National Public Radio, a humorist, and a professional guitarist and soccer coach. He draws on this remarkable breadth of reference to be what several college faculty and administrators have described as “the most interesting speaker we have ever hosted.”
“[A] fantastic person to bring to your campus: smart, funny, flexible, engaging, and a heck of a nice guy to boot. Tim engaged his audience in the origin of words, the dignity of culture and the love he has for educating others about his passion–a stunning array of beautifully crafted wooden panels that conveyed the richness of human expression in the script of endangered alphabets.” – Bill Hardy, Millbrook School
Endangered Alphabets
The world has perhaps 280 alphabets, more than 85% of which are on the verge of extinction. When a writing system is abandoned or suppressed, an entire culture loses its ability to read its own history, its literature, its folklore, its medicine. The Endangered Alphabets Project preserves these scripts, carved in gorgeous woods, and each carving raises countless questions about language, progress, globalization and the importance of indigenous cultures.
“I write to enthusiastically support any effort to invite Tim Brookes as a visiting artist/scholar to any institution of higher learning or for any community forum. His Endangered Alphabets Project is as enthralling as his commitment to it. As far as content and relevance, Tim’s wide-range of knowledge and ability to make connections with many fields and interests, however contemporary or historical, is a wonder, one which lends itself beautifully to the exploration of cross-curricular currents and ideas. More importantly, perhaps, is his gift to patiently and deliberately engage an audience or students within a classroom setting to think deeply about the topics at hand…”
—John V. Puleio M.Ed
Coordinator for Multilingual Student Services
Norwich University
Tim has visited libraries, galleries and campuses all over the United States and Europe, exhibiting the Alphabets carvings, discussing them, running talks and workshops.
Read on to learn some of the ways you may want to incorporate Tim and the Alphabets into your institution and your classes.
The Alphabets in the Syllabus
The Alphabets carvings provide such a vivid, even tactile illustration of language at work that they have provided stimulating discussion material in a wide variety of courses. At Yale, for example, faculty invited Tim to use the Alphabets in a course on the history of writing entitled “From Pictogram to Pixil”—but an hour later he was involved in a class on Himalayan Culture, where students found themselves considering the anthropology of language and writing. At Harvard, Tim spoke about script loss, human rights and social justice. Several schools have followed the example of SUNY Geneseo in having students research the circumstances in which a particular language or script flourishes or dies, and Castleton State College asked students to create their own alphabets, using graphic images or motifs from their own lives or surroundings. Teachers of graphic design and typography find the Alphabets especially valuable classroom material.
The Alphabets in the Library
The Alphabets have now been enthusiastically received by visitors to more than a hundred libraries in every possible setting, from the Sterling Library at Yale to the town library in Vergennes, Vermont, the nation’s smallest city. Libraries typically display the exhibition for 2-4 weeks, usually with a launch event involving a personal appearance and lecture/talk/guided tour by Tim. Some institutions, such as the Smithsonian, have asked Tim to create specific displays and activities that integrate the Alphabets with existing exhibitions or current themes.
The Alphabets as Art
The Endangered Alphabets carvings are often displayed in college, university and commercial art galleries. Tim is especially interested in working with curators to select and create thought-provoking experiences. For California State Fullerton he created one exhibition on the spiritual nature of writing and another that immersed the gallery visitor in the three-dimensional multi-media sacred space installation that played with the perceptions of art, writing, and time. For Norwich University he contributed to a year-long exhibition on the institution’s history of global exploration by lending a series of carvings by endangered cultures “discovered” by Western explorers, whose lives and histories were forever changed by that contact.
The Alphabets in Conference
The initial and driving purpose of the Endangered Alphabets project was to draw attention to global issues of cultural endangerment, and as such they have particular value for conferences on anthropology, linguistics and endangered languages. Solid and tactile rather than academic and abstract, they have provided a kind of visual centerpiece to the central themes of conferences in the United States, Indonesia, Spain, England and Canada, raising all kinds of fascinating questions and stimulating conversations that lasted for days or even weeks after the conference has ended.
The Art School Visit
Tim has visited Middlebury College, the Community College of Vermont, the University of Maine at Presque Isle, and the Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Massachusetts, with the challenge to help the students understand the nature of development of writing in a hands-on fashion. He brought carving tools and wood, and invited students choose their own monogram. The students learned to transfer the image to the wood and carve the character — and in doing so discovered in an intimate way the relationship between the development of script or typography and available technologies. Each student left with their own carving they could display or use for block-printing.
Create Your Own Agenda
Every visit by the Endangered Alphabets is different, and is tailored to interests, needs and opportunities of the individual host. Alphabets events have ranged from an hour to a year and have engaged participants from nine to ninety years old in activities as formal as lectures and as informal as interactive Alphabets games.
Physical Requirements
Exhibitions of Endangered Alphabets carvings are extremely flexible, both in terms of physical space and purpose or theme.
Some exhibitors have elected to display as many as 30 carvings, others as few as a dozen. In some cases the carvings have taken up an entire gallery, in others a single display case.
The carvings vary in size from roughly 18” x 8” to as tall as seven feet, and in weight from two pounds to twenty. All have D-rings on the back, and can easily be hung using picture wire or can be suspended from a rail or filament. Some libraries prefer to use horizontal display cases, and the vast majority of Alphabets carvings work fine under such circumstances.
I am happy to provide explanatory texts for all the pieces to be on display.
Costs
For an exhibition of Endangered Alphabets involving up to 25 carvings for up to 4 weeks, we charge a speaker fee of $2,000 per day spent on campus, including up to three presentations, lectures or class visits per day. The host is responsible for travel, shipping and insurance costs.
Longer periods of exhibition, larger exhibitions, and longer campus visits can be negotiated. I am always delighted to tailor specific exhibitions and/or programs of activities to suit the interests and needs of galleries, libraries and faculty.
Testimonials
Testimonials from the California State University at Fullerton visitors’ book
Contact
The Endangered Alphabets project is a federal 501c3 non-profit corporation