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      Curator Talk

      The Revolutionary Work of Women Printers

      Mary Katharine Goddard 1777 Declaration re-created and edited by Mindy Belloff in 2010, on display in Pressing Importance

      Know before you go

      Location: Morse Auditorium

      Free with preregistration. 

      The Revolutionary Work of Women Printers is supported by the Lowell Institute.

      Mindy Belloff, Intima Press and Mary Katharine Goddard, The Unanimous Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776: Second Unambiguous Edition, 2010. Ink on paper. Museum purchase, Elizabeth Rogers Fund. Phillips Library, KF4506 .U558 2010 +

      Women have always been actively engaged in printing. They continue to disseminate challenging texts, educate the next generation, create beautiful work and run printing businesses. Join artist and master printer Mindy Belloff, historian of early America and digital scholar Jessica C. Linker for a discussion of their own work, the role of women printers in the American Colonies and the Declaration of Independence. Director of PEM’s Phillips Library Dan Lipcan will moderate the discussion. 

      About our collaborators

      Dan Lipcan
      Dan Lipcan

      Dan Lipcan is the Ann C. Pingree Director of the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum. He leads a talented staff charged with stewarding the library’s extensive and varied collection, and has curated or co-curated several exhibitions at PEM, most recently Pressing Importance: Salem and the Declaration of Independence. Previously, Dan was Associate Museum Librarian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is a member of the Grolier Club, the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, and the Art Libraries Society of North America.

      Mindy Belloff
      Mindy Belloff

      Artist Mindy Belloff publishes fine letterpress printed editions under the imprint Intima Press, the only private press in Manhattan, New York. She creates books, prints and mixed media installations presented through a feminist lens. Belloff holds a Master of Arts from New York University, and is an educator, lecturer and independent scholar. Her editions are widely exhibited and collected. Belloff is a MacDowell Fellow and recipient of an NEA Book Residency grant. Her newest edition, The Golden Hair of Medusa, received a Fine Press Book Association (FPBA) Award in 2025, and the award-winning companion volume, A Golden Thread: The Minotaur—A Contemporary Illumination, received the FPBA Award in 2020, and was prominently featured in the Peabody Essex Museum’s exhibition The Creative Legacy of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Selections from the Phillips Library Collection. Belloff’s meticulous, hand-set recreation of the Unanimous Declaration of Independence (2009), as originally printed by Mary Katharine Goddard in January 1777, is paired with her own re-written, inclusive edition of the broadside, which received a Puffin Foundation grant supporting “creative and innovative initiatives that advance progressive social change.”

      Jessica C. Linker
      Jessica C. Linker

      Jessica C. Linker is Assistant Professor of History and Co-Director of Huskiana Press at Northeastern University. Huskiana Press is an experiential letterpress studio that supports class visits and projects centered in book history, letterpress printing and the book arts. Linker is trained as an early Americanist and is presently working on a book on women's scientific practices in early America. Her writing has appeared in a range of venues, including Early American Studies, The Journal Studies and Fine Books & Collections. Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, New York Public Library and the American Philosophical Society, among other institutions.

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