Join authors Craig Smith and Ben Wise for a discussion of their book The Collection (2024). The Collection features matchbooks collected at gay clubs, bars, hotels, and restaurants in the United States between 1971-1982. The matchbooks were collected by Larry Blagg and eventually archived in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection at Cornell University. Smith and Wise discovered Blagg’s collection at Cornell while conducting research into the lyrics, legislation, and literature that stigmatizes marginalized communities in the United States and abroad. They photographed the collection on-site at Cornell in 2023 and this new book was finished in the Summer of 2024. A second, limited edition book entitled American Ace was also created and published by Invisible Hand Press (Tivoli, NY) featuring sixty-two matchbook reproductions made with two-color risograph print technology, including a letterpress cover with hand painted gold tint emblem. Smith and Wise’s presentation will address the contemporary actions at the local, state, and federal level that perpetuate stigma and consider other book projects utilizing archives to explore the cultural epochs that shape community.

The Collection book features sixty-six full color photo-lithography reproductions of the matchbooks in a hardcover with dust jacket. The books were made in an edition of 1000, with Smith and Wise designing the book with Shapco Press in Minneapolis who also handled the printing. Both The Collection and American Ace will be available for purchase at the event.

Dr. Craig Smith is an American media artist whose art and research focuses on the process, aesthetics, and ethics of human‐to‐human interactivity in contemporary art, especially photography, sound, and socially engaged performances. Smith has been awarded grants from numerous organizations including the New York State Council on the Arts as well as the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Smith’s published books about art practice and social engagement include Relational Art: A Guided Tour (2024) with Bloomsbury Publishing, LLC, the Training Manual for Relational Art (2009) by CEPA Gallery, as well as On the Subject of the Photographic (2007) by the University of the Arts London.

Smith’s exhibitions of photography, live sound performances, lectures, and other art media have been featured at an international range of museums, galleries, art fairs, athletic facilities, and financial organizations including the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., PS1 MOMA Contemporary Art Institute in New York, The Tate Modern in London, The George Eastman House in Rochester, the Cantor Film Center (NYU), the Hudson River Museum, the Mao Live House (Beijing), CAFA (Beijing) and the Burchfield Penney Art Center (Buffalo) as well as galleries and art fairs including CEPA Gallery (Buffalo), Galerie Schuster Photo (Berlin), the Douglas Hyde Gallery (Dublin), RARE Art (New York), SCM Hong Kong, ARTSPACE Sydney, The Kent Gallery and White Columns (New York), Elsewhere Museum, and the Scope Art fairs in London, New York, and Miami.

Smith has held teaching positions at numerous universities and colleges including New York University, Goldsmiths College, and the London College of Communication (University of the Arts London). Smith joined the University of Florida in 2010.

Associate Professor Ben Wise (Ph.D. Rice University, 2008) is a historian of modern America, and specializes in southern history, gender and sexuality, and cultural history. He joined the History Department at the University of Florida as an Assistant Professor after teaching at Harvard University and holding a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

His first book, William Alexander Percy: The Curious Life of a Mississippi Planter and Sexual Freethinker, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2012. In 2009 he was awarded the C. Vann Woodward Prize for the best dissertation in the field of southern history. His research has been supported by grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina, and the Regional Humanities Center at Tulane University. His articles have appeared in The Journal of American Studies, Southern Cultures, The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, The William Mitchell Law Review, and in the edited volume, Southern Masculinity: Perspectives on Manhood in the South Since Reconstruction.