No open access. Welcome to the print archival practices and new media panel. First, on behalf of this event, I would like to share this Indigenous People's Land and Territory Acknowledgement. Founded in 1889, the University of New Mexico sits on the traditional home lands of the Pueblo of Sandia, the original peoples of New Mexico, Pueblo, Navajo, and Apache, since time immemorial, have deep connections to the land and have made significant contributions to the broader community statewide. I don't know myself. And those who remain stewards of this land throughout the generations and also acknowledge our committed relationship to Indigenous peoples, we gratefully recognize our history. And now, I would like to introduce myself. My name is Maria Erin Jones. I am the OER fellow. I'm going to let's see. Is everybody in? Somebody else? Sorry. I am the OER fellow, and I am an MFA candidate in dramatic writing here at UNM. As it is related to the panel today, I would also like to share that I'm the founder and co-producer of ABQ Zine Fest, New Mexico's first and the oldest Zine Festival. Now it's 13th year. And now I would like to introduce the panelists. Carol A. Wells is an activist, art historian, curator, lecturer, and writer. She has been collecting protest posters and producing poster exhibitions since 1981. Trained as a medievalist at UCLA, she taught the history of art and architecture for 13 years at CSU Fullerton. Her articles are on political posters, have appeared in numerous publications, and she has lectured extensively throughout the US and abroad. Amy Sulcer, also on our panel, began her time at the Center for Study of Political Graphics as a volunteer in 2015. She is now the archives director and oversees three other archivists in the cataloging, preservation, digitization, and management of CSPG's collections. Sulcer received her MLIS from UCLA and her BA in art history and visual art from Occidental College. She worked on a variety of archival projects at art institutions in Los Angeles, including the Skirval Cultural Center, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and the Getty Research Institute. Kenneth Oravets received his PhD in literature from Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, in 2023. His research focuses on investigating contemporary media culture, materiality, and reading practices through the study of art comics. His pedagogy focuses on inclusive strategies for entwining instruction and reading comprehension, collegiate success, and multimodal rhetoric. Dr. Suzanne, I'm sorry, Dr. Oravets. Dr. Suzanne Anderson-Rido is associate professor of European art and chair of the Department of Art at the University of New Mexico. She received her MA in art history from Freiberg, Germany and her PhD from UCLA to focus on European art in the 18th and 19th centuries. Okay, I've introduced all of you. And so let's begin with your presentations. We would like to go first. Carol, will you start us off, please? And we can queue up your slides here. So actually, let me start with a question. I was given some questions. Is that how I should start my presentation? I should actually just talk a little bit about the slides and then go into that first question of how I started. I think if you would like to start with your slides, that would be great. And then we can go into questions. Thank you all for doing this and for having Emily and myself to speak about the work that we do and hopefully spread the word to a broader audience. I was told that you wanted to focus on community. And so I picked five slides that deal with different aspects of community organizing and building community through the posters. I don't know if you wanna, I think you're gonna be showing them, right? Cause I don't, that's what I was told. That's why we sent them to you. We're showing the slides here. Oh, I just can't see them. Okay, that's unfortunate. Is there any way you can have it so I can see them also? You should be able to see the slides. And I think, I think I'm always seeing my names. I'm seeing the slide that has the Center for the Study of Political Graphics. My name and Emily's name. That's the first one. Perfect. So then if you would just like to call out when you want the slides changed and we will change them. Okay. So I just wanna make sure I don't run too long. So this first slide is, I mean, most of the slides are dealing with our anti gentrification. That's really a fairly consistent theme throughout the building community posters that we have. And we have many from actually around the world. I think all of the ones I've picked here are from the United States. This is actually a 10 year struggle that was partially a victory, partially not. But it started in 1979 when they were trying to tear down and neighborhood that was a lot of affordable housing. And one of the last buildings that was surviving was called the International Hotel, which was where 196 low income, mainly elderly Filipino and Chinese men had been living there is one actual resident, the man you see in the front with his fist in the air and the fist breaking forward, Felix Eisen, Filipino, he had been living there since 19, since late 20s. So it was really 1928. And they fought it for 10 years. It was the students from Berkeley and San Francisco State literally fought them off. There were like six, at least six major confrontations over 10 years with the police confrontations. The delay gave them another 10 years, but they finally lost. They leveled the building. Felix was the last one to be evicted and he died just a few weeks later or a couple of months or two later. So it's like where the victory side of it comes in the community was so outraged that they never were able to build there the high rise that they were planning on building. And ultimately they built a community center with a museum to the struggle. So, and the posters are one of the main things that organized, kept it alive and continued to tell the story. Next one, please. I won't be talking quite as long about the other four, but this is a poster from Brooklyn, from 2007, the earlier poster was 1979. And it's pretty much the standard slogan, their profit versus our community stopped the gentrification in Brooklyn. And this was put out by the Families United for Racial and Economic Equality and Christopher Cardinale did the primary design. You can see that the people that are trying to put the buildings on top of the people who are fleeing and then the people are organizing together and pushing the buildings out. So that's the kind of the shorthand version, visual version. The next one, please. This is a silk screen. We don't know, it was from the 21st century but we don't know when it was interesting because this is not very far from where the center is and we sent this picture all over that community and we never were able to identify the artists but there's a lot of gentrification in LA as in most cities around the country and they've really been fighting back. And this particular poster from Boyle Heights community of East LA, the Boyle Heights working class community wants better neighborhoods but with the same neighbors. Yes, give us better services, give us cleaner streets, give us more better public transportation but don't evict the people who are here and don't replace the people that are here and give a wealthier community the services the people that are here now basically deserve those services as a message. The next slide. Micah Bazant from the Bay Area. I don't watch my neighbors, I see them. We make our community safer together and it's just a beautiful, a lot of posters are very militant, very negative and Micah Bazant has an incredible ability to really make positive statements while making the same kind of, the complaint is there of what usually happens but it's not, but it's done in a very positive affirmative way. And then the final poster is also from Berkeley from 2006 from the community health works and the picture, the image is actually from a Frida Kahlo painting but I thought the slogan was a perfect slogan for this section of my presentation that social justice is the foundation of community health and it's actually the foundation of community. So those are the five posters that I chose. Should I go into how I founded the center now or should I let someone else come in first? I think we'll go on to the next panelist and look at all of the presentations and then we'll come back to questions and more statements and we would love to know more about the center and your founding of it. Okay. Thanks. Emily, so we'll start with your presentation. Yeah, of course. Hi, I'm Emily, I'm the archives director at the Center for the Study of Political Graphics and I work with Carol. I've sort of been asked to join the talk to provide a little more detail about how here at CSPG we provide access to the protest poster collection and about the work that sort of happens behind the scenes. So CSPG is a really small organization with a large collection of over 90,000 human rights and protest posters and basically consists of two adjoining office suites where we keep all of the posters and we've cataloged over 30,000 unique posters during the last 34 years of CSPG's existence. So about 30% of our collection is fully cataloged on an item level and the vast majority of the posters are stored here in flat file drawers. Each drawer has about a dozen large archival folders which are shown on the table in this image and each folder contains a big batch of posters. So we sort the posters either by topic or by country or by artist and all of the 3,400 plus folders in the archive are listed in an archival finding aid that researchers can access online. So they can at least have a reference point in inventory. So they can request specific folders to view. They can request research appointments. We have researchers that come to the center from all over the world and our research audience is very diverse. It includes activists, organizers, curators, artists, scholars and educators. Could you show the next slide please? Yeah, so the biggest priority for our archive right now is digitizing the collection. This is especially important for us because we have so many international posters and people are not always able to travel to the center to do research here. So for most of CSPG's history, we sent posters to an outside vendor to be photographed. But since January, 2022, we've set up a digitization studio in-house and we're photographing the posters on site. And our archivists have digitized over 32,000 posters since we started this project. And this is a really great accomplishment for such a small organization. We really only have four staff people that work directly with the collection. Next slide please. So all of this digitization work is kind of in the service of putting our posters online on a collections website so that the public can freely access our collection. We've had a small collections website since about 2015, but we're in the process of rebuilding it and changing it to include more images and to have the ability to zoom in on the poster images and kind of see finer details. Could you show the next slide please? This slide kind of gives you a taste of what we're going for. The site will have sort of a list of all the folders in the archive and then you can see the record for one folder here. So there's the title, artist groups, tire, graphical, popular. And next to where it says description, there are like names and keywords about what items are in that folder to make it, you know, text searchable. And on the new website, you'll be able to see the images of the poster that are inside the folder. So this is sort of what we're aiming for. And yeah, right now we're mostly just focusing on digitizing the poster collection and constructing this upgraded website to give the public access to the images. And we're hoping to launch this new website at the beginning of next year. But yeah, thanks so much for your time and I appreciate the chance to speak about the work that we do here. Thank you so much, Emily. Let's move on to Dr. Kenneth Borovitz. So we'll shoot those up. Thank you. This is a hybrid presentation, so we're online and we're sitting here in the room. All right, can everyone hear me on the Zoom? Yes. I apologize if I'm not looking at the owl but look at the screens, the new modalities for me. So I'm Dr. Kenneth Borovitz. I'm here with the University of college at the University of New Mexico. Now I'm going to be talking a bit about my work on research into comics, zines, print, and the media. So I received my PhD in literature very recently, 2023. And in that program, my focus was on studying and teaching recently canonical literary graphic novels. So our speaker is Miles, Mike and his trophies were Sepless, Allison Bechtel's Fun Home. Those are often considered the three canonical graphic novels as much as their work would be canonical and it's come out the last 20 years. But in the course of my research, I began to dive into works that began to experiment with comics form, right? It's often that we think of comics as a genre but rather comics is a medium of expression that's not limited to certain types of content but rather is a mode of expression with very indistinct and flexible boundaries. And so it's like footnotes and Gaza by Rosako and what it is by Linda Berry, pages of which are depicted on the screen really got me thinking about the gray areas between comics and other medias. From there, I decided to go really crazy with it and I decided to focus in explicitly on experimental comics. So experimental comics, they're reimagined in comics formal devices favoring the purposeful radical and sometimes playful deviation from tradition. And one of the key areas I was exploring was comics as visual objects. So comics as image text objects rather than merely image texts thinking about the vitality of objecthood and preserving and reading in a literary sense whether comics are functioning as distinct objects. So for instance, on this slide, I have excerptions of three works. On the top is a work from the Haida Manga artist, Michael Nicoliani-Lannis called Red. Red is a book but if one would have two copies of the book and rip out all of the pages, it would be arranged on the wall to create a mural as depicted in that image. In that sense, the book is really deconstructing the notion of boundaries and borders. It's a comic, but as you can see, it isn't using conventional panels but rather form lines and indigenous to the Haida people. And so Michael Nicoliani-Lannis's work really explores that type of object breaking, dimensional breaking. On the bottom right, we have work by Yako Pelzebue who is an Instagram cartoonist who's really exploring that format. And then in the bottom left, we have work by the cartoonist Lalee Westvend which is printed in RezaGraph, which I'll get into in a second. But overall, experimental comics are independent on the ground, experimental artsy comics community. We find a place like Epikuzine Fest, for instance. A lot of wonderful experimental comics. It was there. So RezaGraph printing was one area that I was invested in in my dissertation. Some folks might be familiar with it, some folks not. RezaGraph emerged in the 1980s as a means of job printing, printing of federal materials. It's extremely compact, yet can print materials very quickly and in multiple colors. So it was originally favored for things like cruise ships, churches, small organizations, but on material quickly. It builds off of many a graph technology. So essentially, you create a difficult stencil. You then put in a ink drum of one predetermined color, then the stencil prints onto that ink drum in a singular color. RezaGraph is a dry ink, so you can print layers immediately, which allows for multicolor prints as that little diagram is illustrated up there. In the time since it was invented, it's become a favorite medium for the small press, especially for comics and zine craters who are used to using or maybe say stealing prints from Kinkos. RezaGraph opened up a whole new world of color possibility and expressive possibility. Part of my dissertation research that I interviewed 12 RezaGraph print makers from RezaGraph Studios across the country about their work, about their community-oriented work. And then I put that up in this old zine. I actually had a bigger zine, but this is the one I dispernerated at RezaLonga last week. I went to the local Op-Kirky RezaGraph studio. I have one more slide. This is not related to comics, but it is related to archival work in new media and I thought it'd be fun to share. When I was at Northeastern, I was part of a project called Letter Press Goes 3D. We had a letterpress studio called Husky on a Letterpress and we explored techniques for using laser engraving on wood as well as 3D printing to replicate the historical woodcuts. So on the left is a woodcut from the early 1900s by Thomas Nason that we recreated using laser engraving on wood. We also have an illuminated letter being 3D printed there. And then we also integrated new technologies with Letterpress design. So for instance, we 3D printed a QR code that was type I, that I would then integrate into our promotional bookmarks. So lots of fun with new and old media. Thank you, Dr. Orvitz. And let's move on to our final panelist presentation from Dr. Suzanne Anderson with Reader. Yeah, all right, let me see if this maybe works enough. Yeah, so I'm gonna change a little bit the focus. And that I'm looking at work and I brought to you today particularly one work that was produced in the early 19th century and was a very, very successful print album, print project in the early 19th century. And it focuses of what was then called the Finoss. So really within the art dialogue. And I'm bringing this project because I find it's fascinating as a work that we don't necessarily think of as a political engagement work. But when you look a little bit deeper you can really see the layers of it and its effects. So I just wanted to remind people a little bit that the beginning of printmaking in Europe, which is my focus is in the 15th century. And it's really a revolution like it was in the 15th century like what we are experiencing in the 20th, 21st century was digital images. Meaning for the very first time images could be reproduced. You have multiples of these images that travels to different places. So it opens up entirely kind of new questions in the arts. A big role for printmaking happened to on the one hand make known an artist's work, sometimes produced by the, let's say painter. And that's an example here on the left. Dura produced this print of the presentation of Christ in the early 16th century. This Dura is a Renaissance artist from Germany, but this print circulated in Italy. And the Renaissance painter Raphael knew about Dura because of the prints, not because of his paintings but which was his main work. And as a result is they get in touch with your letter writing and they're exchanging work. So Dura's work is known in Italy through this print. So that's completely kind of changing your audience, changing your influence. Another really big and important role for printmaking is reproducing existing works of art. We don't really think of that today because we're so focused on originality, but up to the 19th century probably the biggest role of prints, of the multiple of a print is making a print after another work of art. And that's what you see here on the right where you have an 18th century print after a 17th century Netherlandish painting showing the scene now in black and white. And I also wanted to focus, I want to draw you focus on what's underneath the print. It's not only the title of it, but it also tells you who owns the print. Not the prints, sorry, who owns the painting. So in other words, prints can serve as knowledge carriers, you learn about other works of art through the prints, but you also learn about the wealth and the status of those who own works of art. So a print can really kind of emphasize the social position of the owner of artworks. And another very important role of printmaking is that it provides models for artists. So be it the fully reproduced print becomes the model for an artist to learn about the vocabulary about the composition, et cetera. And it was in French training, art school training, you started by making copies of drawings and prints. And that's what you see here in the image in the center. So it's, you don't start with drawing after a 3D object or let alone a life model, but every artist and every artisan as well really started with studying prints first, making copies of them first. So my research right now is focused on this print album that's called the Musée Français, the French Museum, which is a huge compendium of prints bound on four volumes and produced between 1803 and 1812 and produced by over 150 engravers from over nine different countries. So it's a truly international, vast project that was funded by private publishers. However, the state got interested in it very, very quickly and it made it very successful because what it represents, this is a series of prints representing works of art from the Louvre Museum in Paris. The Louvre Museum was opened as a national museum and just 10 years prior, the first prints emerged in 1793. And if we just recall what the Louvre was was basically the royal collections and then during the revolution, they added the collections from churches to it and aristocrats that made up the collection. And when it opened as a national museum, the first national museum that we have, very quickly and then Napoleon with the revolutionary wars of Napoleon, he not only conquered lands, but he also conquered cultures. And when after the army had invaded a city and a land, they would pull out the artworks and bring them all to France. So France becomes the hub, not only politically, but also culturally. So now this museum is really, it's larger than anybody had ever seen before. It's a huge collection, the Louvre Museum and the Napoleon. And it has all the great pieces that people have been admiring such as the Louvre Gohan that you see here on the left or Leonardo's St. Anne that you see here on the right. Interestingly, is that this reproduction of these artworks was unbelievably successful. And we know that because we find this album everywhere. We find it in private and public collections, in libraries, in trade schools throughout Europe, but we even find it or we found it in South Africa and also in the Americas. So question matters why, why is such a thing so successful in its own time? And I think the answer is because it's a powerful didactic and that is a propagandistic tool. So if you bear with me, I just wanted to look at one print in particular. And this is a print by the United States and this is a print by Tavadiou, a French engraver, relatively young at the time, who reproduced a famous painting by Raphael that was in the Louvre at the time, St. Michael. And this is then published in the third volume, I believe, of the Musée Français. So when we think of reproductive prints, we think of copies, right? It's like, oh, it's just the same thing in black and white and it's a little smaller. Well, it really isn't that when we start looking at it closely. It's kind of a very unique temporary look at this painting that the engraver takes for his own place and time. So one thing we, of course, we have to consider that this painting here by Raphael is relatively large. The print is one sixth of its size. So I try to size it down, but not too much so that you can't see anything anymore, right? But yeah, it's very, very small compared to the original painting. And of course it's tonal, right? It's black and white rather than colorful. So that means the artist can't just copy, but the artist has to make changes. The engraver has to make changes. Some of them decide, you know, how do you deal with this new scale? How do you deal with the new color range or tonal ranges? So what we see is that Tertillier actually changes things a little bit. So look carefully that for instance, the devil and the angel, the figure composition is actually moved a little bit closer to us. Why? Well, in this reduced version of the, you know, reduced size of the version, it really emphasizes the position of this angel, the powerful, forceful position of the figure group rather than letting us escape into this wide open space, right? So it's an adjustment of these things rather than color with a kind of golden type of color or yellowish colors in the soft warm nuances, the engraver has the line. It can't really be painted, it has to be linear because of how you create a viewer engraver. And also instead of color, what you have is maybe a brilliant black and white, but not the painterly effects of a color. So we have all of these adjustments at the time, but then if we look in a bit more detail, we can see that even within the details he starts to make changes, subtle, but nevertheless changes. So for instance, if you look at the left where you see Raphael's angel, just the lower part of him, look at the tunic, this golden tunic or soft color tunic, that's very decorative from this angel that then the engraver translates into this much more functional linear kind of a tunic or whatever the soldiers are wearing these times. And if you look at the devil, the face in particular, the whole articulation of this devil becomes so much more straightforward, right? He has this grimace and he has these incredible loss that really show the strength and the tail becomes really scaleless. In other words, he has to translate these things. But what that also means is that when we now start to step back again, instead of having this divine figure of Raphael, what we have is much more this young, powerful fighter. He's like a soldier, completely calm in action. Meaning again, for the time, we're talking at a time when Europe is in war, this resonates with people. And sure enough, this print is winning prizes and one of the top prize at the time. And people are really saying, this is the way we need to look at old masterpieces through print milky. And then we find this print, sorry, one more. It stopped. Well, here we go. No. Okay. And then we find these print albums and that's what I wanted to show you with that picture on the right, just the size of it, right? These are large albums that we're talking about. We find this album in Rio de Janeiro in the National Collections of Rio de Janeiro. And that really I thought was striking, like why in this world are we now bringing these prints and finding them in places so far away from the moveable. But what's fascinating is that it seems that this print of these albums actually came to Brazil with a group of French artists in 1816. So right after the fall of Napoleon, many people had to leave France because they were too closely aligned with the Napoleonic regime. And these artists left France to come to Brazil to establish a French-style art school in Rio de Janeiro, which at this point is the capital of the Portuguese colony and the Portuguese king was actually residing in there at the time and back this project wanting to bring and bring in these French artists to build a school which ultimately resulted in the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts that was founded in 1822. So artists bring these prints with them, why? Well, again, remember prints are training tools. So it's excellent training materials for artists to learn the visual vocabulary, to learn what is the quote unquote great art, great art of Europe that now becomes the model for artists who are working for a European colonial court to learn their work and their language and their vocabulary. So I would argue that the prints indeed serve a very political role here as outlining a European canon in the arts, outlining a cultural ideal for the arts. The prints now reinforce Europe's cultural political hegemony in this colonial world. So a little bit of different focus. And I just wanted to add maybe one more thing. I'm working right now with a group of scholars and on this particular project of the Musée Francais and we're trying to put together a website with the digital imagery and the kind of archival material and new interpretations of this work that was so successful throughout the 19th century. Thank you, Dr. Anderson-Reedle. This is also fascinating and I almost can't contain my excitement about just hundreds of years of printmaking. It's very exciting. We have about 15 minutes or so left in our time together. So I'm going to open it up a little bit to questions here online. But first I want to also introduce Jennifer Jordan who is the OER librarian. And so we've been working together today. So I just want to add a face to this tech support a lot more than that, obviously. And then I also want to mention that those of you who are over in Albuquerque in the room, there is a small exhibit inside of Zimmerman. If you just go diagonal to this room, it's called The Visual Power of Print, Images from the Sam Elsley Collection. So there is a print by Carol A. Wells in this collection. And it's really the impetus for this entire event was finding this print and then connecting the print to a living artist and then saying, would you please, would you please be on this panel? So that's how that all happened. And please go take a look at the prints. They're beautiful. They're fascinating and they're exciting. So I am going to start some questions, but please let's make this a little less formal. I've got questions that I can, oh, thank you. There it is. That's the print that I was just speaking about. And I'm sorry, but Carol, is this your first print? Is this what you were telling me recently? Uh-oh, you're muted. There. No, it's not my first poster. I did my first poster. And I don't consider myself a poster artist. I've probably made a half a dozen posters, but it was kind of like by default because there was nobody else around to do something that needed to be done or that I felt needed to be done. But my first effect of the posters, at least though the first, most of the posters that I made, we're not talking huge volume, were about Central America's struggle, which is how I got involved and how I transformed from a medievalist to a poster collector and exhibitor because it had to do, it was that life-changing trip to Nicaragua that I did. Actually, that's not even true. That was 81 and my first poster was 1979, but it was also about Nicaragua. It was as a fundraiser for the Nicaraguan Literacy Crusade. So the Nicaraguan Revolution was actually very central to my education and transformation from the 12th century to the 20th. Thank you, thank you. And so I wanna start with you asking a few questions. So would you please tell us how you started this archive and why? I know you've kind of answered this, but maybe expand that for us. Well, I really refer to it as an accidental archive, although I know a lot of archives consider themselves accidental because my passion for justice, which I've been exhibiting and working on since high school and civil rights movement, Vietnam War protests, were, and then in my passion for art, I became an art historian, really came together in the political poster. I was like, I was just like, wow, these two things that I'm passionate about. And this was in the middle of Reagan, President Reagan's war against the people of Central America. And I was using the posters produced in Central America to create a different narrative, to create a narrative of they were trying to get a better life for themselves, feed their families, develop healthy care, get an education, and the US was trying to prevent all of that. So it really started out as an organizing tool for people to use in the United States as a way of one more tool of organizing against the war, to get the word stopped, kind of things never changed. We're still using posters to promote wars and to stop wars. And it went, this was before the internet, before texting, before, and it was all through word of mouth, through solidarity activists that this exhibition, which started in 1981, and it literally went around the country repeatedly from 1981 to 1989. All through word of mouth, all through the solidarity network. And every place I would go with the exhibition, people would take me to the local bookstore, which was usually a university town, a lot of left bookstores, and they all had leftover posters from past events. And so I helped them clean house. And I would come back from every lecture, every exhibition with piles and piles of posters. And that was really the origin of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, which actually wasn't incorporated until 1988. But it was founded to be a resource for activists because although the exhibition and the initial collection was Central America, they quickly became, I think the second exhibition I did was on women's rights. The third exhibition was on liberation theology. And then it just kept growing and growing. And people say, we need an exhibition on this, a former political prisoner says, could you do an exhibition on political prisoners? I said, well, if you help me, I'm sure we can find the posters. So that's really how it happened. People would come to us and they would want us to work with them to create a labor exhibition or an AIDS exhibition. And we were able to find the posters and work with them to create an exhibition. And then they just kept, our exhibitions have actually been over 400 venues of the United States and internationally since 81. So that's kind of astounding. When you think of a shoestring. Wow, yes, that it is, it is astounding. So I had a question about archiving specifically. Like I just, I noticed in Emily's presentation, you have acquired a way of scanning your posters to make it easier. And I think we were talking about this earlier in another conversation, that this came about during the pandemic as a necessity to be able to keep working in some way. Emily, would you talk to us a little bit about making that shift into scanning your own work in-house? Yeah, that was our big pandemic project. CSPG in its history as an organization has gone through a lot of different digitization efforts. In the 90s, early 2000s, they made slides and then the slides were scanned. And then we started realizing that the images were too small. So we needed larger images. So for a long time, CSPG was able to use an outside vendor to photograph our posters as needed for research requests and for exhibitions. And yeah, during the pandemic, the studio clothes that we had used for a long time, they decided to just completely shift their business model and not do any more photography. And yeah, we had for a long time dreamed of being able to photograph the posters in-house and be able to photograph more posters because it is a lot of work to inventory the posters, to deliver them to the photographer, to do the quality control, like checking all the files when you get them and then inventorying the posters when they come back. So it was something that we'd wanted for a long time and the pandemic just sort of provided an excuse because we did look at other vendors and they were quite expensive because the thing about posters is they're all oversized. They're all considered oversized and photographers tend to structure their pricing around the size of the objects. So eventually it just became more cost effective and more what we wanted in terms of being able to utilize the archive to have something in-house. And we got a lot of help from an archivist in the Bay Area named Lincoln Cushing who did a poster digitization project. And we had a lot of help from sort of someone who volunteered a photographer at the Getty Research Institute who sort of helped us pick out equipment and trained us to use it. So yeah, we've sort of been doing the digitization effort in earnest since January, 2022. And how will this affect your inevitable expansion? You're going to end up having more things in the archive. How has this upgrade, how's this upgrade going to support that growth? Well, that's, I don't know if you want to- You can go ahead, you can go ahead. That's actually part of the longer question about the future of the center because initially, I mean, for over 30 years we had rent free space and that was we were supposed to have that in perpetuity and it was part of a foundation that was about a over a dozen groups had rent free space and it was built in. And then after the founder of the foundation died his son was able to find a loophole and destroy the foundation. And we were not able to, we fought it for a couple of years but we weren't able to convince the court the attorney general that something was off here. So we don't know the long-term future of the center and digitize the entire collection is going to allow us to continue to function whether or not we are the holders of the actual objects. And so before we don't, we want to be, we want to stay independent because there's nothing else like us. We're also, we'll consider a partnership with an existing institution. And there are some models for that. I know USC is in a partnership with the one international game, Lesbian Archives and that's been working well for quite a while. So we're not sure what's where we're going but we are sure that we are going to digitize the whole collection before any final decision is made so that we will at least be able to make sure that these 90,000 posters continue to be in the public access because they were made for people to use as tools for educating and organizing people to action. And so it would be terrible if they were buried in some institutional basement and not have, and not accessible to the public. So that's our priority. Yes, I mean, I think it's a battle between being able to archive and then this idea of impermanence and who decides what is not, what's important and what should be recycled quite frankly. Speaking of impermanence, I want to talk to Dr. Orvis and I'm sorry, I'm looking this way and not at you when I'm trying to connect with everybody. Could you tell us a little bit about z-making and a little bit about the impermanence of that and the struggle between keeping a z in alive for future folks to take a look at and what kind of things are important to you in that respect? Yeah, and I'm sure it's a topic that you're also very familiar with. Yes. And z-making is so powerful because it is rooted in unfettered individual expression and community. When someone sets up to make a z-making, they're not reliant on the network of publishers, manufacturers, distributors. It is them who is set upon making this work for themselves, for other people in the community to read. And that comes to certain challenges for archiving and collecting z's. Z's are made in very small rungs. For instance, as Rizzo, you can very rapidly print somewhere between a hundred to a thousand copies of a zine, but once you go above a thousand copies of this not at all practical because you have to hand-collead everything, among other reasons. Zines themselves, so in part because they're based in, we could say manufacturing methods that are so DIY, are not strong objects. This is stapled down. And as a result, there is a sense of inevitable decay that accompanies the limited run of the zine in the first place. For instance, the Rizograph, it's a dry ink is only ever meant for ephemeral materials. The archival resilience of Rizograph is still very much on improving. And one reason why in my project, I wanted to interview zine makers and zine print studios and publishers was because at least then we would have some type of artifact of the work that was being done, even if the work itself was not accessible in the future. I think it's gonna be, it's a huge challenge to reduce the emergence of zine librarians, but the idea of a comprehensive one is almost impossible. And I wouldn't say that it's antithetical to the nature of zines, but it's the intense locality and intimacy of the zine makes it very difficult for them, our kind of users. Yes, it's true. I mean, if you know a zine maker, do you know them? You've read their zine, you know who they are. It's very, it's connective tissue somehow, it's very strange. But it also makes me think of the presentation from Dr. Anderson Riedel about the subtle changes in a masterwork and then a masterwork of print. Would you talk a little bit about how graphic artists overcome the perception that their art is just a reproduction as opposed to a dialogue across time or across design? Would you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I think actually that is, it has been a problem for artists in the past, but the problem is much bigger today because I would say since the later 19th century, there is such an emphasis on originality which really didn't exist prior. And because this kind of printmaking was taken over by photography, right? And then we're talking what? Is it now a documentation or is it an interpretation? So these are questions that are discussed with photographers and photo historians as well. Well, very much. But one way for the artists that I was talking about to overcome that institutionally is by the way they were trained. And that's actually really interesting. Printmakers were part in the early 19th century of the fine art academic system where artists in France are trained. Actually, printmakers were trained in a printmaking studio. Yes, but absolutely. But they were also asked to join the studies of painters and sculptors. So we have a number of artists who worked with Jacques Rida, one of the biggest names at the times or one of the biggest studios, or with really successful sculptors. And some of them actually became painters or sculptors. But the reason of it was that they truly understood how a painter is working and how a painter is expressing certain things. And then translate that into their own techniques and ways of expression. And I think that was a minimal moment to recognize that even if you translate an image from one medium into another, you truly have to understand your model and rethink it. And so it's that rethinking of, re-experimenting of with forms and with expression and in the arts that make them being recognized as worthy works of art in their own right. And then people have access to it. And I think that's another big part because only the Pope on some of them on sculpture. But now I can put it up in my house. And so I think, yes, you adhere to the image that you see, but he also really embrace the quality of the print. And so that accessibility, what the poster is to move people to action in this case is to include them in that fine art discourse. And I think that's a really an important part of why prints were so unbelievably successful. Even though they were reproductions. I really do appreciate your presentation because I'm reflecting on looking at a painting of Albert Durer my whole life and looking at his fingers and realizing that his hands were not, he was not just positioning that way. His hands were shaped that way through making sort of photography from cutting into wood and cutting into stone. So it's very obvious that printmakers are artists because they are using their buddies. And it's the same as musicians who are using their hands to play instruments become the shape of that need. And it's true of jazz artists that we are interpreting music. Someone's original music, we interpret a different way, a variation or a variant in comic book making. So looking intently at something is not copying it. It is internalizing it and then expressing it as a human being. It's incredible collaborative work. Okay, so we're coming to the end of our discussion. Are there any questions? There's one in the chat. There's one in the chat. Okay. All right. Would you help me find that on the list? I'm an artist who work as archived in CSPG. Hi, Carol. I have a question for the expert on themes in comics but it extends to other forms of archiving as well. Much of comics, particularly experimental comics that play with the form are both physical objects and nowadays often contain links to aspects of the comic that only exist digitally. And in that way, exist as multiple mediums that are also only one medium simultaneous. How does one score those aspects of physical media when they extend beyond the tactile but are still technically part of the zine and comic? Yeah, so you're thinking of something like a hyperlink but then a comic to a digitally related work. I see you on the screen, so not if that's what you're thinking about. That's part of what I'm thinking of, yeah. Yeah. So I've also seen comics linked to 3D models even online. So that's where it gets really complicated, I would think. There's a work I'm thinking of as well called, it's called Beyond Pen and Pixel by Amarith Borsak where you pulled a book to a webcam and then it generates a rotational 2D model of the abstract that can be contained within a book. If I'm remembering how that works correctly. The other iconic one I think of, it's not even a zine at all but there is this really terrible horror movie called The Devil Inside and then it didn't have the end to the movie. It just was like, if you want to see the end of the movie, go to thedevilinside.com. While you go to thedevilinside.com and it no longer exists, the movie has no ending, right? And I think that's the tricky thing about digital media, especially web-hosted digital media is it is so reliant on a continual stream of capital. Like if it is not being financially supported, it is not going to exist. And the moment thing more impermanent than a zine might be a website, right? And I think that is just a intense institutional challenge and a choice that a zine maker makes will when they include something that is digital in their work, they have to accept that there is going to be a fennel unless they put in the financial supports to maintain an online service. That's tough. Thank you. Sorry, not a more optimistic answer, but thanks to Sam. Thanks for that question, Jared. Anyone else have questions I'd like to pose? Oh, what do you want to say? Hello, I just want to look on that, maybe connecting the parallel medieval studies to going into the poster world and thinking about the palimpsest and to what extent that as a very affordable form and just reusing materials in order to bring the most needed up-to-date contemporary thoughts for me to get put on, parchment or on other media kind of brings the old back to the old advice first time. I just have actually a little comment. A lot of people think, how could you go from the 12th century to the 20th? But it's not, when you think about, I mean, all art is political, not all art is overtly political, but all art is, everything is political. But the medieval art was some of the most overtly propagandistic art that was ever made. It was totally upfront in glorifying the state and glorifying the church and glorifying, I mean, and then the Renaissance became more secular. So the politics of their art was certainly a little less in your face, but it was totally there. So the in-your-face aspect of the propagandistic quality of medieval art is like a political poster. I mean, it's in your face and it's out there. So it's, you know, the trick becomes finding the political interpretation of things that aren't so blatant. And when I, you know, I've been challenged, I make that statement all the time, all art is political or everything is political. Every billboard is political. But people say, oh, it's not. And it's just, they know how to read it. They don't know how to read, you know, what's out there, how the images are working on us. Thank you. Yeah, if I can just, and I completely agree and to see the nuances of that engagement with the public and then political engagement with the public is what's so fascinating when you look at these works and to get back to the digital archives is, you know, like what you're doing with your posters, digitizing them and really making them available. It might be temporal until we have a new web system and it all breaks down. But until then, the opportunity to research, to learn, to engage with it is really something that is mind-blowing, to be honest. And, you know, having the ability to go into archives, you know, from New Mexico, in Los Angeles, in Paris, in Rio de Janeiro is something that can really help us to pose new questions, to examine these ideas in a new light. And the other thing that I wanted to bring up is the digitization when you do it in a high quality, allows us today to see things that I haven't even seen with my silly little loop, you know, decades ago when you're at the work. Does the artist work necessarily so we can zoom in like this so crazily? No, that's not the idea, right? You're supposed to see it from a certain distance. But to understand of why things operate the way they are and you can really go into that depth is just, yeah, it just changes how we comprehend some of those works. And I'm so grateful for your digital archives to allow an access and to allow a study and a comparison that way that I really feel that we're in a very lucky time period right now to really widen our horizons for that way. It must be like looking at a distant star through a telescope. Yeah, suddenly discovering something that's been there the whole time. Yeah. You were able to get closer to it. And you know, when you talk about the artist's hands you can see exactly where it starts, where it ends, where it swells. So all of these things, right? It's like, well, that's a little geeky, but the geeky part is also sometimes when you have a fascination and they make it to the visual power that these works have, all of these works. You know, I just want to add one other thing. The folk, I mean, I think digital is critical. It's totally, it's opened up a whole new, many universes of working with images and disseminating images and just a quick story. A friend of mine, a wonderful artist named goes by the name Mr. Fish did an image of Che Guevara merged onto the famous statue of King Tut and he, during the Tahir Square and he put it on, he called it Walk Like an Egyptian and it was put online. And the next day somebody took a photograph of somebody in Cairo holding his piece. Yeah. It was just like, you know, one of these, you can't imagine things moving that fast and connecting us. But I also want, if people are so especially, younger people, they're used to seeing everything this size and it's different. And we have a lot of young interns every year and they actually touched the physical object that really was carried in a Black Panther Party demonstration or put on a car of a Black Panther Party funeral or was part of the United Farm Workers. It gives them chills and it's very different when you're seeing something this size than when you're seeing something this size that always looks the same in many ways. So there is something for getting people interested and informed, but also having access to the originals. I mean, if something is the size of a billboard, it has a very different impact and feeling than if it's the size of a sticker. Stickers are important, but they have a different function, much more intimate. I said that for you, Jerry. Because you made two. I was nodding. I don't know if it's clear on camera, but I was just like, yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much for that. Are there any other questions before we close out? I just want to say thank you to everyone watching, everyone in the room, and to thank our panelists. And this has been an amazing discussion and so glad it's reported so we can go back and review and come up with more ideas. Long live print. Long live all of you. Thank you, Mari. Thanks for having me, I think. Thanks. Thank you. Okay. I think that's it. That's it. Thank you. Should I add? Did our panelists stay on for a moment? Let me stop at 30. I'm going to jump in.


Hello and welcome to the session. In this session we are going to discuss the following question which says that find a unit vector perpendicular to the plane A, B, C where A with the coordinates 1, 2, 3, B with the coordinates 3, 4, 5 and C with the coordinates minus 1, 6, minus 7 are the points on the plane. Let's start the solution. Let OVB origin and we are given point A with the coordinates 1, 2, 3, point B with the coordinates 3, 4, 5 and point C with the coordinates minus 1, 6, minus 7. Then we have vector OA can be written as i cap plus 2 j cap plus 3 k cap as point A has coordinates 1, 2, 3. Vector OB can be written as 3 i cap plus 4 j cap plus 5 k cap as point B has coordinates 3, 4, 5. Vector OB can be written as minus i cap plus 6 j cap minus 7 k cap as point C has coordinates minus 1, 6, minus 7. Therefore vector AB is given by vector OB minus vector OA which is equal to 3 i cap plus 4 j cap plus 5 k cap minus OA that is i cap plus 2 j cap plus 3 k cap. Therefore vector AB is equal to 2 i cap plus 2 j cap plus 2 k cap and vector AC is given by vector OC minus vector OA which is equal to minus of i cap plus 6 j cap minus 7 k cap minus of i cap plus 2 j cap plus 3 k cap. Therefore vector AC is given by minus 2 i cap plus 4 j cap minus 10 k cap. Now we shall find the cross product of the vectors AB and AC. Now vector AB into vector AC is equal to which is equal to i cap into minus 20 minus 8 minus j cap into minus 20 plus 4 plus j cap into 8 plus 4 which is equal to minus 28 i cap plus 16 j cap plus 12 k cap. Therefore the cross product of vector AB and AC is equal to minus 28 i cap plus 16 j cap plus 12 k cap and modulus of the cross product of vector AB and vector AC is given by square root of minus 28 square plus 16 square plus 12 square which is equal to square root of 784 plus 256 plus 144 which is equal to square root of 1184 that is 4 into square root of 74. Therefore modulus of the cross product of the vector AB and AC is equal to 4 into square root of 74. Now we have cross product of vector AB into AC is equal to minus 28 i cap plus 16 j cap plus 12 k cap and the modulus of the cross product of the vector AB and AC is equal to 4 into square root of 74. Now our unit vector perpendicular to the plane of triangle ABC is perpendicular to both AB and AC. Therefore our unit vector N perpendicular to the plane of triangle ABC is given by N cap is equal to vector AB into vector AC upon modulus of vector AB into vector AC which is equal to minus 28 i cap plus 16 j cap plus 12 k cap upon 4 into square root of 74 which can be written as 1 upon square root of 74 into minus 28 by 4 i cap plus 16 by 4 j cap plus 12 by 4 k cap which is equal to 1 by square root of 74 into minus 7 i cap plus 4 j cap plus 3 k cap or we can also write minus 1 upon square root of 74 into 7 i cap minus 4 j cap minus 3 k cap hence our unit vector perpendicular to the plane of triangle ABC is given by minus 1 upon square root of 74 into 7 i cap minus 4 j cap minus 3 k cap which is the required answer. This completes our session but we enjoyed this session.


Let's begin here in chapter 17 as I normally do. I will read a few verses to you Give you again a little bit of a reminder for those who may not have been with us in our last study just to set the tone And then we'll move into our study. We're looking today at verses 1 through 15 of chapter 7 17 I'll read verses 1 through 3 and we'll get into our study acts chapter 17 beginning at verse 1 Reading to verse 3 Luke writes now when they had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia They came to Thessalonica where there was a synagogue of the Jews Then Paul as his custom was went into them and for three Sabbaths reasoned with them from the scriptures explaining and demonstrating that the Christ had to suffer and rise again from the dead and Saying this Jesus whom I preach to you is the Christ is the Messiah And so we've been following the Apostle Paul on what has been called his second missionary journey He had been ministering into what is today modern Turkey He had crossed the Aegean and he had entered into a region at that time known as Macedonia which is northern Greece and We saw how that when he was there in that area in Macedonia He had planted the first church ever planted in Europe the church of Philippi so as He's ministering Paul is encountered in tense persecution and he in he encountered in severity in Philippi again remembered there was a demon possessed young woman who was Demon was cast out or and as a result of that Paul was placed in jail. He had suffered a beating and a night in jail for doing something good Now in 1st Peter 2 verse 19 Peter said it like this He said it is a credit to you if being aware of God you endure pain while suffering unjustly And so persecution was something that he had become ready for it was actually something that was becoming common Now Jesus had prepared the church while he was still walking on the face of the earth And and he said you need to be prepared even to expect this kind of opposition Because there's a price that believers will pay when they actually really follow the Lord Psalm 3419 says it like this many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him from them all So Paul knew that he was going to suffer affliction as well as knowing that he was not abandoned He knew that God was with him and God was fully aware of what he was enduring He was enduring all of this for the sake of the kingdom So after his night in jail, he and Silas had been released They they went to a woman by the name of Lydia's house and and there they encouraged the saints And he made it very clear that through many tribulations we enter into the kingdom of God So after all of this has taken place Once again, he resumes his mission and that's where we pick up our study here in verse 1 now Notice how it begins in chapter 17 verse 1 when they had passed through Amphipolis and at Bologna They came to Thessalonica where there was a synagogue of the Jews And so Jesus had commanded the disciples to take the gospel and mark chapter 16 verse 15 to the entire world He had said go into the world and preach the gospel to every creature So in obedience to the command Paul is traveling from Philippi to a place called Thessalonica now Amphipolis is around 30 miles south of Philippi Apollonia 30 miles from Amphipolis and Thessalonica is around 37 miles from Apollonia So Apollonia was Prince's girlfriend, but anyway, I wanted to show you for you oldies Okay, this is basically giving you an idea of what's going on So you see up in the top there by Thrace you see Philippi, and then you see south Southeast Amphipolis in Apollonia You see Thessalonica up there to the to the west and and then you'll see Berea We'll be looking at all of those places He'd actually will be seeing Thessalonica and Berea today, but that's been the way that Paul has been traveling So he's from Philippi to Amphipolis to Apollonia Thessalonica and then we're gonna close with Berea So I wanted you to have that in your mind So all of this is you know giving to us an understanding of how long it took him to get the Thessalonica So from where he was to where he ends up in Thessalonica. It was about a five-day journey Now Paul had spent a night in jail He had been beaten with rods. He had been put in the stocks He had been placed on a cold wet floor in a prison And he had every reason to complain to God about what was happening to him. This is unjust This is wrong. I shouldn't be going through these kinds of things But instead of giving up he and Silas actually gained strength through it Instead of it causing him to close his mouth He continued ministering Proverbs 28 verse 1 says it like this the wicked flea though no one pursues But the righteous are as bold as a lion and that's what's happening in the ministry life of Paul the more He endures the stronger he becomes He's gaining strength and he's once again on the move and he's on his way now to the city of Thessalonica Later on he's gonna he's gonna plan a church and we'll see this in a moment But later on he's gonna write to this church and he's gonna say in 1st Thessalonians 2 verse 2 As you are aware, we had already endured suffering and shameful treatment in Philippi But in the face of strong opposition, we were bold in our God to speak to you the gospel of God So they're gonna be aware of what has taken place and what has driven him basically to come and minister So notice in verse 1 it says they came to Thessalonica where there was a synagogue of the Jews So this this city Thessalonica is called Salonica now. I've been there in in Greece in northern Greece This city was uh, uh, was a large city It had a commercial port and it attracted many foreigners and amongst the foreigners who came to this place Were a large group of Jews. That's why you have a synagogue that is mentioned Now it was a chief seaport in the region that we just looked at called Macedonia It was what is called a harbour town It had a population of 200,000 now that doesn't sound like much today and the way that we think but that was a huge city in ancient days It was a very large city It was like there san francisco or their new york los angeles boston or san diego It was a large large city But it was also filled with corruption and persecution and it was very difficult for paul the minister there It had rigidly religious jews who were completely against the message of the gospel Now as we're looking at this laying another bit of the foundation his ministry pattern has been developed He often entered first into larger cities Because he knows that the larger city has an influence that it wields on the smaller ones If he could plant a work in a large city Very often smaller villages would follow suit. It's true to this day large cities influence Various other places. So what takes place will say in hollywood for the longest time is going to influence the whole nation And so when something was planted in a large city very often It had a progressive kind of effect on on the villages and all that were around it So he went into into this area and he he's beginning to do a work and with the hope of reaching others And so he makes his way notice here He makes his way verse 17 to the verse one verse one in chapter 17 He makes his way to the synagogue. He says this calls it the synagogue of the jews And he would go there and he would minister to the jews And and that's because he wanted them saved in and romans 116 He said i'm not ashamed of the gospel because it's the power of god That brings salvation to everyone who believes first to the jew and then the gentile So he would take the message of the gospel to his people And first and and then minister to others And so it says in verse two it was his custom to go in and to reason and went into them for three Sabbaths three consecutive Sabbaths So again, paul consistently would first enter a synagogue It became his practice in chapter nine We saw it in verse 20 at once he began to preach in the synagogues that jesus is the son of god In chapter 13 verse 5 when they arrived at salamis they proclaimed the word of god in the synagogues Chapter 14 verse 1 at iconium paul and barnabas went as usual into the jewish synagogue Now he would do that for many reasons But one is because he had a commission to take the gospel out and to preach it He wanted to reach all the people it was a commission that jesus christ had given Jesus said you shall receive power after that the spirit has come upon you You shall be witnesses of me and judia Jerusalem judia samaria unto the uttermost parts of the earth Jerusalem and judia in you would go to the jew first and then to the gentile was the pattern And so he would go out and he would reach the jews As a matter of fact in romans 1520 he said i have made it my aim to preach the gospel not where christ was named Lest i should build on another man's foundation I want to go out and preach the gospel but to the jew first and also the gentile You see the entire world is spiritually lost it's in spiritual bondage And so it needs to be set free and the gospel brings the word of god that brings freedom and first uh john 519 John said we know that we're children of god the whole world is under the control of the evil one And so he's preaching the gospel to the whole world and he's preaching to israel You see as a as a jewish man he had a special burden for jewish people In romans 9 2 through 4 i have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart I could wish that i myself were cursed and cut off from christ for the sake of my brothers Those of my own race the people of israel So he had a general love for the world and a special love For the jewish people the people that he himself was part of And so what does he do? Well, it tells us in in verse 2 that he he went there for three consecutive sabbaths and he reasoned with them From the scriptures He reasoned with them the word reason means to dialogue or discuss it actually carries with it the meaning of arguing So he would argue with them. He would reason with them. He discussed with them dialogue for them He was disputing with them And how did he do it? Well, he he did it through the old testament scriptures What he's doing as he's there is he's showing them the old testament How that it speaks to them concerning their messiah. That's what he's doing He's quoting old testament prophecies. He's showing how jesus christ fulfilled those prophecies We know that jesus fulfilled somewhere in the 300 plus range of prophecies And so he's using scripture to demonstrate to them who jesus christ is He quotes the scripture because the scripture reveals christ Remember in the gospel of luke in chapter 24 remember the story of jesus Having a conversation with disciples who were on the road to imeas And he initiated a conversation with them and and they told him that they were confused They said that they had thought messiah had come But the messiah whom they thought was messiah had been killed and And then they went on to say certain women came to his tomb and they couldn't find his body And so at that point jesus told them that he had fulfilled what the prophets had written In luke 24 26 and 27 he said it jesus said not the christ who have suffered these things and to enter into his glory And beginning at moses and all the prophets He expounded to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself And that's what he's doing here. He is reasoning with them paul in verse 2 from the scriptures He's speaking to them about messiah So he's giving them passages from the old testament These are passages that reveal jesus and what god has done In order to save people now i want to make going simple point And then i'll move on today we very often Want to reach people and we use a variety of means by all means necessary. Let's reach as many as we can paul would tell us But what happens sometimes is we will We will advance our music and we'll advance personal testimonies and we use those as As a a gospel presentation and of course I'm not opposed to either one of those I think of course that scriptural music and worship of christ is very appealing of course And also personal testimony goes a long way God can use those things to reach people on a very personal level when I first got saved I began to learn scripture through the songs Not just through the reading and studying of scripture and having bible studies presented to me that of course But part of the way that I began to learn scripture was through the songs We called them scripture songs and we would sing we would sing them in in church services Many of the young musicians who had gotten saved would pick up the bible They would find a verse you know rejoice in the lord always and again I say rejoice and we would sing and clap and all of that You're great as the lord greatly to be praised And and we would sing these different songs that were scripture songs and we knew a lot of them You know we we did that we we sang about the love of god that we god saves and scripture songs are powerful And that's how I I memorized a variety of scriptures and not only that But when we'd go to church and very often the the young pastor like lania frisbee or somebody like him At calvary chapel would would speak concerning how god had transformed their life and me as a hippie I would listen to these people I could relate so there's nothing i'm not speaking against the music and i'm not speaking against the testimony Those things are great those are great tools god uses those things of course he does But the thing that he uses to save people is not just the music and it's not just the testimony And this is what we're seeing the things that saves people the thing that he uses to save is the scriptures And that's what it says here Paul as his custom was went into them and for three sabbaths reasoned with them from the scriptures explaining And demonstrating that the christ had to suffer and rise again from the dead It's saying this jesus who my priest used to christ see i could i could sit down and i could say to a Buddhist which at that time I did i could say this to somebody with the religious science or whatever i could say well You know i was a doper i was a i was a drunk you know i was this and that And and i came to faith in christ and and they'd say well i was that too but i found my truth in in buddha So it wasn't enough that i was giving my testimony there had to be something else that was stronger It's the power of the word of god and that's what he's doing. He's giving them passages from the scripture Again testimonies are great But it doesn't bring people to salvation in the end salvation comes from god's word In first chrithians 1 21 Paul said it like this he said since in the wisdom of god The world through its wisdom did not come to know god God was pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe So it's a word of god that sets you free It's a word of god that saves.  That's why when i got saved i didn't go to some guru I went to the word of god And the word of god enlightens my darkness by the power of the holy spirit And so that's what he's doing he's sharing these things and he's explaining God's word to them notice in verse two when it speaks of him reasoning When it says he's reasoning that includes fielding questions So he's dialoguing he's presenting to them the claims of christ It says in verse three explaining and demonstrating That the christ had to suffer and rise again from the dead and saying this jesus whom i preach to you is the christ And so he's quoting various old testament passages passages that we the church Are familiar with there are over like i said over 300 specific scriptures related to christ in the old testament So he would be speaking concerning The fact that jesus was born in bethlehem that he was from the tribe of juda that he's a descendant from king david But he especially is speaking of how he fulfilled what was spoken of him in isaac as well as the Psalms So verse three when it says that he's explaining and demonstrating that the christ had to suffer and rise again Well in isaac 53 A book that was written in the old testament over 700 years before christ It prophesies messiah in isaac 53 verses 3 through 12 where isaac was inspired to write He was despised forsaken of men A man of sorrows acquainted with grief And like one from whom men hide their face he was despised we did not esteem him Surely our griefs he himself bore our sorrows He carried yet we ourselves esteemed him stricken smitten of god afflicted But he was pierced through for our transgressions. He was crushed For our iniquities the chastening for our well-being fell upon him and by his scourging by his stripes We are healed so he would be quoting from the old testament He'd speak from isaac. He'd speak from the Psalms Because it says he had to suffer and rise again Psalm 16 verse 10 you will not leave my soul in sheol nor will you allow your holy one To see corruption so he's pointing out who christ is through scripture And that's what he says in verse 3 this jesus whom i preach to you Is the christ Again in acts 10 43 all the prophets testify about him That everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name He is the christ the christ is a word that is a greek word In the hebrew it's mashiach. He's the messiah the anointed one of god So as he's pointing to to jesus as a suffering servant He also is pointing to his death as well as his resurrection Well listen verse 4 says Some of them were persuaded And a great multitude of the devout greeks and not a few of the leading women joined paul and sylas And so gentiles and women were open to the message and it says here that they were persuaded now The word persuaded means to be convinced it means to be convinced by somebody's words that they might believe They were persuaded they're convinced by what was said That they might believe That has led to what we today in in the church community refer to the ministry of apologetics The apologists is the one who presents the scriptures. I remember my mom saying to me She she used to call me daddy. She said daddy. Why do they call? Uh christians Apologists we don't apologize for anything. That was my mom We don't apologize for believing in jesus. My mom was real radical And I said no mama. We don't but the word apologists or apologetics is speaking of explaining the reason behind our faith And that's what an apologist does. That's a ministry of apologetics is to explain what we believe. That's what he was doing He was pointing to christ as the suffering servant that he died and that he was resurrected and he was persuading And people were listening now Earlier we had seen the birth of the church of filipi and now we're seeing the birth of the church in thessalonica Notice how it says that the majority of the new believers were Gentiles Later on paul would write them in his first letter And in first Thessalonians chapter 1 verse 9 he would say to them that they had turned to god from idols to serve the living and true god So these were people who are devout greeks who became what are called godfarers Included he says many prominent women. They were attracted to the purity of the faith of israel But not everybody is going to believe verse 5 the jews who were not persuaded becoming envious Took some of the evil men from the marketplace and gathering a mob set all the city in an uproar and attack the house of jason And sought to bring them out to the people that word attacked means literally to raid they raided his house Now they did not allow themselves to be persuaded. I want you to notice this in verse 5 Let me explain something briefly notice again in verse 5 it says the jews who were not persuaded That speaks of not allowing themselves to be persuaded It is what has been called a willful rejection. It's something that has been fueled by a spiteful envy They would not allow themselves to believe Now we had seen this in what is called by city in antioch when the jews had rejected the gospel It says in acts 13 45 when the jews saw the multitudes They were they were filled with envy and contradicting and blaspheming opposed the things spoken by paul In verse 50 of acts 13 the jews stirred up the devout and prominent women and the chief men of the city Raised up persecution against paul and barnabas and expelled them from the region Now that's happened before the religious jews rejecting the gospel Such persecution rejection that they just pushed them out So these are people who are hardening their hearts. They're not listening to what is being said I've spoken to people who are Who have told me they are who have literally said it? I remember on one occasion. I was speaking to one one one fellow and his name was rich and I said I was speaking to him I I shared some things with him about Jesus and and he said to me He goes well, he says I have no reason to disagree with you He says but I can't follow I can't follow Jesus the way you're telling me to and I or calling me to and I said Or calling me to and I said well, why is that? He says because he says I can't come to faith in christ in the way you're presenting to him because That my mother Will be upset if I become a christian and step away from the faith that she raised me and he said and for me To to change my what he thought was his religion for me to change that is is saying that my mother Lied to me. He said I can't do that I've had that happen twice. I had somebody else say to me one time the same Basically the same thing. I was sharing the gospel with him and and he said to me He said, you know, he says, yeah I go, okay.  I respect you he says that's He says I I just can't because I've been raised by my mom to believe this and I won't turn my back on my mom And I said to him.  And he said yes And I said I wasn't But I was willing to bring my mom to heaven I said you need to know Jesus so you can bring her to heaven with you But there are people who know But they willfully reject they hear But they on they're hardening their hearts like it says in ezekiel 3 verse 7 the house of israel will not listen to you Because they will not listen to me For all the house of israel are impudent and hard hearted ezekiel was a prophet And god is saying they're not going to listen to you because they don't listen to me Hebrews 4 verse 2 says Indeed the gospel was preached to us as well as to them But the word which they heard did not profit them not being mixed with faith and those who heard it So they may hear but they don't put their faith in these were not persuaded they rejected willfully They rejected what was being said they had nothing to do with it wanted nothing to do with it as a matter of fact They firmly opposed it look at verse 5 The jews were not persuaded became envious Took some of the evil men from the marketplace gathered a mob Said all the city in an uproar attacked the house of jason and sought to bring them out to the people So they gathered these wicked men who were hanging around the marketplace And uh, these are the kinds of guys that would be easily encouraged to create Uh trouble it says in verse 5 that they raided the house They attacked the house of jason and they wanted to bring them out to the people It seems that jason was a believer who was hosting paul and the team but verse 6 when they did not find them They dragged jason and some brethren to the rulers of the city crying out Those who have turned the world upside down have come here too Now that's something similar that was brought against them when they were in the city of philipi in act 16 20 and 21 These men being jews exceedingly trouble our city and they teach customs which are not lawful for us being romans to receive or observed And so they're making a similar charge But notice how they say it in verse 6 they have turned the world upside down That shows you the the power and the impact of the church in the early days for them to say the world is being turned upside down Would to god that the church would once again have the charge of turning the world upside down It seems sometimes that the world has has infiltrated to the church so much that the church is doing very little to influence the world And yet in the early days they said these people are turning the world upside down But as believers we say no, we're not turning the world upside down We're turning the world right side up and the way we're doing that is by the word of god and the spirit of god And so they're saying these people are trouble makers And they're causing problems for us here And the idea that we christians are trouble makers Uh hasn't stopped it continues to this day Uh the the right to life even as we're celebrating the reality of that Today here in our fellowship aware of and celebrating the reality of that. We're still looked at as trouble makers We're still being presented as those who don't care and things like that and And the argument is still going on because we do care because we care about the babies We care about the women we care about the the young men involved There's lives that are being destroyed that the church ought to care for And that's what we're doing, but they're saying now you guys are just a bunch of trouble makers well verse 7 says that jason has harbored them And and these are acting contrary to the decrees of seas are saying there's another king jesus And so These are not charges that can be ignored That they're they're charging them with disturbing the peace of preaching and illegal religion Advocating sedition by proclaiming a different king Jesus christ is the king potchess pilot had asked them. Are you a king and jesus responded to it's as you say But i'm not a king after this world If i had a kingdom that was modeled after this world my servants would be at war But my kingdom is a kingdom of the heart That's what jesus taught and so they're saying they're advocating a different king and we as believers would say Our king is jesus christ We we bow our knee to him. We follow his commands. We're part of his kingdom Yes, of course. Well, they got them upset and it says they troubled the crowd And the rulers of the city when they heard these things These were charges that they couldn't ignore so verse 9 So when they had taken security from jason and the rest they let them go So they forced jason to post bond Like today it would have been forfeited if if violated and and so what happens is by doing this They're guaranteeing that paul and sylas will not create any more trouble And so after they post the bond verse 10 the brethren immediately sent paul and sylas away by night to baria When they arrived they went into the synagogue of the jews and so To allow the bond to be refunded for their safety paul and sylas Leave we just saw the map barrio is around 50 miles southwest of thessalonica And again notice when they arrived they go into the synagogue Once again, they go to the lost sheep of the house of israel to preach to them And this is in spite of how they had recently been treated Just because Some are not interested in christ doesn't mean that we should give up There are a lot of people who are But it seems sometimes that nobody is But there are a lot of people who are saying and i'm hearing this now Just tell us the truth Can't you just tell us the truth? Everybody is so careful not to speak what is true because they're afraid of being called judgmental or harsh That they keep their mouths quiet. No, we need to learn to speak the truth in love But if we don't speak the truth, how are people going to know that they're blind and walking in darkness? And the world sets up systems to keep them in darkness. They're already dark They're already in the darkness as is because spiritually they are darkened But they're hiding if you will and thinking that the way that they're living isn't going to be noticed I have a three-year-old granddaughter myalena And she will cuddle up next to me On the couch and she'll bury her head in my shoulder And she will hide she's hiding from grandma She's three years old. She's hiding from grandma And so what i'll do is i'll put my hands over her eyes And i'll say she can't see you And she'll sit there and she'll yell grandma But my hands are blocking the view and she actually at this point one day she'll realize her grandfather's a liar, but Right now it's just fun She'll say grandma and i'll say she can't see you she can't see you Because something is blocking the view. You know what that's how we are before we're saved Is we think that if we hide behind good works Or hide behind something whatever religion If we hide behind something god won't see the evil that we actually do We have this idea that we can hide from god And what we are actually is we're hiding from truth And so they don't want to hear the truth They don't want to hear it because it's convicting because it makes them realize what they need and so Paul hasn't given up sometimes it seems that people don't care But every time an invitation is given in this fellowship there are people who respond to it Because they need jesus christ And they know what you may be one of those even today you need jesus christ You're living in darkness hiding from god But god sees all that you're doing and he's welcoming you to himself if you turn from your wicked ways and come to him And so this is what's taking place here They arrive they go to the synagogue. They go to the lost sheep But notice how he's there in the synagogue. He receives a different reception Verse 11 says they were more fair minded Than those in thessalonica in that they received the word with alreadyness and searched the scriptures Daily to find out whether these things were so They are more fair minded when it says they were more fair minded That means they were the the word is of noble mind They were They had a a nobility in the way that they were listened. They were listening with a heart that was willing to hear and to test They were not predisposed in other words to reject what was being said These were people who were aware of their own lacking and they wanted to hear the claims of messiah Now paul is preaching to them in a simple way And when he did that by the way He wasn't trying to impress him with the way that he spoke he he said to the Corinthians in first Corinthians 2 verse 1 So it was with me brothers and sisters when I came to you I didn't come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about god He went on into verse 4 of the same chapter Verses 4 and 5 to say my message of my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words But with the demonstration of the spirit's power so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom But on god's power And that's what paul's doing. He's he's bringing the word of god in a simple fashion He's explaining to them. He's not trying to use eloquence. He's not trying to deceive them in a crafty way He's speaking clearly. He's not making untrue statements and claims He's not trying to impress him with his ability to communicate or his vast knowledge of scripture He's simply preaching simply. He's saying this is who jesus christ is You see the gospel doesn't need to be dressed up to entertain people The ones who need the gospel to be entertaining Are normally the ones who drift away But paul preached salvation to a fair-minded people and their desire was to know god Now that reminds me of a devout man we find in scripture. His name was simian He's referred to in the gospel of luke This is a man who longed to see messiah and the spirit had received him that he wouldn't die until he had Had been able to do so and joseph and and mary had brought jesus to be presented in the temple and Simian was there and when simian saw them in luke 2 29 through 32 This is what he said.  Why do we attend certain places or do certain things? Why we need to always be very quick to look at our own hearts to ask ourselves that reason Why do we go? a long time ago when I first began to teach a made a A decision That I would do the very best I as a pastor teacher could do to actually teach the word of god It's it's not hard To tell stories as a matter of fact, that's the way that I learned my mom would tell me stories all the time That's how I learned my mom was a storyteller And so she would tell me stories about this and that she told me i'll give you one example I could tell you many But my mama for example said to me, you know, david, do you ever pray and not get your prayers answered? Well, i'm six seven years old. I don't even know what that means really, but I say yes mama I do And she says well, let me tell you a story. That's how mama would do it.  This is one of my mom's stories There was a little girl who when she was little would pray and ask god to give her red wings She wanted red wings And then one day because she didn't get the red wings she told her mama I don't believe in god anymore and i'm not going to pray to him anymore I asked for red wings and he didn't give me red wings And she said you know what happened and right now again, I'm I like stories. I said well, what happened mama Well, she was a young teenager going to her first prom And she had a backless dress And as her mama helped her to get ready for the prom Her mama said to her baby, aren't you glad now that you didn't get those red wings? So my mom would tell me stories like that about Why god can and she didn't even know the lord yet But she had kind of like these people. She was fair-minded She wanted to know god My dad wouldn't allow a bible in the house when I grew up because the only people he knew who read the bible He said we're crazy And so mama that's the only thing I know for certain that she ever disobeyed my dad in it She hid a bible And she would read her bible and my mom wanted to know god So when I got say forgive me, I don't know why I get emotional But when I got saved mama had been reading in her bible Misunderstanding it by the way in the book of isaia a little child shall lead them. She read that She said what's that mean? So when I came in and told her about Jesus, she said well, I had read a little child. Well, mom that was incorrect but You got saved because she was I want to know god I want to know see so for me I I don't like to waste my time I just don't I don't have enough of it left in my life to be wasting now I don't like to waste my time So if I go to a bible study I want to know what the bible says I don't want to hear the stories that the evangelist can give me I don't want to hear how great that person may be I want to know how great Jesus is because that helps me to live You see and that's what's taking place And so it says in verse 11 they received the word with our readiness and searched the scriptures The word received means to welcome To accept the word readiness means to be willing or eager And the word searched means to thoroughly Investigate these burrians are models of faith and reason They are ready to believe but they're examining what is being said They're not going to simply trust everything he says they're going to Trust what the scripture says they're not going to trust everything he's saying or what they're feeling They want to know what god's word says so they made a determination to examine the word itself. They weren't naive but they weren't cynical either They wanted to know god Again, that's a model to every believer in jesus christ. We are not to naively believe everything we hear We hear and we search In first on four verse one beloved do not believe every spirit But test the spirits to see whether they are from god many false prophets have gone out into the world later Paul would write the Thessalonians and it would seem to infer something of the burrians using them as an example because In first Thessalonians 5 20 and 21 he said do not treat prophecies with contempt but test them all Hold on to what is good And so they heard what was being said they searched the scriptures daily To find out whether these things were so therefore verse 12 many of them believed And also not a few of the greeks prominent women as well as men So god used this to reach them But verse 13 when the jews from thessalonica learned that the word of god was preached by paul at baria They came there also stirred up the crowds Immediately the brethren sent paul away To go to the sea but both sylas and timothy remained there So those who conducted paul brought them to athens and receiving a command for sylas and timothy to come to him with all speed They departed And so notice how the jews the unbelieving jews from thessalonica came to do what they could to interrupt him preaching The world is diligent to ensure that the gospel is not preached uh Football quarterback a believer in christ recently won a game and he gave testimony of how good jesus is This happened just within the last week or two And he he was giving testimony of christ But the the station broadcasting his interview after the game cut off his testimony Because they do that If you were a muslim it wouldn't been cut off But he was a christian And we don't want to hear jesus be in honor. It's going to offend people Well, that's what happens the world is diligent to ensure that the gospel is not preached and driven by envy The enemies of the gospel pursue paul that they might make more problems And they were willing to take a good journey to interrupt his ministry notice in verse 13 how they stirred up the crowds The word stirred up speaks like a storm on the sea. They're disrupting it And the men that they that they got these evil men Were enemies their enemies of the laws what it is And so it's making it dangerous for paul to remain and so they send him away Verse 14 says the brethren sent paul away, but sylas and timothy remained So in verse 15 to protect paul from further danger they sent him to to athens And from there he's sending for sylas and timothy that they might join him immediately Why would that be well paul was concerned for the new believers in thesilonica and baria He wants to know what has happened to them since he has left He knew that they were going to go through things and as a father in the faith He wanted he wanted to hear how they're doing and it always bothers It always will bother a person who Brings somebody else to the lord to hear that they've gone through pain I remember a young man in one of the bible studies here in the fellowship in our earlier days Who had he was a real rough guy? He was a real tough guy And he gotten saved and he and I got to know each other He'd come and talk to me and all and I got to know him a little bit And one day he had come to a midweek bible study and And as he was there I saw him he walked up and his he had a black eye his his eye was swollen shut I looked at him and I said what happened to you He says oh He says I work at and he told me some some store. He says and he says some guy walks in And he put some alcohol down on the counter Now I've been telling people, you know share your faith tell people about jesus So he says so he put the alcohol on the counter He said all I said to him was you really don't need that So he hit me He says and I'll tell you the rest of the story. This is what he told me He said so he hit me and he says so I jumped over the counter and grabbed him And I put him down and I pulled my hand back He said But I remembered I'm not supposed to be violent He says because you've been teaching me the word that I'm supposed to be loving and forgiving So I let him go When he walked in with his black eye I felt bad I I did Because what I encouraged him to he paid a price for But that's what happens When you're encouraged to do the right thing There will be prices you pay And a lot of people are not willing To pay the price not that we should go out and start, you know, what are you doing there? What are you doing there? What are you doing there pow pow pow? We don't need that What we need to do is be aware Of what's taking place and paul knew Something was happening as a matter of fact, he writes in 1st asloonians 2 14 And says for you brothers and sisters became imitators of god's churches in judia Which are in christ jesus? You suffered From your own people the same things those churches suffered from the jews He heard news what happened persecution Persecution erupted as a pastor as well as an apostle Paul loved the people there He knew that those who live godly in christ jesus shall suffer persecution But that doesn't mean he didn't want to hear how they're doing How are they doing their new believers in thesalonica these new believers in baria? It's a it's a pressure cooker. There's going to be violence So i want you guys to come as fast as you can I want you to tell me what's happening And so it says receive in a command for sylas and timothy to come to him with all speed They departed and as they depart will be picking this up next time paul is in the great pagan city of athens And we're going to be seeing what happens What is the thing that provokes a person to preach we're going to be seeing that next time we get together