Archive photos from my 2009 installationListening from Within that I created in honor of my father, Dr. Mohammad Sarwar, who passed away in 2009; the larger production was called Honoring Dissent/Descent

In Houston for a few days, this morning I stopped by Copy.Com to do some printing for my project, On Belonging, that I’m doing in February 2018 at the Menil Collection. I was greeted by Jordan, the owner who welcomed me and asked about Minal.

“I cry every time I enter a printing shop in Pasadena,” I told him. “I wish I had a Copy.com there!”

He smiled and said: “Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help you.”

And I knew that Jordan meant what he said. For decades, while I was teaching and then operating VBB, I printed postcards, posters, anthologies, production programs at that same family-owned printing shop. I knew his father, Steve, when I was a WITS visiting writer at the Rice School, and a few years ago, Jordan donated the printing of color photographs for a project that Minal was doing at her school.

Later on, I stopped by the University of Houston’s Library’s Special Collections where an archive has been started about my work. After a two-hour visit with archivist Vince Lee and graduate student Genny Joshi where I searched for some photographs and helped Vince retag some of the material (my archive is, unsurprisingly mixed up with VBB’s archive), I drove away appreciative of how helpful Vince and his team are.

Human history and connections are created by living. Such experiences cannot be reproduced.

The entrance of Copy.Com

13 Oct 2017 · 01:59:17 PM