Handwriting Analysis, Community Conversation on Handwriting, and Institute Inauguration

On July 21st, 2012, the Institute offered free handwriting analysis toolkits to passerby’s on the sidewalk stage at Elsewhere. The artists helped participants investigate their handwriting and shared their research. Graphololgy has often been deemed a pseudoscience, yet the 1939 letter found by the artists was able to pinpoint some of Sylvia’s traits that were decidedly accurate: “You have a personality which is properly developed…make the most of it by dealing with people in the selling field or similar work.” Questions, motivations behind, and possibilities around graphology were discussed.

The analysis session was followed by Handwriting: Then and Now, a conversation facilitated by the artists featuring panelists Professor Veronica Grossi and Professor Lawrence Jenkins of UNC Greensboro, poet Graham Holt, and Carol Hart, Director of the Greensboro Historical Museum. Ideas about handwritten documents as sources of research projects, differences between the written and typed word within art practices, and the importance of this form of mark-making historically, were expounded upon.

Elsewhere’s mayors Chris Kennedy and Valerie Wiseman concluded the day’s activities by officially opening the Institute to visitors with a ribbon-cutting ceremony.