Dear friends,
Finally, after two years of travel and research, I am ready to organize The Bee Kingdom Archive. Please consider giving a small donation. I'll be producing two editions of prints for those who give larger donations. Please visit the fundraising site at Hatchfund for details: http:www.hatchfund.org/project/the_bee_kingdom_archive
Thank you!
+++Joy Garnett
Brooklyn, NY
http://joygarnett.com
+++
THE BEE KINGDOM ARCHIVE
Dr. Ahmed Zaky Abushady (1892-1955) was an influential Egyptian scientist, beekeeper, and poet. He was also my maternal grandfather.
For the past two years I have been gathering and sorting the many
documents that Abushady left behind. Taken together, these documents
chart my grandfather's innovative beekeeping practices in early 20th
century Egypt and England, as well as his development as a poet and
thinker.
I am asking for your support so I can begin to organize this collection of historically valuable and visually compelling material into a searchable archive: The Bee Kingdom Archive.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
The Bee Kingdom Archive will include decades of correspondence between Abushady, his famly and his peers, diagrams and patents for beekeeping inventions, manuscripts, poetry, ephemera, Abushady's own scientific and literary publications, and books from his personal library. And because Abushady was drawn to new gadgets and inventions like the handheld Kodak camera, it will contain a large number of photographs and 'snaps' of his activities in the laboratory and in the apiary, many of which he shot himself.
Much of this material has never been published or shared before. It has been preserved for generations by various family members who strove to keep the family legacy intact through wars, displacements, and deaths.
It is my ultimate goal to find funding to digitize The Bee Kingdom Archive and make it accessible to historians, researchers, and artists. But first I must secure and organize the physical archive.
AZ Abushady: Revolutionary Egyptian Poet, Feminist, Beekeeper, and More, Interview with Joy Garnett, by M. Lynx Qualey, for Arabic Literature (in English) blog, August 26, 2013
I am asking for your support so I can begin to organize this collection of historically valuable and visually compelling material into a searchable archive: The Bee Kingdom Archive.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
The Bee Kingdom Archive will include decades of correspondence between Abushady, his famly and his peers, diagrams and patents for beekeeping inventions, manuscripts, poetry, ephemera, Abushady's own scientific and literary publications, and books from his personal library. And because Abushady was drawn to new gadgets and inventions like the handheld Kodak camera, it will contain a large number of photographs and 'snaps' of his activities in the laboratory and in the apiary, many of which he shot himself.
Much of this material has never been published or shared before. It has been preserved for generations by various family members who strove to keep the family legacy intact through wars, displacements, and deaths.
It is my ultimate goal to find funding to digitize The Bee Kingdom Archive and make it accessible to historians, researchers, and artists. But first I must secure and organize the physical archive.
Please consider donating a dollar or more at Hatchfund.
...
Artist and writer Joy Garnett's work has long revolved around the archive as subject and medium. She will continue to develop The Bee Kingdom Archive
as an open access, virtual museum for her post-doctoral work at
Winchester School of Art at the University of Southampton (UK), in a
program that emphasizes interdisciplinary research across the arts. She
is also working on a book about her grandfather, Ahmed Zaky Abushady. In
an August 2013 interview, she answered a few questions about Abushady,
his work, and her book project:AZ Abushady: Revolutionary Egyptian Poet, Feminist, Beekeeper, and More, Interview with Joy Garnett, by M. Lynx Qualey, for Arabic Literature (in English) blog, August 26, 2013
