We are proud to announce the illustrator for the Bee Lives: We Will Only Know Summer project is Alina Josan! Alina is an artist with a longtime passion for Philadelphia’s books and libraries. She studied painting and art history at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and her work has been commissioned by local historic institutions that include Bartram’s Garden, the National Archives at Philadelphia and Eastern State Penitentiary. In recent years Alina taught painting, drawing and bookmaking workshops at the Ryerss Museum & Library, Bartram’s Garden and the Rosenbach Museum and Library. She has worked as a book and paper conservation technician and archivist and is now happily a librarian in the Art Department of the Free Library of Philadelphia, Parkway Central.
Alina has done some bee related work in the past while she worked with Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia, as you can see here:
Dec 25, 1765
“… from these roots grow woody cones, called cypress knees, four, five and six feet high, and from six to eighteen inches and two feet in diameter at their bases. The large ones are hollow, and serve well for bee-hives; a small space of the tree is hollow, nearly as high as the buttresses already mentioned … and what adds to the magnificence of their appearance is the streamers of long moss that hang from the lofty limbs and float in the winds.”
John Bartram
From: “Diary of a Journey through the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida from July 1, 1765, to April 10, 1766,” edited by Francis Harper, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, new series 33: 1-120 (1942).
We welcome Alina to the crew as illustrator and can’t wait to see what she creates for this project!
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