Notes
put the FU in fair use
Amanda Levendowski Tepski
Medium: Letterpress, library ephemera.
Dimensions: 5 x 8 inches.
Public Domain artwork referenced in this piece:
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Hogarth Press, 1929.
Artist Statement
Public domain works "put the FU in fair use" by empowering anyone to freely, legally reappropriate works without consulting lawyers. In this page from A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf engages with the societal difficulties Jane Austen and other women writers faced in the nineteenth century - struggles not dissimilar from the ones that Woolf herself grappled with many decades later. Societal pressures on women writers persist, but so too does the power writers like Austen, whose public domain classic Pride and Prejudice inspired two adaptations and multiple retellings, including Bridget Jones' Diary, Bride and Prejudice, and this year's Moderation. By appropriating a page that puts two icons into conversation, put the FU in fair use seeks to celebrate the promise of a rich public domain.
About the Artist: Amanda Levendowski Tepski
Gallatin ’11, Law ’14, Clinical Teaching Fellow 2016-2019
Trained as a lawyer, Amanda Levendowski Tepski creates prints, poems, and perfumes as part of her artistic practice. She is the Founding Director of Georgetown’s Intellectual Property and Information Policy Clinic, where she supervises students’ creative legal and sociotechnical advice to justice-minded artists, nonprofits, and coalitions. Many of the Clinic’s matters engage copyright law. She lives in Washington DC with her husband and cat, Waffles.
Footnote
To access a digitized version of A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf:
Citation:
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own / Virginia Woolf. New York (State): Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/ucbk.ark:/28722/h2j960j8h.