Visual Learning Conference

Carleton College, Gould Library
September 10-November 25, 2012

Carleton College presents an exhibition featuring artists' books by several artists published over thirty years by Women's Studio Workshop. Curated by Kathleen Walkup, the exhibition is a comprehensive retrospective featuring some of the most influential contemporary book artists in America.

The works in Hand, Voice & Vision celebrate three facets that characterize the artist’s book program at Women’s Studio Workshop: the hand-made mark of the book-maker, the unique voices and viewpoints of a broad and diverse range of artists, and the visionary nature of artwork that forges new directions in the medium of book arts.

Since 1974, Women’s Studio Workshop has provided close to two hundred artists, both emerging and established, with studio facilities and technical expertise to produce limited edition artists’ books. Currently the publishing program at WSW adds five new artists’ books each year. The variety in form and content of the books in the exhibition demonstrates the breadth of the Workshop’s publications, reflecting an assortment of ideas, topics, and methods spanning thirty years of women responding to pressing political and cultural issues, as well as themes of a social or personal nature.

Women’s Studio Workshop was founded by four women artists – Ann Kalmbach, Tatana Kellner, Anita Wetzel, and Barbara Leoff Burge – with a mission to operate and maintain an artists’ workspace that encourages the voices and visions of individual women artists, to provide professional opportunities for artists, and to promote programs designed to stimulate public involvement with, awareness of, and support for the visual arts.

Each of the four women founders are still very much involved in the day-to-day operation of the studios. Together with a vibrant new generation of staff, they continue to provide programming in accordance with the original mission: residencies, fellowships, internships, and classes have become the basis for professional programs that attract artists from around the world. Public programs include Art-in-Education in collaboration with Ulster County school districts, and community workshops.

About the Curator:
Click here to see what Kathleen Walkup has to say about the exhibition.

Kathleen Walkup is Professor of Book Art and director of the Book Arts Program at Mills College, where she teaches courses covering a broad range of subjects, from visible language to women in the Paris avant-garde. Walkup’s research interests include the history of women in print culture and conceptual practice in artists’ books. Her own ongoing artist’s book project is entitled “Library of Discards.”