CEAM presents "Hands, Voice and Vision: Artists' Books from Women's Studio Workshop"

ST. AUGUSTINE, FL (08/19/2014)(readMedia)-- The Crisp-Ellert Art Museum and Flagler College are pleased to present "Hand, Voice & Vision: Artists' Books from Women's Studio Workshop" featuring artists' books by thirty-six 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 exhibition will open with a reception on Friday, September 5 from 5 to 9 p.m.

The forty 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.

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 opportunity for artists, and to promote programs designed to stimulate public involvement with, awareness of, and support for visual arts.

What first began as a space in which artist could practice various forms of printmaking other edition-based mediums, it wasn't long before the organization embraced the then-emerging medium of artists' books. As the curator Kathleen Walkup suggests in her essay for the exhibition catalogue: "This excitement was based on the ability of the artist's book to subvert the mainstream gallery and museum system through the creation on non-precious artifacts that could be easily duplicated and passed from hand to hand or send through the mail." Throughout the years, artists at the Women's Studio Workshop have mined this medium to investigate the formal, political, personal or otherwise. Whether an artist engages the book as their primary medium, or merely as a bridge or "liminal space" within their body of work, they each exploit the broad appeal and familiarity of the book, mapping this history onto their own contemporary practice.

Programs related to the exhibition will include a conversation between Ann E. Kalmbach and Tana Kellner, on Thursday, September 11 at 7 p.m. in the Gamache-Koger Theater in the Ringhaver Student Center. Kalmbach is the Executive Director and Kellner the Creative Director of Women's Studio Workshop. Both women are artists whose works are also represented in the exhibition, as well as two of the four original founders of the WSW.

A fully illustrated exhibition catalogue will be available for purchase. It contains essays by the exhibition curator, librarians, teachers, curators, and artists on the topic of artists' books and WSW's role in the field, as well as interviews with the four founders. Read more about the catalogue here.

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.

Curator 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.

This exhibition was generously supported through a grant from The Community Foundation for Northeast Florida.

For further information on the exhibition and related programs, please visit the website at www.flagler.edu/crispellert, or contact Julie Dickover at 904-826-8530 or crispellert@flagler.edu. The museum's hours while classes are in session are Monday through Friday, 10 am to 4pm, and Saturday, 12 to 4 p.m.

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Flagler College is an independent, four-year, comprehensive baccalaureate college located in St. Augustine, Fla. The college offers 29 majors, 34 minors and two pre-professional programs, the largest majors being business, education and communication. Small by intent, Flagler College has an enrollment of about 2,500 students, as well as a satellite campus at Tallahassee Community College in Tallahassee, Fla. A Flagler education is less than half the cost of similar private colleges, and competitive with many state universities. A relatively young institution (founded in 1968), Flagler College is also noted for its historic beauty. The centerpiece of the campus is the former Hotel Ponce de Leon, a grand resort built in 1888 by Henry M. Flagler, industrialist, railroad pioneer and co-founder of Standard Oil. The Ponce has been designated as a National Historic Landmark. For more on Flagler College, visit www.flagler.edu.