The Women’s Studio Workshop presents an exhibit of artist books.
By: Kristin Boyd
Ripped from the headlines, Ann Kalmbach’s book claims, "Your Co-Worker Could Be a Space Alien."
The 14-page pop-up pamphlet, wrapped in saddle stitching and patched together with grainy black-and-white photocopies of supermarket-checkout stories, is the essential guide for employers who want to know the telltale habits of space aliens based on credible criteria established by inquiring minds, of course.
Equal parts sarcastic story, social commentary and sculptural piece, Ms. Kalmbach’s 1985 work is also an essential blueprint on how to break the boundaries of bookmaking, both in design and content.
"It really pushes our idea of what a book should be or should look like," says Sarah Cunningham, director of the College of New Jersey’s Art Gallery, where Ms. Kalmbach’s artist book is one of 40 on display through Dec. 6.
Between the Sheets: A Collection of Artists’ Books from the Women’s Studio Workshop captures the defiance and beauty of those books, which straddle the line between artwork and literary work.
An artist book, whether about AIDS, family recipes or President George W. Bush, captures the creator’s mood at a single moment in time. The book’s size, style and texture are often as layered as the story it tells, and the piece can take any shape imaginable an accordion, shadow puppet, handkerchief, postcard or cake-mix box.
"They become sculptural objects," Ms. Cunningham says. "They’re something you want to look at because they take on their own life. You want to experience them in their physical whole. You want to read that story even if it has no words."
At the art gallery, a combination of sunlight and artificial spotlight bounces off the Plexiglas displays. Ms. Cunningham slips on a pair of white gloves, careful not to leave fingerprints as she points to and pulls out the artists’ books that visitors have enjoyed since the exhibit opened last month.
In "He Likes You," artist Indigo Som explores gender, racial and sexual interactions through a familiar childhood game. The story, complete with a condom and picture of the late Bruce Lee, is told on three pink origami fortunetellers, the kind that elementary-school girls use to decide how many boyfriends or children they’ll have someday.
"Crazy Quilt" by Maureen Cummins starts out as one square and unfolds to reveal a blanket of patterned square pages. With text that resembles sewn handwriting, the patches relate the stories of women who have been institutionalized for insanity in the last century.
Bound in a velvet-like purple cover, "Atlas of Punctuation" by Heidi Neilson looks like a journal except the book contains no words. Instead, only the punctuation marks from classic books including Alice in Wonderland, Horton Hears a Who and One Hundred Years of Solitude are scrunched together on a page.
"It’s not anything different from reading a fabulous book," says Ms. Kalmbach, executive director of the Women’s Studio Workshop. "It’s a new way to look at a situation, a problem, a moment in time, a color, a shape, a form. Hopefully in the best of creative energy, it will leave you feeling refreshed and excited."
In the early 1970s, Ms. Kalmbach befriended artists Tatana Kellner, Anita Wetzel and Barbara Leoff Burge. They yearned to have an alternative space where artists, particularly women, could create new work and share their skills with the community.
By 1974, they co-founded the Women’s Studio Workshop in a two-story, single-family house in Rosendale, N.Y. Creativity collected in every corner of the home, which included an etching studio in the living room, a papermaking studio in the attic and a screen-printing studio in the basement.
The workshop eventually outgrew the home and relocated to the Binnewater Arts Center in 1983, but Ms. Kalmbach says the mission has never changed.
"We have a lot of equipment and we can do a lot in the printmaking world," she says, adding WSW is the country’s largest publisher of hand-printed artists’ books. "It’s the medium. What do you do with print? You make a book."
Hundreds of artists worldwide now apply for the workshop’s coveted artist-book grants. A panel selects only a handful of those submissions usually between four and seven annually for publication. Chosen artists spend up to six weeks at WSW, where they work uninterrupted and have continual access to equipment and technical assistance from staff.
The result, Ms. Kalmbach says, is an impressive archive of 160 handmade artists’ books that stretches the imagination and often spurs a moment of reflection, an outburst of laughter or a critical opinion.
An artist book, she adds, "sometimes looks like a book and folds open. Other times it’s more of an object. But there is always a point of view. Sometimes it is simply a visual concept. But mostly people have something to say."
Between the Sheets: A Collection of Artists’ Books from the Women’s Studio Workshop
is on display at The College of New Jersey Art Gallery, Room 111, Holman Hall,
2000 Pennington Road, Ewing, through Dec. 6. Gallery hours: Mon.-Wed., Fri. noon-3
p.m.; Thurs. noon-3 p.m., 7-9 p.m.; Sun. 1-3 p.m. Closed Nov. 23. For information,
call (609) 771-2198. On the Web: www.tcnj.edu/~tcag.
Women’s Studio Workshop on the Web: wsworkshop.org

