Myer Elementary really PULL proofs in screenprinting.

We’ve had children on the left brain. Our Clay Studio Manager’s baby is due in just a month, and our Marketing Director’s kids, Jack and Matilda have been exploring WSW grounds during their spring days off. The most overwhelming youthful presence at WSW this spring has come from Myer Elementary’s fifth grade class.  Students marched through rotations in screen printing, intaglio, and paper-making working side by side with artists–in-residence as they participated in our Art-in-Education program Hands-On-Art.

Here’s a sneak peak at the kids and their art, which you can support and see in full during an opening at Myer Elementary in Hurley on Tuesday, May 15th  from 6-7:30 pm. It also happens to be a school budget review day. We hope local voters are buying!

Anna Haglin (left) and Laura Brown (top, right) work with students in the etching studio.

JoAnna Ruisi pulls colorful paper with students.

Clockwise from top left, Tara Hagen (the antithesis of Oscar the Grouch), Tatyana Nadtochey (snoozes in cubbies), Jenn Bratovich (photogenic even with copper plates for eyes), and Anna Haglin (needs to dry up).

In January, we moved to the thick, Mid-Hudson forest. We traded internet connection and cell reception for communal meals and card games, knowing that at the end of our six-month WSW internship we would have a handful of new friends and fresh artwork. Easy as pie, right?

By pi day, we were chili-bowled over, exhausted, and had yet to make our own work. [Read more →]

In the studio: Phyllis Kudder Sullivan

I came to Women’s Studio Workshop during my spring semester sabbatical to work on ideas that were still in the germination stage.

Time, outside of my daily routine, allowed me to experiment with new materials, techniques and concepts.  There is something about having a block of time for just “playing,” that can open entirely new avenues of exploration and kick start a process of creative risk taking.

Space to work, away from my isolated studio, and within a community of artists has been uplifting, motivating and energizing.  It is part of what Jon Gertner, in his New York Times article True Innovation, refers to as a “culture of creativity.”  My experience at WSW will stay with me and manifest itself in unexpected ways long after my residency has ended.

Thank you, WSW, for the gift of time and space.

Visit Phyllis’s website to see more of her sculptural ceramics

WSW Book Artist-In-Residence Tona Wilson working on her handmade artists' book "Stories Behind Bars"

Tona Wilson came to Women’s Studio Workshop in the fall of 2010 to create an artists’ book inspired by her job as a Spanish interpreter in the US courts system.The product of her residency, Stories Behind Bars, consists of four individually bound silkscreen printed booklets: in one, a young man is deported using video teleconferencing, another gives some brief history of immigration detention, and all tell stories of immigrants in U.S. prisons and jails using silkscreened graphic novel style imagery. Tona’s poignant stories from New York State’s prisons and jails give testament to a part of our society that is hidden to those not directly involved.

Dummy covers for Tona Wilson's artists' book "Stories behind Bars".

Inspired by the voices brought to life in Tona’s book, Bardavon/UPAC director Chris Silva has put together a staged reading of Stories Behind Bars with a cast made up of students from Kingston High School and Bard College and local parishioners and clergy.  The Kingston Library will host E EQUALS ARTISTS: BOOK ON ITS FEET a special one-night-only reading this Wedneday night from 6pm to 8pm.

You can view Tona’s book in it’s entirety in our Artists Book Database.

Read more about this event in the Hudson Valley Almanac’s article Staged reading of Tona Wilson’s Stories behind Bars in Kingston