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Hello out there New Havenites! There will be a show highlighting The Beinecke Library’s collection of Erica Van Horn’s (Seven Lady Saintes) work  January 13 -through March 27th, 2010.

“Throughout her career, Van Horn has woven together her methods and preoccupations into a common fabric of artistic practice and subject. Her interest in exploring the daily aspects of her life though her art, for instance, is informed and determined by her frequent use and reuse of ordinary and cast-off materials as the raw materials of her work. In remembering and making beautiful mundane aspects of life, Van Horn celebrates the significant but often unnoticed habits and customs of family and friendship, the exquisite qualities of home, the work of making art.”

Erica Van Horn will visit the Beinecke Library for a public conversation with Beinecke curator, Nancy Kuhl, on February 24, 2010, at 4pm. Van Horn will discuss her development as an artist and writer, her artistic process, her influences and inspirations. The conversation will refer directly to materials on view in the current exhibition.

Born in Concord, New Hampshire, Erica Van Horn now lives in rural Tipperary, Ireland, where she is the publisher, with Simon Cutts, of Coracle, a small press producing creative and critical works of various kinds in small editions. Coracle Books

http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/exhibitions/vanhorn/index.html
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Yale University, PO Box 208240, 121 Wall Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06520-8240
www.library.yale.edu/beinecke
203-432-2977

Melissa Jay Craig in the WSW papermaking studio, Spring 2009

The lovely and talented Melissa Jay Craig is featured in the show Respite, at the Vespine Gallery in Chicago. Melissa spent the spring here with us at the workshop coaxing pulp into dazzling shapes and colors. She writes about her experience at the workshop, and at two other residencies she took part in this past summer at Ragdale & I-Park, on her Blahhg – melissajaycraig.wordpress.com/. There will be an opening reception for Respite tonight from 7 – 10pm. If you go, please send her our greetings!

You can learn more about Melissa and see her handmade paper works and artists’ books on her website: web.mac.com/melissajaycraig/

Respite Featuring book and paper artist Melissa Jay Craig with JE Baker, Shayna Cohen, Suzi Cozzens, Marnie Galloway, Amanda Meeks, Maria Jose Prenafeta, and Sarah Vogel. November 6th through November 28th Opening Reception November 13th from 7pm-10pm

Vespine Gallery 1907 S Halsted, 1st floor Chicago IL 60608 www.vespine.org

Post event update: The reception was a smash! Read more about it and see pictures here: http://melissajaycraig.wordpress.com

This month, join us in the WSW studios to view artwork by our current artists in residence as they discuss the methods and inspiration they use in the creative process.
Katherine Spinella – Art-in-Education, Etching Fellowship
Kyla Luedtke - Art-in-Education, Artist Book Residency

Tuesday, November 17th 7:30pm
free and open to the public
Located at Women’s Studio Workshop
722 Binnewater Lane, Rosendale, NY 12472

Katherine Spinella

Kyla Luedtke

Paper Works, by Jennifer Grimyser

A selection of WSW book works is part of the Rutgers exhibition that accompanied the 15th Annual New Jersey Book Arts Symposium. WSW directors Ann Kalmbach and Tatana Kellner participated in one of the panels at the symposium, along with Karen McDermott (Book Arts Roundtable), Linda Helm Krapf (Printmaking Council of New Jersey), Esther Smith, Sarah Stengle, Judith K. Brodsky, Michael Joseph and Karen Guancione.

Recent WSW artist-in-residence Amanda Thackray curated the exciting accompanying exhibition which will run through January 22, 2010. It features a selection of books from WSW along with the work of over 20 artists, including collaborative projects.

I and Thou: The Book as Community:
15th Annual New Jersey Book Arts Symposium
November 6, 2009 – January 22, 2010
at Rutgers University
John Cotton Dana Library
185 University Ave
Newark, NJ 07102

A bunch of us have been collecting walnuts this fall. There has been an unusual abundance of them this year. We have talked about making dye for cloth, pigment for  paper, ink for drawing and how it might be possible to make oil based ink for printing. Has anyone had any experience with using black walnuts?  We would love some input!

A sampling of this years black walnut bonanza

Past artist book resident Erica Harris just returned from Guatemala where she spent September teaching soap-making workshops in the village of Xeabaj Dos. Erica was invited by Oxlajuj B’atz’, an organization that is working to improve the lives of indigenous Mayan women. You can see beautiful pictures from Erica’s trip on her website.

A solo exhibit of Erica’s collages, Remains to Be Seen, opens October 29th at the Visual Art Center of Louisiana Tech University School of Art, in Ruston, LA.

If you’re in the area, the opening reception is Thursday, October 29th from 5- 6:30pm. This show runs through December 3rd.
More information: http://www.art.latech.edu

Erica came to WSW in 2005 to produce The Midwestern Book of The Dead, she lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. You can see more of her work at w w w. e r i c a h a r r i s. o r g

Somehow Abigail Uhteg managed to not only edition a book and take some of the sweetest photos ever during her residency here at WSW, but she also managed to put together over 3000 of her photos to make a fabulous video of the process. We cant stop watching this!

You can learn more about abby at www.pressejanvier.com and you can see more of Abby’s book The Complex of All These on the WSW Website

Last night Barbara took us to meet Ute Ritschel, a fascinating woman, just back from China, who essentially develops “forest and garden” site specific installation projects with artists from around the world. These are serious, thoughtful, extremely well organized exhibitions. Each exhibition has a thematic focus, such as Native-Invasive, where artists, forest managers and scientists are engaged through the project. Operating as a not-for-profit she scrambles to put together funding from a variety of sources, which while undoubtedly is difficult, I suspect make the projects richer and more accessible to visitors. We also met Anna, her daughter, who has just finished a degree in sustainable economics. She will be moving to Switzerland to become the president of a student organization engaged in sustainable projects through chapters all over the world. Ute is also a foody. She lectures about cinnamon, there are hundreds of different kinds…and salt, black salt lemon salt etc.

Yesterday was a bummer at the Museum. first we cut a pile of prints on the wrong side, not serious, but it certainly set the tone for the day. Next we picked out some large wood type to print on the back of about 700 cards we’ve made. This project uses the same words (my current favorite is ultracrepidarian) from the book, only this time we used multiple faces in each word. We intended to print No, No, not…fill in the guessed meaning…and then put in the correct definition. But we ran into technical problems and it was looking crumby, one of the problems of wood type, so we re coming home to print it is silkscreen. But we were already part way into the printing, which meant that we had to reprint some of the first sides. No printing yet on the main book project, but today is supposed the be run number 1. No way this is going to get finished when we are here, so it will have to be packed and sent. I am a little concerned about dented corners since, as a rule, the museum doesn’t ship out anything (they collect not disperse), but there is nothing we can do except hope that it is well packed. Tana is afraid that there will be a typo. I doubt it, these guys are professional we have already set the hard part the zeros and ones. There is not enough uppercase e’s in the font for the text so we can only do half before we leave.

There is a lot of industry here. Feels a little like the US in it’s manufacturing prime. We had lunch in the cafeteria in the factory directly behind the museum where they make bridge parts. There are a lot of US hospitals that could take a cleaning lesson from this place. It was sparkling, including clean windows, and the lunch was good. Merck, drugs and chemicals is headquartered here as well as Wella and Schenk.

One of the books we got from Gerhard Wolf is all about sex, i think, going by the pictures. One poem is it called in english, “in cunt we trust” and the final line in each stanza is “in cunt we trust, cook my sock” I think it’s a fabulously funny mis-translation. Tana sez I don’t know enough German…but it’s in english. What do you think?

Here’s some pictures of the trade dinner. Don’t you like us marching in from above?

Today we set all of the type for the book. Wolfgang did the sentences and we did the zeros and ones. They are going to print half of one side one color each day which should mean it will be all printed by Friday. They have a great gizmo that makes a score. I looks a lot like the plate cutter, but rather than cut it just scores. I am hoping we will be able to get that done here as well, since it will be faster and probably more accurate than doing it by hand. The binding is still up in the air. Tana wants to see if we can get circuit board material.

Wolfenbuttel Bibliothek

On the way home from Berlin we stopped at a fabulous library in Wolfenbuttel. There were thousands of leather and parchment bound books. It’s always a surprise to see these books because they are all the same size; that is the way paper was made. They also have a good sized collection of artists books. Most were again Livre D’artists. they were housed in individually marbled paper covered archive boxes. And there were two boxes of books by Barbara. Also there was a show of the work of Hermann ZAPH, the dingbat and multiple typeface designer. Both he and his wife, also a type designer, are living in Darmstadt, still working in their 90’s.