Handmade/Homemade Exhibit 2015, Northeast by Northwest, Exhibitors

Sharon Alexander, language poet and artist

Visual art down to paper—it’s possible to paint with it—collaboration, book works, typography, collections, layering… and posing the question—“who is behind this?”

Remaining resourceful in coordination—reoccurring frontiers; book art—convenient and beautiful medium—small spheres in decision and direction.

Maureen Cummins is a native New Yorker who has cranked presses from California to the Eastern Arctic and produced over 30 limited edition book projects. Her “re-created” books are based on subject matter as diverse as slave narratives, the Salem witch trials, turn of the century gay love letters, and records from McLean Hospital, the oldest mental hospital in the United States. She is represented in over one hundred permanent public collections and has received over a dozen grants and funded residencies, including the prestigious Pollock-Krasner award.

Photo: Salem Lessons

Jody Gladding’s newest poetry collection is Translations from Bark Beetle (Milkweed Editions, 2014). Her other books include Rooms and Their Airs (Milkweed Editions) and Stone Crop (Yale University Press). Recent poems have appeared in ecopoetics, Orion, Terrain.org, and other journals. She lives in East Calais, Vermont, teaches at Vermont College of Fine Arts and translates French. Her work includes object poems and site-specific installations that explore the places where landscape and language converge.

Michael Kalish studied sculpture at Brown University (with Richard Fishman) and blacksmithing at Rhode Island School of Design in the mid 80s, winning ‘best of show’ at his senior student exhibit at Brown. Armed with this honor and his degree in Cognitive Science, he embarked on an academic career with too little attention to art. He moved to Australia in 1995, where he hand-built an adobe fireplace in his rammed-earth block house on a hectare of bush outside Perth. He has been in Syracuse since 2013, where he may be found working in the studio or the laboratory.

Deborah Poe is the founder and curator of the annual Handmade/Homemade Exhibit whose work for this year’s exhibit is in collaboration with Lee Gough, Claire Hero, Brenda Iijima, Julie Joosten, Layli LongSoldier, Melanie Noel, Hassen Saker, Kate Schapira, and Meredith Stricker.

Marthe Reed is the author of five books: Nights Reading (Lavender Ink), Pleth, a collaboration with j hastain (Unlikely Books), (em)bodied bliss (Moria Books), Gaze (Black Radish Books) and Tender Box, A Wunderkammer (Lavender Ink). She has published chapbooks as part of the Dusie Kollektiv, as well as with above/ground press and Shirt Pocket Press. Her collaborative chapbook thrown, text by j hastain with Reed’s collages, won the 2013 Smoking Glue Gun contest and will appear in Spring 2015. She is Co-Publisher of Black Radish and Publisher of Nous-zōt chapbooks.

More than 400 of Bertha Rogers’s poems have been published in literary magazines, journals, and anthologies, and in several collections, most recently Heart Turned Back (Salmon Poetry, Ireland); and the forthcoming Wild (Salmon Poetry, Ireland). Her translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic, Beowulf, was published in 2000 (Birch Brook Press); her translation of the Anglo-Saxon riddle poems from the Exeter Book, Uncommon Creatures, Singing Things, is forthcoming. Her visual art, including artist’s books, has been shown in more than 200 juried and invitational exhibits throughout the USA and abroad; and is included in the Ransom Center at the University of Texas, and many private collections. A teaching artist for many years, in 2007, she received the NYS Association of Teaching Artists Distinguished Service to the Arts in Education Field Award; she has also received fellowships and awards from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts; New York State Council on the Arts; and the AE Ventures Foundation, as well as fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony for the Arts, Hawthornden International Writers Retreat in Scotland, Caldera, and others. She is the founding director, since 1992, of Bright Hill Press and Literary Center in New York’s Catskill Mountain Region.

Photo: Bears Book

Kaia Sand is the author of three poetry collections—interval, a Small Press Traffic book of the year and published by Edge Books; and–published by Tinfish Press–Remember to Wave and the forthcoming A Tale of Magicians Who Puffed Up Money that Lost its Puff. Her poetry is investigative and documentary, frequently incorporating research. She also moves poetry outside the book and into other contexts such as art spaces, walks, and a magic show, and co-authored a book on that subject, Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry and Public Space. She has had her poetry most recently exhibited at the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston as part of the Antena Exhibition and North Portland Branch of the Multnomah Public Library. She is the resident poet at the Portland State University Honors Program and also teaches a summer writing workshop in County Cork, Ireland. In collaboration with Garrick Imatani, she is artist in residence at the City of Portland Archives and Records Center, commissioned by the Regional Arts and Culture Council.

Aseel Sawalha was born and raised in Palestine, where she learned traditional handicrafts and developed an interest in fine arts. She attended Yarmouk University, Jordan, for her BA (English) and Masters (Anthropology). Moving to the US, she earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology (2002). As a college professor, first at Pace University and now at Fordham University, she resumed her pursuit of visual arts.

For Bonnie Thompson Norman books are a passion and a profession. She has been proprietor of The Windowpane Press, a letterpress printing and book arts studio, for nearly thirty years and works part-time as a hand bookbinder in a commercial bindery. Evenings and weekends, she teaches classes in printing and bookmaking. Her studio has many things found in a traditional print shop and bindery as well as a wonderful library. The works produced at The Windowpane Press reflect concerns about timeless and/or contemporary issues, offering challenging questions, provoking puns and inspiration in the form of broadsides and artist’s books. These pieces are included in institutions and collections throughout the United States and in New Zealand, France and England.

Photo: Vital Signs

Elsi Vassdal Ellis creates books in a well-equipped studio outside Bellingham on 20 acres of what was once part of the Buckholtz Homestead. Born in Fallon, Nevada, she spent her formative years in Iowa City, Iowa, before settling down in the Pacific Northwest. Since 1983 she has produced over 95 editions and 120 unique books employing a variety of reproduction techniques and materials. Her work is permanently housed in many public collections including the National Museum of Women in the Arts, New York City Public Library, Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, Grabhorn Collection in the San Francisco Public Library, and Arts of the Book Collection in the Yale University Library. Western Washington University has been her professional home since 1977 where she holds the rank of full professor, is chair of the Department of Design, and teaches courses in design production and (occasionally) book arts.

Danielle Vogel is a book artist and cross-genre writer who grew up along the south shore of Long Island. Her visual work—which investigates the archives of memory stored within language—has been exhibited most recently at RISD Museum, The University of Arizona’s Poetry Center, and Abecedarian Gallery in Denver, Colorado. As a writer, Danielle explores the bonds between language and presence, between a reader and a writer, and how a book, as an extended architecture of a body, might serve as a site of radical transformation. She is the author of Between Grammars (Noemi 2015), the artist book Narrative & Nest (Abecedarian Gallery 2012), and lit (Dancing Girl Press 2008). She is currently a visiting writer teaching at Brown and Wesleyan Universities.

Student Exhibitors: Sania Azhar, Jenna Bassi, Aymer Chaux, Heidi Clorofilla, Alec Gutierrez, Jamie Leotta, Shawn Murrell, Cassie Pacenka, Rob Rizzitelli, and Aisha Shillingford.

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