Rising Together
Essayist Alison Karasyk will leads a conversation with artists Marueen Cummins, Tatana Kellner, and Melanie Mowinski at Center for Book Arts to discuss the themes of the exhibition, Rising Together.
About the Exhibition
Rising Together showcases the potential of the book arts to engage—through messaging, through critique, through action—and to speak truth to power in an era when such truth is dire.
The work in Rising Together demonstrates how artist books give activism a visual voice, and can serve as powerful agents in effecting positive social change on issues encompassing social justice, power, politics, the environment and more.
Rising Together is a traveling book arts exhibition organized by the College Book Art Association and hosted from 2018 – 2021 in conjunction with the Art Center College of Design, Center for Book Arts, Mills College, San Francisco Center for the Book, University of Iowa, University of Puget Sound, and the University of Utah.
Moderator
Alison Karasyk is a curator and writer living and working in New York. She completed her MA at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) in 2018 and graduated from Oberlin College in 2012.
Alison is the 2018 recipient of the Ramapo Curatorial Prize for her MA thesis, An unbound knot in the wind, a group exhibition which built off of her research on the Finnmark Witchcraft Trials and the Steilneset Memorial. She was Assistant Curator of the Lofoten International Art Festival (LIAF) 2017: I Taste the Future and has held positions at Crush Curatorial, Brooklyn Museum, Aperture Foundation and The Museum of Modern Art. Her research interests focus on the intersection of gender, space, memory and materiality.
Speakers
Tatana Kellner is a visual artist with over 20 solo exhibitions in USA and Canada. Her practice encompasses artist’s books, printmaking, papermaking, drawing, photography and installation. She uses these media to comment on contemporary culture.
Tatana’s work has been featured at the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Fort Collins, Co, Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz, and Center for Photography at Woodstock, Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA and Creative Concepts in Beacon, NY, Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY and District Fine Arts Gallery, Washington, DC, among others.
In 2008 she received the Puffin Foundation Grant and in 2005 the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant. Tatana is also the recipient of two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships, two Photographer’s Fund Award from the Center for Photography at Woodstock and Ruth Chenven Foundation Grant. She has been awarded residencies at The MacDowell Colony (three times), Yaddo, Banff Centre for the Arts, Lightwork, Visual Studies Workshop, Saltonstall Art Colony, Millay Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Artpark, Blue Mountain Center, Jentel, Foundacion Valparaiso and Ragdale Foundation.
Tatana is a co-founder of Women’s Studio Workshop, an artists’ workspace in Rosendale, NY. Her work encompasses printmaking, photography and installation and she is the author of 22 limited edition artists’ books.
Maureen Cummins was born in 1963 and is a native New Yorker. She graduated with a BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art, where she studied Printmaking and book arts. In 1993, following a series of apprenticeships with master printers and binders in New York and California, Cummins established her own printshop/studio in a nineteenth-century packing box factory in Brooklyn.
Since that time, she has produced over twenty-five limited edition artist’s books. Her work is held in over one hundred permanent public collections internationally and has been included in exhibitions at the American Craft Museum, the Zimmerli Art Museum, the Rotunda Gallery, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Art Complex Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum. Cummins has received over a dozen grants and awards and has been an artist-in-residence at numerous venues, including the American Antiquarian Society and the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
Maureen Cummins currently lives with her family in the town of High Falls, New York.
