Leslie Allen
(American, b. 1954) Leslie Allen is a painter’s painter. She approaches the canvas without preconceived notions and allows the process to guide her through the painting. She “takes the plunge” literally, and immerses herself in the development of the painting as it occurs, responding to every mark with a keenly honed improvisational style. Allen relishes the pure color and movement of oil paint on the surface. She tells stories by way of quirky cartoons, moody landscapes, gestural figures, and large juicy abstract oil paintings, all revealing something about relationships, weather, attitudes, or just textures and the nature of paint. These are sophisticated paintings with a keen sense of color, gesture and division of space. Though you would have to relate her work to Abstract Expressionist paintings of the forties and fifties in their reliance and trust in process, Allen’s work is more lyrical than the New York school – less concerned with “not being beautiful”. Her color sense and gestural style might relate more to Joan Mitchell, but with an understanding of the structure and “bones” of a painting that relates more to Bay Area abstractionists such as Frank Lobdell or Richard Diebenkorn.
Western Playland, 2014 oil on canvas over panel 40 x 30”
Farm, 2014 oil on canvas over panel 36 x 12”
Jeffrey Beauchamp
(American, b. 1964) Flying brushstrokes of color inhabit Jeffrey Beauchamp’s paintings, the exuberant marks giving way to recognizable bits of landscape. Beauchamp is a trickster with prodigious skills and a wry sense of humor. He could, should he choose to, paint like a Renaissance painter or Vermeer spiced with bits of Gerhardt Richter and Odd Nerdrum. Instead he lures you in to a more magical space where color rains down like confetti and he sets you down wherever he chooses. Born in Montclair, New Jersey, Beauchamp’s talents extend themselves to music and writing. He is a voracious reader and student of art history, his large collection of art books often open in his studio. An artistic time traveler, his teachers are the masters from both contemporary and historic epochs. Beauchamp received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. He has enjoyed a long exhibition history beginning with his frequent exhibitions at Susan Cummins Gallery in Mill Valley in the early 90’s. Beauchamp’s extraordinary exhibition, Freefall is currently at the gallery and catalogs are available.
No Way to Finish these Deep-fried Wiffle Balls, 2013 oil on canvas 60 x 48” (left)
The View that Startled Grieg, 2013 oil on canvas 25 x 40” (below)
Joe Brubaker
(American, b. 1948) Joe Brubaker carves wood and assembles carefully curated found materials to create characters with stories to tell. Brubaker’s figures echo sources of inspiration from Spanish colonial Santos and retablo objects to Egyptian tomb figure and Buddhist stone carvings. In recent works, Brubaker has gone beyond these early influences, crossing cultures on a broader basis. He has included forms reminiscent of ritual costumes and body decorations from indigenous peoples all over the world. Incorporating scraps of metal and found materials, he has created a cast of characters that are at once strikingly universal and absolutely unique. For Brubaker, there is a moment when the work takes on its own personality. “I almost imagine myself as channeling some soul that’s out there and wants to come back”, he says. “It’s really an eerie moment, a Geppetto moment”. Since his 1997 exhibition at Susan Cummins’ Mill Valley gallery, Brubaker sculptures have been populating collections from coast to coast and internationally. He has enjoyed an enviable exhibition history and remains ever fascinated with the creative process. As he amasses the weathered wood and rusted remnants of earlier lives, the figures begin to suggest themselves as Brubaker skillfully facilitates their rebirth, borrowing from a host of influences from Spanish Colonial retablos and santos, to African and Balinese sculpture and modern and contemporary artists such as Picasso, Louise Nevelson and Deborah Butterfield.
Felipe, 2014 carved wood and found objects 32 x 13.5 x 12 (left)
Sergio, 2014 painted bronze 16.5 x 5 x 8” (above)
Squeak Carnwath
(American, b. 1947) It is with great pride that Seager Gray brings work by Squeak Carnwath to Miami Aqua for the first time. Carnwath is a Bay Area master, whose work has been a major influence on painters everywhere. Squeak Carnwath draws upon the philosophical and mundane experiences of daily life in her paintings and prints, which can be identified by lush fields of color combined with text, patterns, and identifiable images. She has received numerous awards including the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA) Award from San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, two Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Award for Individual Artists from the Flintridge Foundation. Carnwath is Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives and works in Oakland, CA. Carnwath has a distinctive and recognizable style which combines personal journaling elements with universal or existential themes. Her paintings combine text and images on abstract fields of color to express sociopolitical and spiritual concerns. She has described herself ironically as a “painting chauvinist” due to an abiding preference for that medium, although she is also an accomplished printmaker and has created sophisticated Jacquard tapestries, artist books, and mixed media works in addition to her oil and alkyd works on canvas.
Candelabra Study 2, 2014 oil and alkyd over panel 12 x 12”
Confidence, 2014 oil and alkyd over panel 60 x 55”
Night Light, 2014 oil and alkyd over panel 12 x 12”
Bathed in Light, 2014 oil on canvas 24 x 24�
Melinda Cootsona
(American, b. 1959) Nearly 60 years ago, the Bay Area Figurative movement freed the figure from the constraints of portraiture and illustration. The figure became a form to hold paint and the artist could use color, gesture, atmosphere and composition to explore new expressions. The paintings in this exhibition engage us in both the rich language of abstraction and in the mysteries of the human condition. The freshness of the work makes us hesitate to file it under any catch-all genre that has been around for so long, and yet the best qualities of that very valid movement in art history prevail. Melinda Cootsona might be considered the Intimiste of figurative abstraction. Her paintings are reminiscent of Bonnard and Vuillard in their depiction of private intimate moments in a personal life and world. They are abstracted portraits of everyday life. Her colors are soft and creamy with pleasing contrasts. Melinda Cootsona received her BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts.
Sunday Rain, 2014 oil on canvas 24 x 24�
Pale in the Sun 1, 2014 oil on canvas 16 x 16�
Chris Gwaltney
(American, b. 1953) Born in Van Nuys, California Gwaltney began painting full time after an injury restricted him to crutches for a year and a half at the age of 23. He received his BA and Masters from the University of California State Fullerton. Gwaltney has enjoyed an exhibition career with no lapses, showing with Diane Nelson Fine Art, Peter Blake Gallery, Robert Green Fine Arts, Julie Nester in Park City and Tria Gallery in New York. Gwaltney’s one person exhibition, Time Is . . . was the opening exhibition for Seager Gray’s new location on the square in Mill Valley. For Gwaltney, the figure is expressed as a gesture, a presence simply articulated with line and stroke, often seen as walking alone or in relation to one or more figures. He begins with making smears or marks on the canvas. Gwaltney once said, “some paintings are a conversation, others are an argument.” Through the process of painting, he sets up situations that seek resolution in the work. In the end, the work becomes “a testament to time well spent.” Like any great artist, Gwaltney takes what inspires him and incorporates it into his vocabulary. He has absorbed the lessons of Bay Area figuration, and by osmosis the lessons of Still and Hofmann, and has added his own twists, as well as a few from more contemporary artists like Basquiat. Gwaltney is at the point where he is fully in command of his medium, has refined his touch, and is deceptively simple in his meaning. He is an artist who likes to push himself--to build on what he has done, discard it, and rebuild again--continually evolving, taking from his surroundings and from his life, and recasting it into something worthy of our attention. (from the catalog essay by Bolton Colburn, September, 2014)
Summer Solstice, 2014 oil on canvas 80 x 60” (left)
Shout, Because Whispers Fail, 2014 oil on canvas 65 x 57” (available through gallery) (right)
Union, 2013 altered book, steel, brass 18 x 7 x 2�
Andrew Hayes
(American, b. 1981) Andrew Hayes’s sculptures embody a tactile exploration of scale, a push-and-pull between the immense and the intimate. His juxtaposition of materials from the tough environs of industry with those more familiar to the softer world of study, and his use of forms reminiscent of monuments, architecture, and landscapes in objects that can be held in your hand invite a pleasant confusion about the indicators of size. Are these pieces destined for public display in the plaza of a federal or corporate building? The fabricated steel and simple geometric design language say yes, but what to make of the book pages? The delicate leaves of paper held in suspension between the steel sheets suggest an object intended for shelf or tabletop display, to be examined closely and reread often as part of a more personal landscape.
Moor, 2013 altered book, steel, brass 17 x 10 x 2”
Hayes’ exhibition, Volumes successfully kicked off Seager Gray’s 2014 exhibition schedule, highlighting Andrew’s mastery of metalwork, his meticulous attention to fine detail, his intuitive sense for materials - how to manipulate them, how they contrast, and what they mean in themselves. The intimate size, delicate attachment points, and small detail work of the pieces encourage close attention, and the surface textures - cool steel, smoothed or scored, warm, feathery paper - and finger-sized notches and valleys practically beg to be touched. Meanwhile, the formal elements of each composition speak of the heroic, the public, the industrial, the modern. These are monuments on an approachable, possessable, lovable scale, cool and stirring, quirky and intriguing, tough and bookish all at once.
Plat, 2013 altered book, steel, brass 5 x 12 x 4”
Assent, 2014 altered book, steel 12 x 10 x 6�
Ens, 2014 altered book, steel 12 x 7 x 7�
White Tara, 2012, letters cut from the Koran, 14 x 11 in. 14 x 11� full piece and detail
Meg Hitchcock
(American, b. 1961) Meg Hitchcock is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, and studied classical painting in Florence, Italy. Her work with sacred texts is a culmination of her lifelong interest in religion, literature, and psychology. Hitchcock’s work has been shown in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, London, and Berlin, and reviewed in Art in America, ArtCritical, The New Criterion, Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, and The Daily Beast. Her work is included in “State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now” at Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas. ARTIST STATEMENT: In my text drawings I examine and dissect the word of God. I deconstruct a sacred text by cutting its individual letters, and reassemble them to form a passage from another holy book. The Koran is transformed into the Bible, the Bible into the Bhagavad Gita, and so on. I discourage a literal reading of the text by eliminating punctuation and spacing; a sentence from one text merges with a passage from another. By bringing together the sacred writings of diverse religions, I undermine their authority and speak to the common thread that weaves through all scripture. The labor-intensive aspect of my work is a meditation practice as well as an exploration of the various forms of devotion. A long history in Evangelical Christianity formed my core beliefs about God and transcendence, but I later relinquished the Christian path. I now gravitate toward Eastern Mysticism, and am deeply moved by Islam. My work is a celebration of the diverse experiences of spirituality and the universal need for connection with something greater than oneself. In the end, the holy word of God may be nothing more than a sublime expression of our shared humanity.
White Tara, 2012, letters cut from the Koran, 14 x 11 in. 14 x 11” detail
Bliss, 2012 letters cut from the Koran 14 x 11� full piece and detail
Om Tat Sat, 2013 letters cut from the Bibles 14 x 11� full piece and detail
Lisa Kokin
(American, b. 1954) Lisa Kokin makes art with recycled materials that she finds at flea markets, thrift stores, and recycling centers. She has worked with buttons, photographs, and books, most recently with simple thread and zippers. Kokin’s work is often a critique of the socio-political status quo imbued with a healthy dose of levity and a keen sensitivity to materials and processes. Sewing and fiber-related sensibilities play a key role in much of Kokin’s work, which she attributes to growing up in a family of upholsterers. Thread, which in the past she used to construct and embellish her work has, in her most recent body of work, become the primary material. Kokin explores irony and memory in her seemingly ephemeral pieces, allowing transiency itself to be immortalized in lasting works of art. It is difficult to classify Lisa Kokin’s work. She is a conceptual artist to be sure, but few conceptual artists break as many boundaries in working with their materials. Her work has content, humor and social commentary while maintaining a rigorous adherence to painstaking process. Lisa Kokin received her BFA and MFA from the California College of the Arts in Oakland, CA. The recipient of numerous awards and grants, Kokin was most recently given the Dorothy Saxe Award from the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco and the Purchase Award from the Richmond Civic Center Public Art Interior Acquisitions Project in Richmond, CA. Kokin’s work has been featured in many books and articles including the upcoming Art Made From Books, Chronicle Press, by Laura Heyenga. Her one person exhibition, “How the West Was Sewn” was at the Boise Art Museum in 2013. Peachblow Peccability, 2014 thread, zippers, linen 25 x 16.25”, (left) Diagram, 2013 thread, zippers 21 x 15.5, (upper right) 48 - 49 (from The Democracy Trilogy), 2014 thread, zippers, shredded money 26 x 28.5, (lower right)
Point System, 2014 thread, zippers, linen 15.5 x 20.5�
Armed Shepherd Tending His Flock 2014 thread, zippers, linen 23 x 29�
Waldemar Mitrowski (Polish, b. 1957)
Waldemar Mitrowski is a virtuoso painter who can move from deeply guttural expressions to the most subtle and delicate renderings. Though seemingly rooted in the Bay Area Figurative tradition, Mitrowski has a European painting sensibility, employing techniques carefully learned and masterfully employed. The paintings are richly layered with surfaces that move from gritty and coarse to whisper smooth and translucent. Mitrowski’s paintings have an element of mystery and nobility that evoke a visceral feeling in the viewer. Like Charles Eckart, the artist’s concerns are more metaphysical than worldly. He taps into the collective unconscious with larger questions of who we are and how we came to be here. Waldemar Mitrowski was born in Poland in 1957 and came to California in 1988. In 1990, he moved to Bolinas where he has resided ever since, with intermittent stays in Poland, where he also enjoys a following. Mitrowski attended the Academy of Fine Art in Krakow, Poland. He has had gallery exhibitions at J. Noblett Gallery in Sonoma, Campbell Thiebaud Gallery in San Francisco, the Bolinas Museum, Donna Seager Gallery and many group shows in the United States and Poland. He has collectors throughout the United States and Europe. Black Shoe, 2014 oil on canvas 73 x 54” Game, 2014 oil on canvas 12 x 12” Observer, 2014 oil on canvas 21.5 x 21.5
Skycraper Bird Left and Skyscraper Bird Right, (available through gallery) 66 x 15 x 13� (left), 71 x 15 x 16� (right) kiln cast, pigmented glass and limestone
(right) The Bird I Touched, 2009 hand blown pigmented glass 15 x 3.5 x 5
Jane Rosen
(American, b. 1950) Jane Rosen makes birds out of blown and cast glass. She sculpts them as the Egyptians did, as inert icons, leaving just enough information in her attenuated shapes so that we can identify them as birds of prey: hawks, falcons, kestrels and kites. Hers are not portraits of individuals. They reveal only generic traits, most notably the poses of nobility that raptors strike when they perch on tree limbs or rocks. Frozen and statuary, but also heraldic in the manner of ancient gargoyles, they signal something far greater than just birdness. That something is time – geologic time. It’s evoked by the alchemical process of glass making, which, in Rosen’s hands, involves chiseling, grinding and lacing of kiln-cooked organic materials with colored pigments. The birds and the pedestals they stand on look like weatherworn rock. In them we see the transparent glow of amber; intimations of various kinds of metamorphic rock along with marble, granite and sandstone. The resulting objects convincingly simulate actual rock. Wall-mounted birds, made from blown glass, are more reductive still, their black surfaces recalling Oaxaca pottery, beautiful but inscrutable, save for the heads, which appear alternately alert or sunken in quiet resignation. - David Roth, Square Cylinder Review, 2013
Rosen was born in New York where she began her career as an artist. Despite finding early success in galleries and a prestigious teaching position in the city, Rosen found herself captivated by the accessibility of nature on a visit to the West Coast. She eventually relocated permanently to San Gregorio, California, where she keeps her studio and resides on a horse ranch frequently visited by the birds you see in her work. Rosen was selected by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for inclusion in their 2010 Annual Invitational in New York. A masterful teacher, Rosen has taught at the School of Visual Arts and Bard College in New York, LaCoste School of the Arts in France, Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. Rosen’s work has been reviewed in the New York Times, ArtForum, Art in America, and Art News and has been exhibited across the United States.Collections include the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Aspen Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Chevron Corporation, the collection of Grace Borgenicht, JP Morgan Chase Bank, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.
Still Life with Matisse, 2014 mixed media on panel 24 x 24�
Inez Storer
(American, b. 1933) Inez Storer was born in 1933 in Santa Monica, California. She studied at the Art Center in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Art Institute, the University of California at Berkeley, and the San Francisco College for Women, ultimately receiving her B.A. from Dominican University in San Rafael, California (1970). She received her M.A. from San Francisco State University (1971). Storer’s work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions consistently thorough the United States at institutions such as the Reno Museum of Art, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Monterey Museum of Art, the Fresno Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Missoula Museum of Art, Montana, and The National Museum of Jewish History, Philadelphia. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions throughout the country. Storer has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute (1981 - 1999), Sonoma State University (1976 - 1988), San Francisco State University (1970 - 1973), and the College of Marin (1968 - 1979). She has received numerous grants and awards, including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 1999, and has worked twice as a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome (1997, 1996). Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Oakland Museum of California, the Lannan Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University. Recent exhibits: “Story Painters”; Squeak Carnwath, Hung Liu and Inez Storer at Bedford Gallery, Walnut Creek, Painting with Matisse, 2013 CA. and Seager Gray Gallery in Mill Valley. mixed media on panel 36 x 24”
James Allen
(American, b. 1984) James Allen was born in 1977 in Illinois. He earned a BFA from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee in 2000. Currently he lives and works in Portland, Oregon. Allen’s artwork is included in Art Made From Books: Altered, Sculpted, Carved, Transformed, published by Chronicle books in August 2013. His work was exhibited at the Bellevue Arts Museum in The Book Borrowers: Contemporary Artists Transforming the Book in 2009. His Book Excavations can be found in Public collections at UCLA, Johns Hopkins University, Ringling College of Art and Design, and University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. He’s also exhibited across the country in many cities including New York, Chicago, and Miami. A “book excavation” is a sculptural work of art made by transforming various types of old books using precise cuts with a scalpel or knife, carving pages one by one until an astonishing new composition reveals itself. This almost surgical focus of dissecting books results in a wholly new object infused with a graphical history that evolves as the artist exposes each layer of the book while cutting around interesting images or text. For most artists working in this remarkable medium, the process is performed without pre-planning or mapping out the contents before cutting into the books pages and/or covers. Finished book excavations often appear as cross sections of the book, carved to create an alternate universe between the covers.
Everybody’s Encyclopedia, 2013 hand-carved altered book 9.5 x 7.5 x 1.25
Wood Working, 2013 hand-carved altered book 9.5 x 7.5 x 1.5
Rhiannon Alpers
(American, b. 1977) Rhiannon Alpers is a papermaker, letterpress printer and book artist. She has taught workshops and college courses at San Francisco Center for the Book, Sonoma Community Center, MarinMOCA, Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, Kala Printmaking Institute, Academy of Art University, University of San Francisco, Stanford University, Filoli Gardens Estate, Cabrillo College in Santa Cruz, Feather River Art Camp, Center for Book and Paper in Chicago, Columbia College Chicago, and Santa Reparata School of Art in Florence, Italy. Rhiannon now works for her own company called Gazelle and Goat, a letterpress and bookbinding shop located in the Mission district of San Francisco. Please visit the website www.gazelleandgoat.com to learn more. She has an MFA in Book and Paper Arts from Columbia College Chicago and a BA in Book Arts from UC Santa Barbara, College of Creative Studies. She worked as the Head of Studio Operations for the Bindery and Letterpress for over five years, and was the Production Coordinator for the Imprint Publications for San Francisco Center for the Book. She has apprenticed/interned at Turkey Press in Santa Barbara, Larksparrow Press in Evanston, and worked as a production bookbinder for the Paper Source Bindery in Chicago.
Specimen Series: Papilio Maynardi, 2014 handmade book object with butterfly, handmade papers 4.25 x 6 x 2.5�
Air, 2014 handmade artist book 10 x 9.5 x 1.5
Emergence, 2014 handmade artist book 14.5 x 7 x 3.5
Alisa Banks
(American, b. 1957) Alisa Banks is a visual artist whose work centers on issues concerning identity. She often incorporates fibers and found materials that in form reference traditional crafts. Her work has been exhibited abroad and throughout the US and is in several private and public collections. Alisa received her BS from Oklahoma State University and her MFA from Texas Woman’s University. She resides in Dallas, TX. Alisa Banks: “ ... my work addresses the quest for understanding identity and all it encompasses. ... Each individual, quiet story coalesces to form a cultural memory that is shaped by experience, ritual, belief, places and relationships, and is called upon to explore connections. ... my project continues. It continues when stories that reference culture, the body, memory, and place are shared. It continues when an object relays an experience, either by paint, thread or paper. It continues.” -
Sara Burgess
(American, b. 1972) About fifteen years ago, Sara put an x-acto blade to an unfinished sketchbook. She liked the silhouettes, the relationship between positive and negative space – still does. Today, she draws and then cuts, slicing thousands of lines until a story emerges – seeing and planning for what stays versus what falls away. She says things like, “your brain has to think of what remains” She is meticulous and calculated, some might say, downright crazy. She, like you and I, didn’t realize that people still practiced this tradition. She remarks on how it’s refreshing to see someone put a lot of time and patience into something – so few of us have time and patience anymore. She loves how unequivocally non-digital this craft is. It’s the opposite of technology. It’s raw, simple, soft, tangible and breathtaking. Burgess studied printmaking at the University of Victoria and received her MFA in Illustration from San Francisco’s Academy of Art College. She’s designed product lines (table linens, dinnerware and bedding) and has worked as an illustrator, animator and graphic designer in the UK, US and Canada. Today, Sara develops new things using all of the above: products, ideas, homewares, and so much more stuff that she hasn’t yet realized. Her clients include IDEO, Pottery Barn, Restoration Hardware and Levis. She also has exhibited her print and cut paper artwork in the UK, US and Canada and teaches at the San Francisco Center for the Book.
Praxis, 2013 handmade artist book, letterpress 7 x 10 x 12.5�
Julie Chen
(American, b. 1972) Julie Chen is an Associate Professor of Book Arts at Mills College. Her œuvre at this point in time is large and daunting: she is an award-winning book artist and a repeat finalist in the important Minnesota Center for the Book Arts International Book Arts biennial prize. She has with her Flying Fish Press designed and produced over thirty artist’s books many of which are held in the collections of libraries and museums throughout North America and Europe. Chen combines fine traditional craftsmanship such as letterpress printing and hand bookbinding with new technologies such as polymer plates and digital design tools. She often replaces the codex and its largely subconscious turning of a page with a more innovative approach to the sequencing of information: unfolding a flap, tilting a box, or spinning a wheel. This active engagement by the reader, and the reader’s unconventional manipulation of the book itself, enhances the work’s communicative purpose. Chen graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a B.A. in Studio Art and received a M.A. from Mills College in Book Arts.
Praxis, 2013 (open) handmade artist book, letterpress 7 x 10 x 12.5”
Maria Porges
(American, b. 1954) Maria Porges is an artist and writer whose work has been exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions since the late eighties. She received a SECA award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and has twice been in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. For over two decades, her critical writing has appeared in many publications, including Artforum, Art in America, Sculpture, American Ceramics, Glass, the New York Times Book Review, and a host of other now-defunct art magazines. She has also authored essays for more than 75 exhibition catalogues and dozens of scripts for museum audio tours. Porges is an Associate Professor at California College of the Arts in the Graduate Program in Fine Arts. Born in Oakland, California, She received her BA from Yale University and MFA from the University of Chicago. She also attended Grinnell College and the San Francisco Art Institute.
The Forest for the Trees, (Mary’s Books), 2014 (left page) altered book sculpture 9.5 x 7 x 1”
Mary’s Book 7, 2014 (upper) altered book sculpture 14 x 14 x 2.5”
Mary’s Book 8, 2014 (lower) altered book sculpture 12.5 x 8 x 2”
Talking in Circles, 2009 handmade artists book 6.5 x 6.5 x 4�
Erica Spitzer Rasmussen (American, b. 1968)
Erica Spitzer Rasmussen is an artist who creates mixed media and handmade paper garments. She received her BFA (1990) and MFA (1997) from the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis), which included coursework in Mexico and Greece. Her current work explores issues of identity and corporeality, often utilizing clothing as a metaphor for one’s skin. Her work has been featured on the pages of FIBERARTS, Surface Design, Hand Papermaking, Craft Arts International and American Craft. Rasmussen teaches studio arts as an Associate Professor at Metropolitan State University (St. Paul, MN). Her sculptural and wearable works are exhibited internationally.
Book of Fears, 2012 handmade artists book 10.5 x 10.5 x 2�