Women’s Studio Workshop Still Going Strong After 50 Years

Erin Zona was a lecturer at the Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri when a friend forwarded her a job opening at the Women’s Studio Workshop, a collective founded in 1974 by artists Ann Kalmbach, Tatana Kellner, Barbara Leoff Burge, and Anita Wetzel, now known for its artists’ books program. Zona was interested in the publishing imprint and in working with artists to produce collectible publications, so she applied.

Zona got the job, and since 2017, she has been co-director of the WSW, which serves women, trans, intersex, nonbinary, and genderfluid artists, Zona says the rabble-rousing nature of the organization appealed to her.

“My history oftentimes was kind of from the subversive part of society being maybe a little punk and a little bit gay. I grew up in the South, and I don’t come from wealth,” she said. “So, there was a part of me that really saw a place where these less than mainstream ideas could be really lifted up and seen.”

The WSW has brought over 5,000 artists to its campus to work in printmaking, hand papermaking, letterpress printing, photography, book arts, and ceramics. The organization offers fully funded residencies and is most known for its long-standing artists’ book publication program. Many institutions like collecting artists’ books, which can have a cover and sequential pages or can be a type of sculpture or some sort of elaborately folded work. They’ve been around since the 1960s, and artists saw them as an accessible way to reach a large audience and circumvent institutional barriers, especially for women artists. More than 260 books WSW has published have gone to major institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, The Library of Congress, and Harvard University.

Before going to Kingston, New York, to join WSW, Zona worked in printmaking and independent publishing. She was interested in queer history and community archives, and she taught printmaking part time at Kansas City Art Institute. That meant she often found herself thinking and talking about the way both emerging artists and adjunct faculty members were exploited in academia. That led to her starting a school aimed at creating opportunities for artists working in print. To address the undervaluing of teachers’ labor, she paid those who worked at the school well — in fact, they got more than she did at the leading art school in Kansas City. Zona believed in what she was doing and planned to continue, but when her friend suggested she apply at WSW, she decided to do it.

“I just felt really aligned with the organization and the way that they create opportunities for artists,” Zona said. “And they saw in me the potential to be the director.”

The WSW has now been around for 50 years, and to celebrate that significant milestone, a show, A Radical Alteration: Women’s Studio Workshop as a Sustainable Model for Art Making, is being held at San Francisco’s Center for the Book, through March 31, and then traveling to Bainbridge Island Museum of Art in Washington.

The show’s curator, Maymanah Farhat, went to upstate New York to talk with Zona and two of WSW’s founders, Ann Kalmbach and Tatana Kellner. Farhat learned that when they started the WSW in a rented house, they built the studios, with paper making in the attic, a dark room off the living room, and some more printing in the basement.

In a phone conversation with Kalmbach and Kellner, Kalmbach told Women’s Media Center they did it that way out of necessity.

“We had no money,” she said. “Our first grant was for $2,000.”

“We were young, naïve, and enthusiastic,” Kellner added. “We were living outside the system and doing things by ourselves without the corporate structure.”

The WSW came out of wanting to create an experience Kalmbach had had at SUNY New Paltz, where students worked with their teachers as equals.

They weren’t thinking about artists’ books when they started, she added — that came later.

“Nobody is really buying prints for $200, but if you make a book for $30, $40, or $50, you could actually sell it and get your work out there.”

“It was a less elitist system,” Kellner said. “It was approachable, and people understood what a book was.”

Books had another advantage, the two say. Museums aren’t interested in buying a print by an unknown artist, but they became interested in the books when artists experimented with transforming them into art objects. The effort to get books in collections, led by Kellner, was to make sure history was preserved. She and Kalmbach build relationships with institutions over time, and libraries and museums started acquiring works as they got to know the work WSW was producing.

“The mission of the workshop is not only to support women artists but also to place that work in public institutions for future generations,” Kellner said. “Otherwise women’s history is erased.”

The WSW published a range of books over the years since all sorts of artists came, and that made universities and colleges the best market since they're looking for a wide variety of materials to teach, Kellner said.

Kalmbach said when they would lecture at institutions, they would bring books along to sell.

“We didn't want the artists to go home with 50 or 100 books to look at and be depressed because they weren't going anywhere,” she said. “They would take a percentage of them, and we took the rest, and our job was to market them and pay the artists royalties.”

Farhat is impressed by the way the organization remained independent and came up with ways to support themselves — such as a lucrative paper making business which they ran for a decade. With A Radical Alteration, she wanted to show the excellent and varied work they produced. Walking through the exhibition, she pointed out books like 26 Plants, a sort of homage to Ed Ruscha’s 26 Gas Stations, with each page made from a different plant found near WSW; Going to Camp, a collective project by artists living with HIV or AIDS; and Suspender Saga, the first artist book they produced. It’s by Kellner and shows silkscreened photos of Kalmbach trying on suspenders.

“There are all these sorts of subversive allusions to gender norms and masculinity and femininity, but the reason I love it is because in addition to those subversive things, it's essentially a photographer who's photographing their partner in a very kind of domestic setting and there's so much love that comes through these photographs,” Farhat said. “For me, it was really a kind of a kind of statement on queer love and just how ordinary it is, which at that time in 1979 was a really radical idea.”