Aileen Bassis is an artist and poet in New York City. She received grants from the Queens Arts Fund, a Fellowship in Photography from the NJ State Council on the Arts, grants from the Puffin Foundation and a grant from the Consulate General of Spain. Her solo exhibits include shows LaGuardia Community College, Lewis Latimer House Museum, York College, Ceres Project Room and Chashama in NYC; Brown University, Rutgers University, Newark, University of Pennsylvania, Moravian College, PA and Seigfred Gallery at Ohio University. Her artist books are in many public collections including the libraries of Yale, Swarthmore and Wellesley. She’s published two poetry chapbooks and a poetry collection will be published in 2026 by Shanti-Arts. She received grants in literature from NYState Council on the Arts, the Queens Arts Fund and a residency award to Yaddo.
Website: www.aileenbassis.com
Artist Statement: My art practice takes many forms — drawing, photography, printmaking, collage and artist books. The consistent thread running through my work is engagement with the world around me, whether bringing in historical concerns (such as the Holocaust) to explorations of the
experience of others. “The Holocaust Book” in this exhibit is from a series. I took photos in the Jewish Quarter of Antwerp where even the buildings seemed haunted by the events of what’s become a distant past horror. The key to this series became the man in a hat — the individual riding a bicycle into this history. The source of the doorway image is from my I visit to a prison in Mechelen, Belgium (now a museum) where people were held before being deported to Auschwitz. My book, “Savoy” was part of a public art project where I interviewed people in the Jamaica, Queens community and created a series of altered books reflecting on their life experiences.
Artist Bio/ Statement
Trudy Borenstein-Sugiura is a multidisciplinary artist whose work delves into the layered complexities of time, cultural identity, ecology, politics, and memory. By meticulously assembling documents, texts, magazines, and personal papers, she weaves together narratives that challenge linear storytelling and invite the viewer to uncover hidden truths. Her art offers an introspective journey, where the interplay of words, dates, and imagery uncovers perspectives often overlooked, reshaping our understanding of the past and present.
Her early portraiture work established a foundation for her approach. Through a delicate layering of papers, she explored the essence of her subjects beyond their physical appearance. Words, timestamps, and archival fragments merge into shadowy textures, creating evocative compositions that invite viewers to engage deeply with each piece, transforming her subjects into vessels of collective memory.
As the analog paper trail dwindles in the digital age, her work increasingly serves as a historical document itself—a time traveler bridging past, present, and future. This archival resonance is central to her artistic practice, as she questions what is preserved, what is forgotten, and how stories evolve with the shifting mediums of record-keeping.
Over time, her focus expanded to include birds as metaphors and messengers. Initially depicted as part of whimsical travelogues, they evolved into symbols of ecological fragility, representing conservation efforts and extinction. Later, birds adopted a more poignant role as silent observers, offering a bird’s-eye view of human conflicts and the toll of war. This avian perspective offers a fresh lens on human activity, reframing both global crises and intimate histories.
Her latest series, Freudian Snips and History Lessens, marks a bold reinvention of both psychology and historical narrative. Drawing from Freud’s theories, she reinterprets the language of dreams and the subconscious, using cut paper and text to construct layered visual essays that challenge singular perspectives. Through this lens, she also reflects on world history’s biases, as she reinvents and retells the narratives, questioning whether there lies another story where the narrative could shift through time with the addition of modern elements.
In all her work, she forges connections between disparate factors encouraging viewers to reconsider the interplay of memory, identity, and time. Her art, rich in texture and meaning, stands as a testament to the enduring power of storytelling and the documents that shape our understanding of the world.
Since 2016, her collages have been widely exhibited in galleries, museums and libraries including the Nassau City Museum Art, Attleboro Arts Museum, Hudson Valley MOCA, Sasse Museum of Art, WVU Library, U. Of Wyoming, Ille Arts-Amagansett, and Site Gallery BK. Her work is featured in the International Research Compendium TO BE…NAMED (How We Colonize or Decolonize Through the Process of Naming), and in 2024 published in Beyond Words, Big Wing Review and Kioku Magazine, among others. She was selected for a 2023 Artist Residency at Foundation House in CT and most recently she was awarded a 2024 Mid-Atlantic States and NJ Council for the Arts Individual Artist Award. Previous work is included in the permanent collection of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum the Smithsonian Institution.
Website: Trudy-borenstein-sugiura.squarespace.com
Magdéleine Ferru is a photographer by trade. She explores the world for a while and returns full of strong feelings, scattered and fascinating, and the desire to share them. She likes material, she likes paper, she likes multi-dimensional. She goes back to the dark room and experiments with diverse alternative photographic techniques: Cyanotype, Polaroid, pinhole, Caffenol. She learns basic binding techniques with Marjon Mudde and at the Museum of Mariemont (Belgium). Artist books take a growing place in her art practice, mixing visual and feeling. The Random and unexpected results of these techniques and materials used to conceive her books make them unique. They invite the viewer to dream, to wander, and to question.
She learns to take time again, in the dark room or when making paper, to let the sun and the wind do their magic, be patient, let it grow. Her work is primarily in the field of photography and artist books, blending the first with all kinds of plastic techniques, handmade paper, sewing, embroidering, binding, etc. Her work has been exhibited in Europe, Japan, and the United States and has been integrated into private and public collections in France, Germany, and the United States.
Kunstadt's works often invoke a metaphysical quality. Her works reference antique books, music manuscripts, maps and artifacts - deconstructing paper and text and using it in metaphorical and playful ways. Through the manipulation of the materials (geography books from the 1860's), the carefully charted topographies, geographies, boundaries and coordinates are physically sliced, sewn, woven and layered - ultimately transformed and inviting new explorations.
Boston born, with a small town New England childhood, Kunstadt received a BFA, Hartford Art School, Hartford, CT. and continued with postgraduate studies at the Akademie der Bildenen Künste, Munich, Germany. Nine years ago she re-entered a familiar landscape as in her youth, moving to the Hudson Valley, having lived for 35 years in NYC.
Recent awards: Florence & Irwin Zlowe Memorial Medal of Honor Award , National Association of Women Artists, 2022; ASK/Kingston Annual Juror's Award 2021; 2017 Kuniyoshi Fund Award; Medal of Honor & The Anna Walinska Memorial Award 2017 and the Mastrangelo Environmental Art Award 2021, National Association of Women Artists; Award for Excellence 2016, Edward Hopper House Museum & Study Center, Nyack, NY.
Public Collections: George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives, Bowdoin College Library, Brunswick, ME; The Book Arts Collection, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; The Permanent Collection, CBA, NY, NY; Baylor Book Arts
Artist Statement:
My devotion to books is inspired by the ability of the written word to take the reader to other places through stories, poems and prayers. Through the exploration and manipulation of the materials the process reveals how language can become visual through re-interpretation.
Taken from a Parish Psalmody,* pages are manipulated and recombined, resulting in a presentation that evokes grace - poems of praise and gratitude. Visually there is a consistent and measured cadence to a page of psalms which is echoed in the often repetitive restructuring of the paper; the layering of translucent tissue over the paper softens the effect of age and context, evoking the ephemeral while adding a veil of alternative possibilities. The aged pages suggest the temporal quality of our lives and the vulnerability of memory and history.
The use of gold leaf elevates and heightens the duality of the physical and the ethereal. And the interplay alludes to the enticing presentation of illuminated texts historically. The intended use, as well as the nature of a psalm as spiritual repository, both imply a tradition of careful devotion and pious reverence. The physical text evocatively and powerfully serves as a gateway to an experience of the sacred and the realization of the latent power of the written word. This process of interaction is played out visually in the piece, mimicking the internal experience.
*Parish Psalmody, A Collection of Psalms and Hymns for Public Worship, 1849
Website: www.carolekunstadt.com
Trained as an engraver and professional intaglio printer, I edited and printed artists books with prints by my fellow artists before starting creating them myself. First in Holland, and later on in Paris and the south of France where I have my studio now. Today my books include many techniques, like pop-ups, adaptations from mediaeval bookbinding, embroideries and textile, and of course, letterpress and prints. I work with my own texts, contemporary writers or French literature. My books, whether small editions or single copies, are shown every year in several countries and especially in France (more than 50 public collections hold one or more).
Artist Statement:
I had some regrets cutting into two halves this small demi-reliure found in a second hand shop… But it exactly suited my project so I took a firm grip on my courage! Using a mediaeval endband stitch, the book has been put together again, while emptying two squares in the pages. I sewed into two blocks those pages, except the part of the short story I wanted to illustrate with the black paper cut outs on the inside of the covers. So it is still possible to read this story, written in the early XXe, which bears some resemblance to Snow White. The leaves and flowers are printed with linocuts. It has been a challenging adventure, with some changes made when come upon technical impossibilities…
Website: https://artmarjonmudde.wordpress.com
Catherine is a visual artist and Professor Emerita of Critical Identity Studies at Beloit College (Wisconsin), whose teaching and scholarship focused on the politics of identity formation throughout US histories of colonization, enslavement, and state-sponsored dispossession–along with the various forms of social activism and decolonizing gestures that resisted them. Throughout her academic career, which included teaching, research, administration, and consulting on equity-centered innovation in higher education, she pursued visual arts mostly as an avocation.
Upon her early retirement in 2021, Catherine embarked on an intensive period of exploration in visual arts media, translating her scholarly insights into a new pictorial language. Her artist books and mixed media pieces depict how cultural and personal ephemera are used to mask or reveal truths about the historical contradictions embedded in the violences of whiteness as an ongoing racial project in the United States–a project in which she herself is implicated. This new artistic trajectory enables Catherine to communicate with audiences beyond the academy, drawing on her decades of intellectual labor and personal investment in social and cultural transformation. Her art seeks to challenge viewers to rethink our collective attachments to narratives of progress, exceptionalism, and innocence by highlighting the inevitable contradictions of our own lived histories.
Artist Statement
My artwork explores the complexities and contradictions of US histories. Drawing on decades of academic research in a loosely defined field of inquiry I termed critical identity studies, I have now fully transitioned my medium of communication to the visual arts. This artistic turn nevertheless continues my life’s work of sharing insights and posing uncomfortable questions about the attachment to “whiteness” as a racial project. More than five centuries in the making, whiteness–in my understanding of the term–constitutes a vast, hegemonic constellation of socially cultivated hierarchies and everyday workings of power that position all of us in relation to each other and mandates normative identities well beyond race (e.g, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, social class, indigeneity, citizenship, embodiment, rurality).1 Grappling with the work of decentering whiteness–my own included–is the preoccupation that connects the academic work of my past with my current artistic expression.
Using mixed-media collage, assemblage, and book art, I have developed a visual language that reflects the nostalgia-driven classifications embedded in national narratives about progress, exceptionalism, and innocence. For example, I visually convey my own deeply felt attachments to what is benignly deemed “vintage” or “retro” or “antique” through familiar artifacts (e.g., book pages, handwritten ledgers, kodachrome slides, other analog cultural relics) and recontextualize those artifacts of bygone eras as simultaneously emblematic of our national histories of dispossession. By including my own lived history and personal ephemera in this exercise of juxtaposition, I hope to invite viewers to consider how we often consent to valorizing the violences of our collective pasts in conveying our love for particular versions of those pasts.
My artwork incorporates several key elements to convey its message: I call attention to the passive voice in the descriptive vernacular and storytelling of the United States (e.g., manifests of “slave ships,” land cession treaties, historical landmarks, Smith’s Wealth of Nations).. Distinct timelines juxtapose historical ephemera with recent regional artefacts, creating a dialogue between past and present. Recurring motifs of grids, twisted bodies, blood, cords, oceans, and threads symbolize land commodification and agricultural labor. Maps of former indigenous homelands–especially of Wisconsin (where I currently reside)–feature prominently. The color palette contrasts the blanched tones of vintage ephemera with vibrant reds and blues, allowing both calm and cacophony to coexist within compositions, mirroring the contrasting layers of the histories depicted.
Ultimately, this artistic practice is about healing through bearing witness. I believe our mutual liberation depends on confronting the hard, messy, and violent legacies that have shaped our present moment. I hope that my art might invite viewers to sit with the necessary discomforts of our collective pasts as a means to work towards a more just future.
Piotr Pandyra was born in 1981 in Poland. In the years 2003/2009 he studied his artistic education in the arts at the Faculty of Arts Pedagogical University of Cracow. Phd title at her Alma Mater in 2020. the Prix France Patchwork,10 International Artextures, Exposition d’Art textile Contemporain, France and THE PROF. IRENA HUML AWARD, 10th International Artistic Linen Cloth Biennial 2018, Poland. Works in the collections of: The Special Collections Book Arts and Rare Book Collection, University of Washington, USA and Museum of Crafts in Krosno, Poland.
Following a degreed study in painting, Chris Perry moved to New York where he worked in the art world, first at the Guggenheim Museum, and later for a selection of artists. His own work progressed slowly while he pursued a career in architectural woodworking until 2007 when he returned to making art full time. After residing in Lower Manhattan for almost 40 years, Chris and his wife moved to Ridgefield, Ct. in 2015 where they both have studios in their home.
In 2008 Chris started creating books modeled on flip books, but with the action expressed by cutting away the empty space around the object in question. Because the offset caused by the signatures, he titled the series Ripples, beginning a continuing set of pieces that emulate water in its many forms, both as forces of nature and as structures that are both manmade and natural.
The early pieces stood alone, single volumes that had a small number of pages, each carefully planned and cut into moving shapes, all within the body of the volume. As they became more complicated they accumulated multiple volumes and started to “sprout” appendages of cut paper that extended out from all edges and eventually from the spine as well.
The works incorporate a number of signature elements to elicit the information he wishes the viewer to take away, in the same fashion a writer will use the same elements repeatedly in her writing, like the use odd names, or staging the action in the same time period or location over and over, or simply to have a particular way of crafting sentences.
While still exploring the small spaces he creates within a few hand-cut volumes, Chris is actively planning on pieces that address entire rooms using thousands of volumes to depict water structures such as a hurricane, or tsunami, or a storm front.
Website: https://www.csperry.net
Artist Statement:
Gina Pisello is a paper engineer and book artist. She has taught book arts for over 17 years and is a member of San Diego Book Arts and Puget Sound Book Arts. Her work has been accepted in exhibitions in San Diego County, University of Puget Sound, University of South Dakota, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and the University of Western England, Bristol. Her work has appeared in the following galleries: Front Porch Gallery, Cannon Art Gallery, Athenaeum Music and Arts Library, Mesa College Art Gallery, Rose Art Gallery, Columbia City Gallery in Washington, 23 Sandy Gallery in Portland, Sebastopol Center for the Arts in Sebastopol, CA, The Ink Shop in Ithaca, NY, and Graficas Gallery in Nantucket.. Her work is in several private collections as well as the University of Washington, UC Berkeley, and the University of Puget Sound special collections.
Books tell stories and by altering them Gina can communicate her stories. Cutting a landscape into an open book or folding the fore edge to make birds fly off the page changes the content of the book without changing its nature. She has been playing with paper her whole life and asking what if...? and artist’s books always seem to hold the answers.
Website: www.ginapisello.com
I am a visual artist/educator and taught art to children in Texas for fifteen years. I currently teach book arts at University of Houston Clear Lake as well as workshops at The Printing Museum in Houston. My interest in book arts began when I attended a summer residency at Boston University. I completed my Masters in Art Education from Boston University in January of 2013 and the focus of my thesis project was exploring artistic learning through tunnel books. I am interested in the architecture of churches and have made several tunnel books incorporating this subject matter. Nature and the environment are also subjects that I am passionate about, and have incorporated these subjects into several books to express environmental threats. I also enjoy learning new ways to make accordion books, hand stitched books, and experimenting with other forms of sculptural bookmaking.
Janet Reynolds is a visual artist/educator and taught art to students in Texas for fifteen years. She is a professor at the University of Houston Clear Lake where she teachers book arts. She earned her BA in art from Notre Dame College in Manchester, NH and her Masters in art Ed from Boston University. She also teaches workshops at the Printing Museum in Houston. Her interest in book arts began when she attended a summer residency at Boston University. She is interested in the architecture of churches and has made several tunnel books incorporating this subject matter. Nature and the environment are also subjects that she is passionate, about and have incorporated these subjects into several books to express environmental threats. She enjoys learning new ways to make accordion books, hand stitched books, and experimenting with other forms of sculptural bookmaking.
http://www.janetmreynolds.com/
@janetmreynoldsartv
Lynn Skordal
Lynn lives and works in the tiny town of La Conner in the far Northwest corner of the United States. After retiring from the practice of law in 2010, she began making artist’s books and small works on paper. Old-style cut & paste collage has been and remains a favorite medium, and she frequently also incorporates sewing techniques, thread, fabric, metal, wood and other materials into her pieces. The goal is always to tell a story that might startle, amuse or provoke. Lynn's work has appeared in many national and international book arts and collage exhibitions, in books and magazines, and is included in many public and private collections across the country.
Website: https://lynnskordal.crevado.com/
Biography
RHONDA URDANG (b. NE) is an interdisciplinary artist influenced by intersectional feminism and the peace movement. Her father (a carpenter) was instrumental in helping her build her first telescope while growing up on a farm in rural Nebraska. Since the early 1970s, she has had a varied and interesting career. After receiving her BFA in painting at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, she has worked as a typesetter, museum gallery attendant, apprentice dot etcher, and journeyman color separation artist and re-toucher on high-fashion catalogs in the graphic arts industry in Omaha and in Phoenix. Since leaving academia, the patriarchy and pseudoscience behind, her ingenuity has flourished. Rhonda has been interested in making contemporary art that challenges the narrative since founding Flagstaff Feminist Art Studio. Her artwork addresses historical and global events, reflecting a period when painting and female artists often faced limited visibility, educational opportunities, and recognition. She stays true to her artistic instincts and is always authentic. Rhonda's work focuses on promoting socio-political empowerment for under-represented womyn and encouraging dialogue around related issues. Her intuitive work has been showcased extensively across local, regional, national, and international exhibitions spanning 42 states. She has lived in Northern Arizona spanning four decades where stargazing has become a crucial aspect of her world on the Colorado Plateau.
Artist Statement
My work concerns itself with the intricacies of my collective unconscious. As a feminist artist living and working at 7,000 feet near the sacred San Francisco Peaks in Northern Arizona, symbols are very much a part of my daily life. The revered sciences of antiquity were recorded in secular and religious icons which sum up certain esoteric principles and therefore form layers of fabrications and enigmatic language. Most cryptograms condense a multitude of meanings into one entity and can be interpreted in a cosmic or human sense. Obscure dreams or nightmares of past, present, and beyond often have no key and can be arduous to unravel. Apparitions of disconcerting images act as truth of reality or are deceptions of paranormal communications that serve to distort or omit the complete truth. My visionary art pierces the veil of remembrance with the creation of unpredictable remnants and is an exploration of feminine mythos intended to leave an indelible seductive mark on a transcendent level. Recollections of cultural personifications and allegory are a vital channel of expression. The recurring arc can be equated with the egg – a sacred pictogram in the cosmology of every person, representing the immense process by which biospheres and all living beings are born.
G-d has been a womyn since the beginning of time – a reminder that archeologists believed divinity was considered female for the first 200,000 years of human life on earth. The ovule contains positive and negative forces which together emit camouflaged existence with hidden meanings. The loveliness of the moon has inspired all womynkind since the beginning of time, especially the magical night sky which rhapsodizes our stellar sisterhood. I’m somewhat more myself in my sleep when my body is in a state of slumber -- when beauty of composition, hybrid images and illusions are formed. – 7/23/2025
“Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West Travel Log, Vol. 2” is a visual biography of an actual event in the life of English modernist 20th-century author Adeline Virginia Woolf and her close ally British novelist, poet, and garden designer of Sissinghurst Castle (Kent, England), Victoria Mary ‘Vita’ Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson. In the summer of 1927, they embarked on an enthralling journey from London to Yorkshire, United Kingdom, to view the Total Solar Eclipse on June 29th (Wednesday: the day of the week when the influence of the planet MERCURY is most keenly felt – books, communication, correspondence, diplomacy, gossip, healing, herbalism, history, libraries, mass media, mathematics, mental prowess/ intellect, reading, school/ education, the sciences, students, teachers, travel, visiting, vocal music, wisdom, writing). Virginia Woolf had chronicled this once-in-a-lifetime “23 second” occurrence in her diary. My re-imagined artistic narrative is loosely based on “The Mysterious Universe” by Sir James Jeans, 1st Edition published 1930 (Cambridge University Press); a gripping book that she had avidly read.
I’ve uncovered historical elements that were in the public domain (with no known copyright restrictions) which I’ve re-mixed and re-used, as colorized digital manipulations onto decorative papers, as archival pigments prints. I’ve hand-cut each fragment into collaged puzzle-pieces – and have fashioned an accordion-fold picture book. There was no real rhyme or reason to the composition of the pages – much like the hap-hazard arrangement of the constellations in the enigmatic night sky. Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s father, was a distinguished man of letters who engaged in the Victorian passion of natural history, including astronomy. Young Virginia, who didn’t receive formal tutelage, spent much of her early formative years among his vast archive of knowledge. She would later write, “I owe all the education I ever had to my father’s library.” Virginia Woolf owed greater self-confidence of her many personal assets to her friend and colleague Vita. The two women bonded over their restrained childhoods and emotionally inattentive parents. Vita convinced Virginia that her ailments had been misdiagnosed and that she should focus on her own diverse pursuits. Stargazing became a crucial aspect of their world.
Website : www.rhondaurdang.com
Betsy van Die is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in sculpture. Her assemblage boxes incorporate vintage photographs, found objects, gemstones, collectibles, and paper ephemera collected over many years with acrylic paint, pastels, colored pencil, and rice paper. She repurposes old books and antique wooden cigar boxes to complement her imagery.
Sixth Grade Biology
Boys flinging frog legs around the room.
The science of dissection and exploration,
of worlds unknown, toads and cells.
All topsy-turvy in the classroom lab.
Formaldehyde so gloriously stinky,
permeating all my senses.
The essence of earth that makes us tick
the stench of swamp water,
Invisible amoebas and lurking nuclei,
Microorganisms in a visibleworld
Swimming with tadpoles,
Toying with boys
It’s uncharted territory.
Artist bio: Pámela Vigo Sánchez is a contemporary equine artist based out of El Paso, Texas. Pámela has a bachelor in art degree from the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), and is an art instructor for SKIES Unlimited on Fort Bliss. The artist is also an avid equestrian; using experience as a horse owner, rider, and enthusiast to influence her work and style. This equine artist is and has almost always been around horses; whether drawing them onto paper or saddling up her own horse, an Appendix gelding named Indy. She uses this stable life experience to inspire her work and artistic practices, scheduling time to draw and create around riding sessions and caring for her horse.This is shown when she teams up with Indy, who paints the colorful backgrounds to her line work, adding an abstract touch to a subjective art style. The artwork created is dubbed by the artist as “Indoodles”
Indy + Pámela’s doodles = Indoodles
