Your Hands will always be Covered with Ink!

Nuns, Widows, Mavericks & Other Passionate Printers

The history of women and printing is as long and as deep as the history of printing itself. The difference is that the role of women in printing has been for the most part invisible in the historical record. But just under the surface we can create a trajectory that stretches from the earliest printing in Europe to the students embracing letterpress in contemporary MFA programs. The first press on North American soil was established by Elizabeth Glover in Massachusetts, a fitting progenitor for the women of the Folly Cove Designers. This illustrated talk will trace this long history with a focus on American roots.

Free for Museum members; $10 for nonmembers. Reservations required. Sign up online at Eventbriteor call (978) 283-0455 x10.

Kathleen Walkup is the inaugural Lovelace Family Chair in Book Art at Mills College, Oakland, California, where she directs the Book Art Program and teaches letterpress and artists’ bookmaking. Her research interests include the history of women in printing and conceptual practice in artists’ books. Her essay on the women of the Distaff Side will appear in Impressions, Vol. 1, later this year. In Fall, 2019, she will have a solo exhibition of her printed ephemera at Mills, and in Fall, 2020, she will curate an exhibition examining the role of women in the rise of artists’ books in the 1970s and 1980s. In the summer she writes a seasonal blog, New Irish Journal.

Offered in conjunction with the special exhibition The Little House: Her Story.