Rebecca Goodale has been creating innovative and sublimely made artist’s books for many years and frequently does collaborative work with other artists as well as public art installations. In addition to being artistically active, she was the founding program coordinator for the Kate Cheney Chappell ‘83 Center for Book Arts at the University of Southern Maine, where she inspired artists at all levels. She continues to teach design and book arts for various institutions and exhibits her work both locally and internationally.

Rebecca’s books can be found in many institutional collections, including the Bowdoin College Library; the Maine Women Writers Collection at UNE; Herron Art Library; Library of Congress; Portland Museum of Art, ME; State Art Museum of Hawai’i; the Boston Athenaeum; the Children’s Museum in Seoul, Korea; and the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art,WA.

In 2015 she received the Maine Craft Artist Award from the Maine Crafts Association. Other awards she has received include a New Forms Regional Initiative Grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts and a Mellon Grant for the Humanities at Bates College. In 1995 she was a Resident Scholar for the Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska.

Rebecca has been creating a series of artist’s books about Maine’s rare plants and animals for the past twenty years and occasionally she is distracted by more common species like the spiders and birds in her own backyard. Her intention is not to become a scientific illustrator; instead, she wants to inspire sensitivity for these rare flora and fauna by using her background in book arts and textile design to interpret color, pattern, rhythm, and transition.

www.rebeccagoodale.com

Carrie Scanga

Carrie Scanga’s printmaking-based practice includes installation, book arts, and works on paper. She first experimented with the material of tracing paper while a graduate student in printmaking at the University of Washington in Seattle in 2000, delighted by its potential to express a sense of time and embodiment. Her projects have explored these themes and materials since then, with exhibits throughout the world and receiving recognition in The Boston Globe, the Printeresting blog, and New American Paintings. Exhibition sites include the Portland Museum of Art, the Islip Art Museum in New York, Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Philadelphia, and Paper Gallery Shanghai in Guangzhou, China. Originally from Pennsylvania, Carrie’s work as an artist after school began at Women’s Studio Workshop in New York, followed by a phase of moving between residencies and fellowships in the US and Europe until her move to Maine in 2009 to be a professor at Bowdoin College.

Jaime Wing

Jaime Wing is an artist printmaker based in Portland, Maine, who specializes in wood block and letterpress printing. He has been printing for over 14 years and has been a member of Pickwick Independent Press since 2014. With an interest in letter forms, texture and the natural world, he draws from his personal experience to make tactile and engaging works.

Evelyn Wong

Evelyn Wong (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the complex stories of past and present Chinese and Asian Americans. Themes of history, tradition, trauma, culture, race, and gender are often found in her work as topics of both celebration and critique. Wong’s work frequently makes reference to artist’s books as a conceptual device while utilizing Western and Chinese imagery and symbolism, materiality, and text as part of her visual language. Wong received their BFA from the University of South Carolina and MFA from Maine College of Art, and was awarded the Professional Development and Creative Entrepreneurship Grant at Maine College of Art to launch Fireball Bookbindery, where they currently craft hand-bound journals and notebooks inspired by Asian traditions in materials, designs, and book-bindings.

Mark Ford

Mark Ford is an artist and teacher living in Portland, Maine. He works primarily with reclaimed materials (discarded books, papers and packaging), breaking down what he salvages and looking for playful combinations and juxtapositions in which to place and engage the parts. He calls the time he spends processing and organizing his materials “slow looking,” a practice that is not so much results-focused as it is about reciprocity. This kind of orientation allows one to see things anew, appreciate their subtleties and sit with their complexities. Mark wants people to see in his work a model for how to exist in the world alongside its many contradictions and is particularly interested in the space he finds between undoing and doing, unmaking and making, deconstructing and constructing, disassembling and assembling, and even between dissembling and telling the truth.

Allison Villani

Pilar Nadal

I am a artist, educator and director of a community print studio in Portland Maine, currently working primarily in letterpress and risography.

Jan Owen

Jan Owen lives in Belfast where she makes unique artist books on paste paper, handmade papers, and hanging, polyester scrolls. She combines words by various writers, poets, the Constitution and laws and often adds her own marginalia. Jan wants to call attention to the beauty and power of words. Jan worked as a touring artist for many years in Maine schools and adult workshops in the US; Percent for Art commissions for Maine courthouses, commission work and now makes the books she wants to make. Her work is in museums, private collections and library Special Collections.

Anna Low

Anna’s formal education is in photography and art education, with a BA from Hampshire College, a year studying at Speós – The Paris Photographic Institute, and a MA in Art Education from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After many years of teaching, first in the Chicago Public School System and then running an art department at a private school in Rhode Island, she made the leap to full time artist. She now focuses her energies on bookbinding and is the creator behind Purplebean Bindery, a business focused on creating unique, durable and inspiring blank journals. To satisfy her endless creative itch, she makes artists books using a variety of printmaking and photographic processes. She also teaches workshops in bookbinding. Her photographs and artist books have been exhibited throughout New England and published in several periodicals, including Maine Magazine. Her home studio is bright and sunny, in Auburn, Maine.

Elizabeth Jabar

Elizabeth A. Jabar is a feminist printmaker who explores a range of personal-political issues in her work including cultural identity, representation, equity and maternal ethics. Her practice is located in the studio, the classroom and the community where she co-creates collaborative and participatory projects with students, colleagues and community members. Her hybrid works on paper and cloth display a highly personal visual language that incorporates motifs from popular culture, folk art, religious traditions and textiles. Elizabeth’s printed objects and environments embody printmaking’s democratic tradition of resistance and collective power and reflect her commitment to art as a tool for social change. Elizabeth is the Lawry Family Dean of Civic Engagement and Community Partnerships at Colby College, and was formerly the Chair of the Printmaking Program and Director of Public Engagement at Maine College of Art She received her BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and her MFA from Pratt Institute.

Annie Lee-Zimerle

Annie Lee-Zimerle is an interdisciplinary artist with a background in painting, printmaking, and book arts, and she received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently an associate professor of art at the University of Southern Maine and a program director of the Kate Cheney Chappell Center for Book Arts. / My work explores transferring thoughts into tangible forms. These thoughts are often inspired by my personal experience, reflections on domesticity and the mundane of contemporary society. Working from personal experience, I also explore responses I have to certain events that have occurred, small or big, and memories of things, concrete or abstract. They are brought to bear in a delicate narrative to provoke a dialogue between viewers and the work. / All my ideas are drawn first, then depending on an idea, I either go in the direction of a print, painting, or book art. I take the process of creating work very important in my art making.