Since 1974, the art studio and publisher in Rosendale has been a space for women to create. Deputy Director Natalie Renganeschi says the Workshop’s four founders — artists Ann Kalmbach, Tatana Kellner, Barbara Leoff Burge, and Anita Wetzel — started it as a teaching collective for an arts scene that didn’t have many educational opportunities for women.
“They felt that they were being met with a lot of sexism, and lot of exclusion," says Renganeschi. "And so they wanted to create a space where women’s artwork would be elevated and permanently recorded in history.”
Now, the Workshop boasts studios for printing, papermaking, ceramics, and more. Renganeschi says the Workshop has served more than 5,000 artists and expanded its scope to include trans, nonbinary, intersex, and genderfluid artists as well. It has published more than 240 books over the years, some of which have found homes in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate Modern, and the Library of Congress.
Its latest exhibition, “A Radical Alteration,” showcases some of the organization's favorite titles. As Renganeschi points out, many of the books are works of art themselves, designed more for museums than for your home library. As we make our way through the gallery, she motions to a red film strip and cassette tape that, to me, looks like any other film strip and cassette tape — but it’s actually made entirely out of paper. She says Carnegie Mellon professor Imin Yeh went to painstaking lengths to recreate it.
"She discovered this educational film strip in a closet at her university, and she became totally fascinated by the idea that there was this fully defunct educational object teaching people about a medium — print — that some would argue is also becoming defunct," explains Renganeschi. "By recreating this object, she ensured that it would be recollected by all these libraries and institutions — the kind that would have put this film strip into a closet."
Another book, by Cherokee artist Rhiannon Skye Tafoya, uses traditional basket weaving practices to form its pages. Renganeschi says Tafoya lived at the Workshop as an artist-in-residence in 2019. The final product folds together to look like a basket, and includes a collection of poems dedicated to Tafoya’s grandmother.
“One really exciting thing is that we were able to acquire a set of Cherokee syllabary letter press, so that Skye was actually able to do letter press in her grandmother’s spoken language, which is really beautiful," adds Renganeschi.
The Workshop offers multiple residencies a year to artists of varying experience. One current resident is Ruthe Karlin, a photographer and retired teacher from Chicago who is printing a new photobook she calls “Karlin in Bed.” The title is a tongue-and-cheek reference to the book artist Richard Minsky and his 1988 work “Minsky in Bed" – but while “Minsky in Bed” depicts intimate details of the artist’s sexual conquests, “Karlin in Bed” is more literal. At 90 years old, Karlin has trouble getting around, and spends a lot of time in bed with her legs elevated to address swelling.
“It’s boring, there’s not a lot you can do with your legs up in the air," says Karlin. "Here I am with my iPhone, my legs up in the air, and I took a picture. And it seemed like a good idea.”
The result is an accordion-style book with several photos of Karlin’s legs: sometimes at night, sometimes with a book in her lap, and always with a short caption handwritten by Karlin herself.
Karlin says her goal is not to poke fun at Minsky, but to provide a glimpse at what it’s like to be a woman of a certain age — specifically, 90. For the past week, she’s been finalizing designs, printing out pages, and signing copies of her book, which the Workshop will bind over the next few weeks. It’s not a mass production — they’re aiming for about 50 copies total — but Karlin says the whole experience has helped her feel seen, kind of like when she first bought her favorite red glasses.
“When a woman is over 50 or 60 she becomes invisible," says Karlin. "And I had gone from getting attention for my looks or being harassed for my looks, and then becoming totally invisible for years. And in a way it was a relief — there are limits to this nonsense! But then I bought these glasses, and I get stopped on the street. People stop me on the street and say, ‘I love your glasses!’ And it’s incredible."
Women’s Studio Workshop will formally celebrate its 50th anniversary with a gala on November 16. “A Radical Alteration: Women’s Studio Workshop as a Sustainable Model for Art Making,” is now on view at the studio through the end of the year. In 2025, it will make stops at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C.
