Bone Folder, Brayer, and Loupe: A Panel Discussion on the Present and Future of Book Arts Education

Stephen A. Kanter Lecture on California Fine Printing

—Gloria Kondrup, ArtCenter College of Design; Kitty Maryatt, Scripps College; and Kathleen Walkup, Mills College

The education of book artists in California has a long and illustrious history. These programs are particularly popular in small private colleges and have attracted people that have gone on to create wonderful and important publications and works of art. Many former students are now instructors themselves. Recently, a number of printing, binding, and design teachers who have been at the helm of these programs have retired, making way for changes that will affect how the discipline continues. Faculty who continue to teach the arts of the book have witnessed fluctuations in support from their institutions, impacting funding, studio space, and personnel. What do all these changes signal for current and prospective students? How are the arts of the book currently taught? What is required to promote the book arts to college administrators, librarians, private collectors, and scholars? Will the ever-increasing popularity of the handmade book be enough to sustain these programs and recruit new students? Join us as we explore the present and future of book arts education in California.

Gloria Kondrup spans both fields of art and design. As a design consultant to national and international firms, she has helped evolve extensive branding, identity, and packaging systems for companies that include Aon, Avon, and Goodwill Industries. As a full-time professor at ArtCenter College of Design, she has been a dedicated design educator for over two decades. As Director of Archetype Press, the ArtCenter’s unique and vibrant letterpress studio, she redefines the value of typography and analog technology in the digital landscape. In 1997 Kondrup was awarded the AIGA Greening of Design and currently serves as Executive Director of the Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography.

Kitty Maryatt is Director Emeritus of the Scripps College Press and was also Assistant Professor of Art at Scripps College in Claremont, California. She taught “Typography and the Book Arts” at Scripps for thirty years, as well as a Core Humanities class to sophomores entitled “The Artist Book as an Agent of Social Change.” Maryatt’s research interest for the last several years has been the 1913 book La Prose du Transsibérien by Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delauany. An article about the “book painting” has just been published by the Book Club of California.

Kathleen Walkup is Professor of Book Art at Mills College, where she teaches typography and letterpress printing, artists’ bookmaking, and seminar/studio courses that combine print culture and book history with studio projects. She is also Director of the MFA in Book Art & Creative Writing, the first such program in the country. Walkup is the Mills College 2016–17 Trefethen Faculty Fellow for Excellence in Teaching. Her research interests include the history of women in print culture and conceptual practice in artists’ books. Her talk, “The Book is a Public Place,” appears in the anthology Threads (Granary Books and Cuneiform Press, 2016). In the summer she writes a seasonal blog, New Irish Journal.

The Stephen A. Kanter Lecture on California Fine Printing is dedicated to an exploration of the history and practice of the printing arts, especially as practiced in California. The biannual Kanter lectures, established through the generous support of Stephen A. Kanter, M.D., began in 1998 and have featured various printers and scholars.

Browse list of Stephen A. Kanter Lecture on California Fine Printing talks.