Women's Studio Workshops

           Tate Peak

      The Women’s Studio Workshops are an incredible space in upstate New York that provide women-identifying artists with workspaces and supportive communities that encourage their visions and provide them with professional opportunities and current facilities. I was interested in them based on the artist books that have come out of the workshops, but they support a variety of visual arts like ceramics, printmaking, photography, and sculptural endeavors. The workshops stated back in 1972 by a group of four women that were looking to create a workspace for artists to exist and make work in. According to their website they “envisioned a society where women’s art was integral to the cultural mainstream and permanently recorded in history”. When they first started out, the facilities were housed in a regular family house, with the different processes (etching, papermaking, and screenprinting) were distributed throughout a few of the rooms. Over time they moved to larger buildings and added more art resources to their campus but the founding four women are still involved in the workshops to this day!
       The most interesting part of the Women’s Studio Workshops are their artist books, and they are the largest publisher of them in North America, and they have copies in almost every major collection throughout the United States, including ASU’s collection! Arizona State University is currently home to 7 books published through the workshops including “A Darning Stitch”, Shared Memories”, “Wrongly Bodied Two”, and “The City Within”.     
     “A Darning Stitch” is a book by Sue Carrie Drummond, who received a grant from the workshop in 2017. The work is printed on two different types of paper to correspond to the two parallel sets of information that the reader is supposed to draw conclusions and relationships between. It is interesting to use paper type as a way to more clearly illustrate the subtext of the story and to more actively draw a relationship between the two texts. One of the papers was quite transparent and allowed the stitch instructions to be overlayed on the corresponding story, further increasing the relationship between the two sets of information.
         "The City Within" is an incredible book by Natalie Draz that combines multiple book structures to create an incredible narrative and beautiful object that uses maps and anatomical themes to explore downtown Montreal as well as a person who might live there. It's an exquisite exploration of body and place and how they connect at many points.
         The Women's Studio Workshops are an incredible resource for women artists to find a place that supports them and their endeavors. Their residencies, grants, and workshops provide women with the opportunities to create work that are otherwise hard to come by in the modern patriarchal society. Hopefully the institution continues to grow and flourish over the years and people will be inspired by their model and continue to open up similar artist facilities that assist marginalized groups in creating more important artwork that helps shape the world.

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A Darning Stitch, Sue Carrie Drummond

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The City Within, Natalie Diaz

Women's Studio Workshops today.

Citations:
​“A Darning Stitch.” Women's Studio Workshop, https://wsworkshop.org/collection/a-darning-stitch/.

“The City Within.” Women's Studio Workshop, https://wsworkshop.org/collection/the-city-within/.

“The History of Women's Studio Workshop.” Women's Studio Workshop, https://wsworkshop.org/about/history-detail/.