Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Clifton Meador is an artist whose works combine his writing, photography, printmaking, and design. He uses these disciplines to make artist’s books that explore how the narratives of culture, history, and place are the basis for identity. He has been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, most notably  having been twice the recipient of NYFA fellowships and as a Fulbright Scholar to the Republic of Georgia. His work is in many major collections of book art, including the Library of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Yale Art of the Book collection. Before becoming a professor, he was the director of Nexus Press, and collaborated on many well-known artists’ books. He taught graphic design at the State University of New York New Paltz for eleven years, and co-founded an interdisciplinary MFA program, the Visual Research Laboratory. In 2005, he became director of the Interdisciplinary MFA in Book and Paper at Columbia College Chicago, a graduate program that encourages students to think of the book arts and papermaking as sites for creating contemporary art.
 
Melissa Potter is a multi-media artist whose work deals with the commodification of women and their rites of passage from marriage to motherhood.  Her work is expressed in papermaking, drawing, print, sculpture, and video animation. She exhibited at venues including White Columns in NYC, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY through the Artist in the Marketplace program, the VideoDumbo Festival, Galerija Zvono in Belgrade, Serbia in addition to exhibitions in universities and galleries internationally.  Her education includes an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University and a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University.  She is the founder of the feminist critique group, Art364B, and exhibits with them as well. Ms. Potter is a two-time Fulbright recipient, with a January 2009 Senior Specialist award in Belgrade, Serbia.  In 2006, she was a Fulbright Traditional Scholar implementing a hand papermaking program at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Belgrade in Belgrade, Serbia.  She has been the recipient of other awards and residencies in Serbia and Bosnia, including ArtsLink and the Trust for Mutual Understanding, through which she has collaborated with artists from the Former Yugoslavia and taught workshops on papermaking.  The Ministry of Culture of Serbia, and Columbia College Chicago currently support her film work.  She is an Assistant Professor in the Interdisciplinary Arts Department of Columbia College Chicago. Her critical essays on art, particularly art in the Balkans, have been printed inBOMB, Art Papers, Chicago Art Magazine, Flash Art, Metropolis M, Proximity Magazine, Hand Papermaking, and AfterImage.
 
Miriam Schaer is a Brooklyn-based multimedia book artist, and a Lecturer in the Interdisciplinary MFA Program in Book and Paper at Columbia College in Chicago. Ms. Schaer frequently uses garments such as girdles, bustiers, brassieres, and aprons as well as children’s' clothing as materials for unique and limited edition books. The fabrics are manipulated and embellished to serve as enclosures, inside which hand-made books explore feminine, social, and spiritual issues. Her work has been numerous museum shows including the Museum of Art and Design and The Museum of the Bible in Art, both in Manhattan, and the Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY. Her work represented in numerous collections, including the Arts of the Book Collection at Yale University; the Mata & Arthur Jaffe Collection: Book as Aesthetic Object at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History & Culture, Duke University, Durham, NC. Her work has earned a NYFA Artists Fellowship, inclusion in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for the Feminist Art Base at the Brooklyn Museum, and representation at the Cheongju International Craft Biennale in South Korea. She was artist-in-residence for the 2007 Imagining the Book Biennale at the Library of Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt.
 
Clifton Meador, Melissa Potter and Miriam Schaer conducted a workshop for students working on books. In the beginning, they presented and discussed their own works and lead participants through a variety of alternative book structures and discussed the ways that various structures offer expressive potential, narrative opportunities, and ground for artistic exploration. Afterwards, they conducted a book structure workshop. Throughout the workshop, students learnt and made book samples of different structures and in the end had the toolkit of various book formats.