Symposium Info

Ana Paula Cordeiro makes books by hand, photographs with film, prints from lead type, and writes either sparingly or profusely on unbound folios, which she then proceeds to bind by hand into volumes. She co-organized the multimedia installation Introspective Collective and co-authored a book about bookmaking titled Bookforms. A Pollock-Krasner Foundation awardee, she was also the recipient of a Dean’s Graduate Scholarship at NYU in 2023, and in 2024 she received a Medal of Arts and Culture from the Governor of New York.

Artist books can be a solitary practice, but as the Introspective Collective manifesto states, no artist is an island. Ana thrives in the shared space, having been a part of the Center for Book Arts communal shop since 2004. She was a resident at the LMCC Arts Center in Governors Island and a research fellow at the Hispanic Society Museum and Library, which became her sponsor for a 2023 regrant by NYSCA. Originally from Bahia, Brazil, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.

This talk delineates a resistance path realized through community support over the course of three artist book editions: Lightweight, Body of Evidence, and Atlas Inverso. From an exercise in aesthetics to a manifest of defiance to a revival of indigenous languages, Ana will share how New York City and The Center for Book Arts community have provided both a nurturing shelter and an obstacle to overcome.

Lightweight elaborates upon the formidable engineering features of limp-vellum bindings. Body of Evidence, presented in the Who Is America exhibition, is a “multimedia, journalistic response to the climate of white privilege and fragility surrounding and in the aftermath of the 2016 election.”1 The third work, Atlas Inverso, explores language, colonization, and representation by inviting indigenous artists to upend European hegemony, reframing the main geographic features of Portugal and Spain with words from Mayan, Tagalog, and Tupi-Guarani ethnologies.
1. Santaus, Meredith. Pressing Issues: Voices for Justice in the Book Arts. Bromer Gallery, 2021.

Beldan Sezen is an artist, curator and independent publisher with a degree in Political Sciences. Her main focus is creating books that reflect on war and abilities, collective spaces and confinements – stories about us humans. In 2015 she was awarded with a Global Arts Fund by the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice for exploring questions of survival, freedom and possibility in regard to Queer bodies which resulted in her guerrilla art project BUTCH IT UP! in Istanbul, Turkey. She received a book as art development grant by the City of Amsterdam and was awarded the 2022 Herzog August Library Artists’ Book Prize. Beldan is the co-founder of Cypher Zine, a digital comics magazine that introduces audiences into the radical lives and dangerous work of human rights defenders around the world. As a curatorial member of Booklyn she aims to continiously broaden the canon of the artists’ book world. She strongly believes that it is in the artist’s creative imagination to draw a yet not existing reality that allows us to question situations, to change perspective and narratives. 

Yuka Petz is a visual artist and writer whose creative practice centers around language, heritage, paper, and letterforms. Yuka writes and hosts Artist’s Books Unshelved, a video series presenting in-depth analysis of artists’ books in the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art collection, and teaches youth and adult workshops around the country. Her artists’ books and prints are held in numerous special collections. She is committed to collaborative and community-oriented projects that increase the accessibility of book, print, and paper arts.

Anne Covell is a book artist, edition bookbinder, and hand papermaker. She holds an MFA in Book Arts from the University of Iowa Center for the Book, where she was the recipient of an Iowa Arts Fellowship. She has taught for numerous institutions, including the Morgan Art of Papermaking Conservatory, Penland School of Craft, and the University of Georgia study abroad program in Cortona, Italy, among others. Her work can be seen in over 85 collections worldwide, including Yale University, the Library of Congress, and the British Library.

IBé Crawley is the founder and director of IBé Arts Institute at Citi Point in Hopewell, Virginia, where the Institute holds space for interns, fellows, and art residents. She is the 2024 recipient of the Virginia Preservation Award and was recognized for restoring a pre-Civil War schoolhouse where IBé Institute now resides. She was the keynote speaker for the 2024 William Mann Book Arts Lecture at Penn State; her work has been written about in the Oxford American (2025); and the British Library exhibited her artist book 11033 (2022, Women’s Studio Workshop) in the Treasures Gallery. Crawley’s artist’s books are collected in university and museum special collections, including Harvard University Library, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, UCLA Arts Libraries, the Scripps College Denison Library, Virginia Commonwealth University Library, New York City Public Library, and more. In addition to exhibiting her handmade artist’s books and sculptural work, she teaches book arts using historic and family documents. Historic research and oral storytelling complement her work in the visual arts as she focuses on researching narratives outside the margins of history. IBé Crawley teaches workshops that are rooted in community engagement and collaborative practice. Her recent book project, Shockoe Exchange 1856, began at the Penland School of Craft and highlights the narratives of two Black Women before the Civil War.

Jocmarys Viruet Feliciano is a visual artist from Arecibo, Puerto Rico with a focus on hand papermaking and Book Arts. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus and a master’s degree from the University of Iowa, Center of the Book. Her first experience with handmade paper was in 2014 as an exchange student in South Korea. Jocmarys has taught several bookbinding and handmade paper workshops in Puerto Rico and in the United States at places such as Penland School of Crafts in Bakersville, North Carolina, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, Tennessee and Taller Lapaduma in Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico. Her artist’s books are part of special collections such as University of Miami, University of Iowa, Yale University, University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University. Her most recent artistic experience was being part of a winter residency in the mountains of Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina and The Lucayan Archipelago Artist Residency at the Poinciana Paper Press studio in Nassau, The Bahamas. Her art practice focuses on her experiences as an islander. https://www.jocmarysviruetfeliciano.com

Book Artist in collaboration with the Atelier du Livre de l’Art & de l’Estampe, Imprimerie Nationale de France

Carole Texier is a printmaker and creator of artist’s books. Self-taught, she spent more than ten years living in Germany, Russia, Great-Britain and Spain — experiences that continue to nourish her poetic and visually rich artistic practice. Deeply passionate about the artist’s book, a form that brings together everything she loves — drawing, engraving, the book as object, text, poetry, letterpress and paper — she creates works in which image and language engage in close dialogue.

She specializes in direct engraving, using burin on copper or wood and linocut, driven by a love of line and material. Her work focuses on the human being — their questions, solitude, and impulses within the crowd. In 2019, she presented a solo drawing exhibition at the Saint-Merry Church in Paris.

Carole Texier exhibits regularly in France and internationally, and has received several awards, including the Moret-Manonviller Prize (2018), the Paul-Gonnand Prize (2017), the Charbonnel Prize (2016), the Robert-Beltz Prize (2016), and the ADAGP Prize for the artist’s book (2016). Her works are held in numerous libraries in France and abroad.

Women in Printing? Yes – Everywhere, and From the Very Beginning!

Since the invention of printing, women have played an active role in the trade, contributing ideas, skills, and financial backing. Some, like the French Charlotte Guillard or the American Beatrice Warde, are relatively well known; others, such as Polish printer Helena Ungelerowa or Spanish printer Antonia Ibarra, have been largely forgotten. To highlight their contributions, book artist Carole Texier, in collaboration with the Atelier du Livre d’art of the Imprimerie nationale of France, created the project Women in Printing.

The project pays tribute to women in the printing trade across Europe and North America since the 15th century. It takes the form of four letterpress posters, printed using the historic techniques of the Imprimerie nationale, featuring around one hundred women alongside their printer’s marks.

In this talk, Carole Texier will introduce the project and showcase the diversity of these women printers, along with their graphic, social, and geographical distinctions.

Claire Illouz lives and works in Chérence, France. She makes paintings, drawings, etchings, and artist’s books, many of them in public and private collections in Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Twice awarded prizes by the French Academy of Fine Arts, she has had solo exhibitions in France at the Musée Louis Senlecq and the Musée Raymond Lafage. Her work can be seen at Galerie Sagot-Le Garrec, Paris; Withoutart Gallery, Strasbourg; and Gallery Leconteur in Orange County, California. https://cillouz.eu/

From Printmaking to Bookmaking and Back: Efforts at Slow Looking

This talk will present visual experiments carried out in the course of my practices of printmaking and bookmaking, which nourish each other. Included are reflections on (1) landscape viewing, (2) the relationship between drawing and reading, and (3) the ocean of images in which our works are often drowned.  An artist’s response to a visual and intellectual challenge of our time, the presentation will show how etchings and book art, experienced at an unhurried pace, can evoke a different kind of perception. The special attention involved in reading has influenced developments in my etchings, resulting in works that would never have existed outside the form of the artist’s book. 

Bibliothèque Nationale de France

Marie Minssieux-Chamonard is Head Curator of Rare Books at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, where she is responsible for the 20th and 21st century collections. A specialist in artists’ books and contemporary art, she has curated several exhibitions at the BnF (Zao Wou-Ki, Richard Prince, Matthew Barney, Anselm Kiefer, Giuseppe Penone) and published numerous exhibition catalogs. Her current research focuses on women artists since the 1960s.

Her talk will focus on one of the most innovative and stimulating currents in artists’ books today. It will focus on artists using the book-object itself as a field for experimentation, and an exploration of its formal power, based on its material and metaphorical components (research into the medium, the materiality of the book, spatiality, etc.). The presentation will be based on a selection of French and foreign (mainly European) artists’ books held in the Rare Book Reserve of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.