Mixed Media
Fun!
For those who love books as art–or books and art–a visual and tactile treat awaits as Greenwich Village-based artist Alison J. Stein works feverishly to stitch, snip and appliqué a growing stack of delightfully-designed booklets that will eventually be exhibited as books without paper.
Local Artist Alison J. Stein Prepares to Unveil New Works: Embroidery Books Our Town, January 30th, 2023.
And a few extra images of the books for your viewing pleasure:
I can often sense my creative focus moving before it actually does. The last time it happened was this past July 14th.
I’m a “multidisciplinary” artist, but I’m actually more serially monogamous I have periods — eras really— where I’m very focused on one kind of art practice. I’m deep into printmaking, collage, crochet, figurative painting, book arts — and then it falls away for a bit. It feels to me like a spotlight trains on an art form and it becomes luminous, irresistibly compelling — which casts other practices in comparative shadow.
I can’t always identify the shift with such precision as this last one, I know the exact date because it’s when I went to an exhibit at The Drawing Center called “The Clamor of Ornament.” It was, as it turns out, the waning days of my last Printmaking Era, C.E.
At the Drawing Center, I spent a long time in front of an embroidery sampler from Mexico in the 1800s:
Image of an embroidery sampler on display at The Drawing Center in 2022, unknown artist.
Worked by an unknown artist, this piece is silk thread on cotton, made to look like patchwork, with each rectangular portion a different kind of pattern made with a variety of different stitches. (If you know your stitches, there was cross, stem, long-armed cross, threaded running, Roumanian, fern and buttonhole.)
i knew at that moment that embroidery was coming back— I could feel it in my fingers.
I first embroidered this piece based, appropriately, on an image I saw on my last trip to Mexico in 2019. But after I finished that, I didn’t want to work on anything specific.
I wanted to keep embroidering, but in the way that I work in my paper art journals. These I bind with various kinds of papers — blank and printed, new and vintage, uneven sizes — and I skip around as I work on them. I can lay down a bunch of marks on different pages, collage a bunch of things down, or I can work right into a piece and finish it.
And so it hit me: why not do this with fabric? Bind a book with lots of different fabrics, stitch scraps on in certain places, and just flip around.
And so, dear reader, I did.
Image of a “spread” in my embroidered art journal.
Another page in my embroidered art journal.
It’s actually weird to me that I haven’t thought of this before. I am always wanting to treat paper like fabric — I want to stitch into it, weave it, attach fabric and buttons and trim to it. (In fact, last year I taught a workshop at FabScrap about using fabric in art journals.)
And I knew you could use bookmaking techniques to bind fabric rather than paper. Although when I flipped through my reference materials on bookmaking, I only saw examples of soft books made for babies, in which each page had been embroidered separately and then bound together after. And that’s not what I wanted. I wanted to bind “blank pages” and embroider into them.
The challenge for me was the back side of the embroidery. Although the reverse side of an embroidered piece can look cool in its own way — and some people take a lot of pride in how neat they keep the wrong side of their embroidered pieces — I’m only concerned about the reverse side when I’m embroidering on a garment. I didn’t want half the book to be the reverse side of embroideries.
Then I remembered that waaay back in 2017, MOMA had Louise Bourgeois exhibit including her embroidered books. She “bound” them with buttons, so she could easily remove each “page.” I liked this idea.
Louise Bourgeois’ embroidered book pages on display at MOMA.
Since I couldn’t see the backside of Bourgeois pages at MOMA, I didn’t know how she resolved this wrong side issue — if it actually bothered her at all.
Eventually I decided I would simply bind my books and just work on every other page. I could safety pin the “wrong” sides together while I was working, and sew them together like a sandwich when I was done.
The only trick here is to keep track of which side was the right and wrong side — you don’t want a wrong side facing a right side, because then there’s no way to hide it.
I did fuck this up a few times on the first journal, although. I just sewed in an extra page when I did, which is a little fiddly but not the end of the world. If you try this at home, I’ve since realized that for stability, I generally need to double up my fabric. I used a different fabric for the “wrong sides” which has helped me to keep track and not sew on it.
I’ve now made three of these art journals — I’ve basically filled all of those up, so I’m soon to bind a fourth. I’ll post more pages from these journals soon!
As if having my art displayed at NYPL wasn’t enough….greeting cards with my art on it are at my absolute favorite NYC indie bookstore, McNally Jackson on Prince Street! I went to check these out just after we installed the show, and although I was hot and sweaty and tired, the sight of these instantly revived me. Go see if they have the same effect on you?
I donated one of my favorite canvases to be auctioned for the benefit of a very cool school here in New York City. The kid of a friend of mine attends. And actually, we know each other because our dogs hang out in the same clique at the dog park. So this just goes to show —what happens in the dog park doesn’t always stay in the dog park. :)
I know it’s a nightmare for parents to navigate the city’s school system, which has grown exponentially more complicated since I was a student, but wow — I wish these things were available when I was in the system. (I also wish these cool options were available to more students across the socioeconomic spectrum, but that’s a different story.)
In any event, I hope this canvas goes for tons of money and the school does good things with it!
And I will definitely consider art donation requests for good causes, so if you’re doing a fundraiser, feel free to hit me up.
I just added some new dessert prints to my Faire shop!
Two of the cake pieces (not the one with candles) were inspired by an amazing ultra-kitsch bakery I visited in Amsterdam a while ago, called De Taart Van Ma Tante.
It may be closed now, I see conflicting things on the internet, and I’m not helped by my inability to read Dutch! Here are some good pics of how it looked when I visited, though. Those people know how to decorate!
I have other work I’ve made that was inspired by that bakery — less sweets, more floral and patterny —which I’ll eventually post. (Heavy emphasis on eventually!) The other pieces were inspired by my small collection of vintage dessert cookbooks. And now I’m off to find a treat for myself.
Preparations continue apace for my solo show upcoming at the NYPL Mulberry this summer! Here’s a sneak peek at the exhibit postcard:
I’m so excited to say I’m having a solo art show at the New York Public Library’s Mulberry Street branch this summer! The show will open on June 4th, 2022 and go through August 28th
It’s called “The Dazzling Margins: Vibrant Glimpses of NYC Liife” and is based on my observations of this neighborhood during the pandemic. Especially in the early going, pretty much my only excursion was to the Mulberry Library to pick up and drop off books — and try to get the damned forehead thermometer to register that I was standing in front of it. (Move closer, move further back…usually the security guard would take pity on me and beam-test my wrist.) The “neighborhood” is the sort of ill-defined area — technically Greenwich Village, but just north of Soho, some people call it Noho… in any event, my stomping grounds.
More info to come!
It becomes more and more of an effort to post on Instagram, to even open the app. I’ve set time limit on my phone to interrupt any glazed-eye scrolling, just 15 minutes per day. At first I was constantly hitting it, but there are now some days when I don’t even reach that.
At the same time, I want people to see what I’ve done — especially you, if you’re reading these words.
Some new work, then, which I’m posting here first instead of on Instagram, at least initially. (There is more on the home page.)
Of course, edited into the square format because you and I both know it’s going to end up there eventually. If not immediately.
I have four paintings that will be on exhibit starting in May. (August 2021 update: Two of the paintings are still available, see below for details. If you’re interested in purchasing, please contact me!)
“Sea/Sun/Set.” Mixed media on canvas, 18 x 24 inches. Included in Art of Water V at James May Gallery. May 1st - July 31st, 2021.
“The Dancers Dance the Dance.” Mixed media on paper. 7x10 inches. Included in Mujeres Mujeres Mujeres at Raices Taller 222 Art Gallery in Tucson, Arizona. May 1st - June 12th, 2021. SOLD
“Completing the Thought.” Mixed media on canvas, 12 inches diameter. Included in Neuroanatomy at Stone Valley Arts, Poultney, Vermont. May 15th-June 27th, 2021. SOLD
“Brain in my Heart.” Mixed media on canvas, 9x12 inches. Included in Neuroanatomy at Stone Valley Arts, Poultney, Vermont. May 15th-June 27th, 2021.
My latest series of work was inspired by wycinanki, or Polish cut paper art. It's pronounced vee-chee-non-kee. Before you get too impressed, let me say that the only other words I know in Polish are "thank you" and "grandmother," more on that in a moment.
Wycinanki are symmetrical designs cut from folded paper — pretty similar in basic process to the blend between origami and paper cutting that kids use to make paper snowflakes. The results can be monochromatic, or, with the aid of layered papers, multicolored. Generally, they're made in folk motifs. Here's a cool quick stop-motion animation on how it's traditionally done.
While I'm not super interested in the traditional motifs, I immediately wanted to try my hand at this. Because while I feel like my truest identity is "New Yorker," I'm inspired by/greatly interested in the arts and traditions of different cultures — Asian, African, Indigenous peoples in the Americas and elsewhere. I have loads of books on these cultures, photos from museums, as well as from traveling I've done to places around the world inspired by this interest.
The issue here is that these are not my native cultures, so I'm well aware that this inspiration can only go so far in my art practice without creeping from appreciation into appropriation.
It's less problematic for me to more directly reference my own heritage, and I do have a grab bag of cultural ties to choose from. My grandparents, as either immigrants themselves or children-of, offer an interesting melange of possibilities. On one side, there's Russian, Ukrainian, Hungarian, and, if you believed my grandmother, gesturing at her almond-shaped eyes, Mongolian. (I mean, there was a lot of historic forays into the general region by Mongolians, so I guess it's plausible — if so, that gives me a little toe-hold into Asia. And if that's credible, then I think I can also find some link to the Caucuses.) And on the other, there's Poland, by way of Spain.
All of that made me feel legit entitled to explore and incorporate wycinanki which evidently has a long history in Jewish communities in both Poland, and several of the areas with which I have a genetic connection. Traditionally, these pieces were made with the intent of warding off the evil eye (of course!), celebrating holidays, commemorating the dead
For my wycinanki-inspired pieces, I used both the positive and the negative shapes of the paper cut outs. (This means I used both the design I cut out, and the paper I cut away.) I started with found papers which I painted intuitively, rather than working with plain paper. Once cut and glued, I painted on them some more.
I really enjoyed the element of surprise in this — you draw a design on the folded paper, or just freehand cut (I did both) and when you unfold it, you get something that's both the idea you had, and that unpredictable little something extra that the process creates. In this way, it's akin to printmaking — minus the ink fumes, which alas, led me away from my experiments in printmaking a few years ago. I'm looking forward to exploring this some more. You can take a closer look at these works right here.
