June Studio News

Studio News - June 2026

Dear Subscriber First Name,

Happy June!

We are just about at the end of the first half of 2026! June is turning out to be a month of recap and reflection, with an extra bit of fun.

Thank you!

Thank you to all the wonderful folks at Bainbridge Artisan Resource Network (BARN) and the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art (BIMA), who helped to make my time there so smooth and easy. It was great meeting everyone and working with the students to create books of personal relevance. Their projects were diverse in scope and approach. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversational presentation at BIMA, which was recorded: https://youtu.be/XNGDSDiki2I

I’m still uplifted by my time spent at both BARN and BIMA, and by the warm hospitality extended by friends who I had never met in person and others whom I had not seen in years. This was my first visit to Seattle and Eastern Washington. It was extra meaningful to share a road trip with my sisters (above), which ended in Portland to visit more friends! I am still ruminating on this trip and will share more about it later.

Unfinished Business

My plan to share a completed artist’s book with you this month was foiled. Most recently, I read a short newsletter article about unfinished business. The author wrote about the Sagrada Familia, a cathedral designed by Antoni Gaudi, the construction of which he planned to far outlive him. The author, Melissa Kirsch, describes the place of uncertainty as “a liminal place, a zone of questions and ongoing work rather than a clean arrival at knowing.” As a list-maker, my natural tendency is to avoid having unfinished business like the plague – over planning? Guilty as charged!

Perhaps a bit of reform is in order - unfinished business can still be useful. The newsletter came at just the right moment – instead of pushing and insisting that this project meets my self-imposed deadline, I decided to let it be for a while. The interruption allowed time for me to assess some printing waste sheets (image above), which I’m currently evaluating for additional work(s).

Playing Around

At the end of May, just for fun, I took an online workshop on making board books through the Austin Book Arts Center. This month, while waiting for a supply, I made a couple of additional board books using some ephemera from friends:

Last Saturday, June 13th, I attended the CBAA (College Book Art Association) hybrid Pivot(al) meeting hosted by the Book Arts and Letterpress Lab at Baylor University. One of the highlights was a letterpress activity using a collection of wood type:

Sha and Virginia pulled several of my works from their collection. I thoroughly enjoyed sharing them with the group as well as hearing other book artists speak about their work.

This week, I checked out the demo activities shared by CBAA for the conference and thought, why not do them all? So I did!

Above and Below: A selection of completed conference activities

Speaking of letting things follow their natural course, the projects I’ve been working on this year, which I’m now calling my “Virginia Series,” were unplanned. I fully intended to return to my “regular” to-do project list after January, but these books had other ideas!

We will see what next month has in store!

On view

History of a People, a conceptual artist’s book that traces African American history and culture through scent, is now on view at the Minneapolis Center for Book Art (MCBA) in Who is America at 250? Artists' Books on the State of Democracy. MCBA is the last stop for this traveling exhibition. Learn more here.

Wishing you sunny days ahead.

~alisa

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Kind Regards ~alisa