A few days ago I received a surprise gift in the mail. The artist Kumi Korf had sent me her latest project, a catalogue titled In & Out of Sculptural Books. Korf, a longtime resident of Ithaca, New York, trained as an architect in her native Tokyo before completing an MFA at Cornell in the late 1970s. She currently lives in a house of her design in the Ithaca woods. For the past several years Korf has had medical challenges, which haven’t stopped her from making her way to her printmaking studio a short distance from her back door.
I first came across Korf’s artist books when I curated Possibilities: When Artists’ Books Were Young (San Francisco Center for the Book, 2022). I included Silk and Secrecy, a sculptural book created in 1985 by Korf and Emoretta Yang. Korf’s sympathy with materials (Japanese paper, silk thread, foam core) matched Yang’s complex storytelling ability in this haunting and beautiful book.
In & Out of Sculptural Books is a catalogue of a show that Korf organized at The Ink Shop, a community printmaking studio in Ithaca that Korf was instrumental in establishing and continues to be connected to. In & Out of Sculptural Books is not a recent show. In 2014 Korf invited artists who had taken her workshops to send work to the show; thirty-eight of them responded. Korf had photos taken of each of the works, but her health issues intervened in her intention to produce a catalogue. It is a testament to Korf’s determination and her resilience that, in 2026, she would complete the job.
The catalogue is presented in a printed wrapper held together by a band closed with a small netsuke-like toggle. Inside there is an accordion-fold introduction and 38 individual 5x7 inch cards, one for each artist in the show. The presentation of the artists (all but one of whom are women) on separate cards immediately reminded me of two artist book catalogues from the 1970s.
Women and the Printing Arts: A catalog was created in 1977 at the Women’s Graphic Center, an offshoot of the Woman’s Building founded in Los Angeles in 1973. One of the three founders, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, a graphic designer, created Women and the Printing Arts as a way to market artist books by women. In this case, each 5x7 inch card represented one work by one woman. The two-sided cards show the work on the front and the information about that work, along with the price and the artist’s address, on the back. The cards are held together by a metal ring.
The second catalogue, Women’s Bookworks, is a catalogue of a 1979 travelling exhibition organized by a coalition of sponsors primarily centered around Montreal, Canada. In this catalogue the 56 artists are each represented by a square (6.5x6.5 inch) two-sided card, the front side showing the work and the reverse giving the artist’s statement. The statements are either in English or French; the catalogue itself is bilingual. The two women who organized this exhibition, Doreen Lindsay and Sarah McCutcheon, decided to focus on women when they noticed that many of what they called “key artists” were involved with bookworks were women, including Martha Wilson, Joan Lyons, Judith Hoffberg and Art Metropole’s Peggy Gale.
Women and the Printing Arts reflected de Bretteville’s belief that, rather than needing to encourage women’s voices, women already had those voices; what they needed were ways to be heard. In other words, better marketing. De Bretteville and her co-workers didn’t curate the selection of women who could be included; the cards include an entry form along with a request for a check for $7.50 to help defray printing costs. Women’s Bookworks was a curated exhibition, but in order to encourage the broadest participation the two organizers travelled the country to contact artists in person, providing a definition of an artist book as “A work of art in book form which embodied an idea” to women for whom the medium was a new concept.
It is not necessarily surprising that the two catalogues of women’s work lacked traditional binding. In the case of Women and the Printing Arts, the use of cards was entirely practical: prospective book buyers could remove cards to use the information on them and prospective artists could remove the entry form. The reason for the single sheets in Women’s Bookworks is less transparent, but the cost of creating and binding the catalogue was almost certainly a factor. (Since the show was meant to travel, single sheets also meant that individual artists could be removed for different locations, although there is no indication of that taking place.) What the single sheets do indicate is a true democratization of the artists and their work. The lack of binding means that no single artist is privileged. Alphabetical filing is a convenience, but in both cases that can be easily breached. These single-sheet catalogues put every woman in them on an equal plane, resulting in a clear lack of hierarchy and an implicit statement about the nature of these books as democratized forms.
This democratic approach is separate from the notion of the democratic multiple espoused by Clive Phillpot and others also beginning in the 1970s. The democratic multiple is a book made in an open edition and generally published outside the gallery system with its norms of limitation and exclusivity. The individual books, however, aren’t grouped together in a non-hierarchical order; in fact, certain artists are privileged. In many of the critiques and histories, those artists are very often male (1).
That Korf chose to use this form in 2026 appears to be a reflection back to the genesis of artist books, particularly those made by women artists, as both individual celebrations and collective achievements. The cards from In & Out of Sculptural Books are one-sided, with minimal information and a corollary emphasis on the object. Most of the cards give the artist’s name and the book’s title, dimensions and materials. (One card, Emoretta Yang’s, lists only the artist’s name. While this could be seen as an oversight, my feeling is that Korf is honoring Yang’s memory—she died in 2023—by leaving blank the space that Emoretta herself would have completed.)
I don’t know if Korf had earlier models in mind when she created her catalogue, but it reflects the democratic intentions of these early catalogues and could be read as an homage to the democratizing nature of second-wave feminism nearly fifty years ago.
Note:
(1) For example, in Stefan Klima’s description of the 1973 exhibition Artists Books at Moore College of Art in Artists Books: A critical survey of the literature [Granary Books, 1998] Klima names eight artists, all male, as examples of the participating artists. The actual catalogue for the exhibition names almost three dozen women whose work was included in the show.
Kathleen Walkup is Lovelace Family Professor of Book Art Emerita, Mills College; she is currently based in the Hudson Valley. Her essay on Notes on Woman Printers in Colonial America and The United States will be published in the Grolier Club’s Gazette later this year. She will curate an exhibition of 1970s Bay Area presses at the Grolier Club in 2028.
