Women to Watch 2027: A Book Arts Revolution

March 2027 - August 2027, Washington, D.c.

The New York Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts is proud to participate in Women to Watch 2027. One of our key efforts is the Women to Watch program.  Women to Watch is presented every two to three years as a collaboration between the museum and its national and international outreach committees.  The 2027 exhibition coincides with the museum’s 40th anniversary is the 20th anniversary of the Women to Watch exhibition series.

Each iteration of the program focuses on a specific medium or theme, selected by the museum. Women to Watch 2027: A Book Arts Revolution focuses on contemporary Book Art.  NMWA itself holds a collection of over 1,000 artists’ books and are in integral part of the museum’s history. An artist’s book is a book made as an original work of art, crafted as a single object, or can be a small edition, or even re-imagines the book as a sculpture or installation. The upcoming exhibition brings artist’s books to the forefront, challenging assumptions about the nature of book arts.

The Women to Watch program asks committees to engage a local curator to create a list of regionally based nominees who are “under-recognized” working along the selected theme. One of the nominees will then be selected by the museum’s curators to participate in its exhibition.  A Book Arts Revolution at NMWA is curated by NMWA liaison curator Elizabeth Ajunwa and guest curator Tia Blassingame.

The New York Committee has worked with New York curator Jennifer Farrell, Jordan Schnitzer Curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art to select 3 brilliant Tri-State area nominees for Women to Watch: A Book Arts Revolution - Golnar Adili, Suzanne McClelland and Tammy Nguyen.

Curator: Jennifer Farrell is the Metropolitan Museum’s Jordan Schnitzer curator in the department of Prints and Drawings.  She is responsible for the study and presentation of modern and contemporary prints, illustrated books, and artists' books. She joined the Met in 2014 after holding curatorial positions at the Yale University Art Gallery, the University of Virginia, and the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, and teaching at Yale University, the School of Visual Arts, and the American University of Paris, among other schools. 

Golar Adili

Golnar Adili has described her practice as “working with diasporic identity through personal archives, language and book arts.”  Her artist’s books center language and writing, as well as memory, history, and loss. She challenges expectations, forms, and structures of artist’s books by using unconventional materials and extending to the realms of sculpture, architecture, and installation. Several of Adili’s books are interactive and involve non-traditional components intended to provoke discovery and play. 

Suzanne mcclelland

Suzanne McClelland - Using various formats and displays, Suzanne McClelland radically rethinks the possibilities for, and experiences generated by, the artist’s book. She has collaborated with celebrated authors on unique books as well as created books with art-based publishers such as Space Sisters Press. McClelland uses every element (covers, bindings, orientations, scale, papers, page constructions etc.) in in her bound books, while mixing visual and textural elements to challenge expectations, concepts, and ways of navigating a book and, by association, language. She focuses on the use, sound, and appearance of language. Words function both as text and abstractions, in dialogue with images or alone.  The flexibility and fluidity of letters and text, as well as the manner in which words and phrases both appear and disappear reflects the ambiguity of language as well as the surges, dips, overlaps, and incomplete phrases that occur when it is spoken.   

tammy nguyen

Tammy Nguyen utilizes a variety of formats, materials, techniques, and processes to explore the structures and possibilities for artist’s books.  Her artist’s books range from unique works to those published in larger editions by her imprint Passenger Pidgeon Press, and zines. Regardless of the edition size, materials, or budget, her artist’s books show a consistent attention to formal concerns (such as bindings, construction, materials, composition) as well as such topics as geopolitical histories and the production of spaces to reflect social and political structures.  Nguyen layers both ideas and information drawn from a variety of sources, as well as handmade paper of various sizes, screenprints, handmade marbled paper, and handset type.  Artist’s books are central to her oeuvre and inform her work in other mediums. She shows landscapes as sites that are neither natural nor neutral, but reflective of interactions between humanity and nature, as well as philosophical concepts and geopolitical struggles. Her landscapes are contradictory spaces—both real and imagined, derived from fiction and shaped by historic events, and constructed and natural.