GPB's Kristi York Wooten speaks with curator Cynthia Nourse Thompson and the artists featured in the Georgia Women to Watch exhibition to learn about the process of creating fine art books.
The National Museum of Women in the Arts or NMWA is a first-of-its kind institution in Washington, D.C., and the only major fine art museum in the world dedicated to supporting women creators. The museum's Georgia committee is opening a new show Feb. 1 at the Atlanta Contemporary celebrating book arts.
"Georgia Women to Watch 2026: A Book Arts Revolution" features five of the state’s prominent artists and educators with a variety of two and three dimensional works that expand the book art form.
The show’s curator, Cynthia Nourse Thompson, who serves as director of curatorial affairs at the Zuckerman Museum of Art at Kennesaw State University, explains.
"The book itself or artists books is a medium in which artists work with both text and image and the relationship between those things," Thompson told GPB. "It's not only a specific craft, but where artists excel with their technical skills."
"When the public thinks of a book, they naturally think of a traditional format, right?" Thompson said. "We have a codex, a leather-bound cover or a cloth-bound cover. And again, there's text and images. But in this field, there are artists that are doing tremendous explorations and interrogating the format and creating sculptural books."
Using non-traditional structures to form a narrative is second nature to Savannah-based artist Eliza Bentz.
"The weavings I will have in the show come from a series that I'm calling 'Binary Weavings,'" Bentz said. "So these are also woven textiles, which, I like to think, were perhaps one of the earliest employments of the matrix and the binary. [Looms] and textiles influenced early computing systems.
For Columbus State University professor and artist Hannah Israel, who uses paper made from Japanese Gampi, book-making is an extension of her heritage into the place she now calls home.
"[Columbus] is where Alma Thomas was born, [and] Amy Sherald. So as [New York art critic] Jerry Salz said when he came down here, 'There must be something in the water of the Chattahoochee River,'" Israel laughed. "One of my works show is called Noli Me Tangere and it is based on a novel by José Rizal, one of the most important revolutionary leaders in the Philippines."
Serena Perrone is head of the printmaking department at Georgia State University and splits her time between Atlanta and the Italian island of Sicily.
"It's a town of less than 2,000 people, but I'm related to everybody there," Perrone said of her family home. "So there's a certain intimacy and a very sort of historic memory of the land of the people that I feel extremely connected to. And a lot of my work takes inspiration from the pre-cinema. And so we're talking about tunnel books, we're talking about peep shows, we're talking about large panoramic prints and things that feel kind of theatrical."
Cynthia Lollis teaches at University of West Georgia and lives in Decatur and works collaboratively with German artist Daniela Deeg.
"Any book is a journey in itself," she said of her many travels with Deeg as part of their bookmaking collaborations. "You start as one person and then you become a different person through the eyes, and you can even revisit a book and then get something else out of it just because who you are at that time. And I think another important aspect of it is that we are two women seeing the world and experiencing the world."
Eileen Wallace said working at the University of Georgia and among artists in Athens, Ga., has given her latitude to stretch the idea of letterpress creations.
"Athens is well known for its music community, but also is a very vibrant art scene," Wallace told GPB. "And so for me, a book is a series of layers. Pages are layers. It's strata. It's building. It's revealing. It's wearing away. And so these are all the things that I'm thinking of. And somehow that materializes in the work that I'm making, whether it's in a book or pieces that are more just about shape and form."
Cynthia Nourse Thompson said the "Women to Watch" exhibition is a rare chance to see a breadth of work from women working across the state of Georgia:
"That's the thing that excites me the most, the fact that I'm able to feature other works by the artists. And I think presenting that shows an interesting relationship between the mediums."
