California College of the Arts (CCA) Campus Gallery presents Closer Reading: Three Bay Area Book Artists, a group exhibition curated by Anthea Black, associate professor of Printmedia, on behalf of the San Francisco Advocacy for the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Bay Area artists Macy Chadwick, Kate Laster, and Vivian Sming bring their own unique practices to their artmaking, and expand the book as a form for artistic experimentation, collaboration, and exchange.
Macy Chadwick
Macy Chadwick is a book artist, letterpress printer, and founder and director of In Cahoots Residency, which provides housing and studio space to emerging and professional artists working in the art book field. Her book art focuses on elegant typography and minimalist washes of letterpress-printed color and texture. Waiting for Rain, 2024, exemplifies her approach. Climate anxiety and seasonal changes in the Bay Area ecology are reflected in the delicate, translucent pages. The tactile aspect of the printed page mirrors the fragile beauty of our world and our need to care for it with our own hands.
Kate Laster
Kate Laster, an interdisciplinary artist and cultural worker, examines the intersection of disability, economic justice, and collective care. Laster uses a papercut practice to connect graffiti stencil traditions with painting and printmaking, producing unique bookforms and agitprop multiples. Emergency Exit, 2021, (featured above) depicts the artist’s visual language of nonlinear poetry and graffiti-influenced techniques. In Thought Daughter, 2025, made from plastic and spray paint, text explodes and spills across the page, complicating conventional notions of “readability.” Yet the power and immediacy of this approach allows the artist to carry the book like a sign, or spray the message onto public spaces as poetic snippets and rallying cries. In the process, Laster is affirming the history of zines, posters, and printmaking as part of graphic consciousness, DIY ethics, and accessibility rooted in activism.
Vivian Sming
Vivian Sming is an artist-publisher experimenting with books as art, discourse, exhibition, and archive. Publishing through her studio, Sming Sming Books, Sming works in concert with other like-minded artists who share similar approaches to design, material and printing. In works like Rebecca Devika Dharmapalan’s My Pen Is Sharp like the Gun in my Hand, 2025, cover art reminiscent of graphic design fonts used in advertising tell a story writ large on the page and in high contrast. The pixelated image represents the women who participated in the armed resistance movement, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE or Tamil Tigers), during the armed conflict in Sri Lanka from 1983–2009. The book centers the voices and lives of the women of the LTTE as they respond to genocide, and considers their creative output in relation to their armed resistance.
A book arts revolution
The rich cultural history of San Francisco and the printed word continues through the voices of contemporary artists. “My decade in San Francisco has taught me that the city’s book arts ecology is truly unique. Books are everywhere here, and they multiply rapidly in the hands of established printers, indie publishers, artist punks, and an avid collector base, anchored by a network of organizations that offer gathering spaces and valuable creative support,” said Black. “Each artist in Closer Reading represents a different definition of ‘the book as art’, and a distinct approach to working with artists’ books as their primary medium.”
Closer Reading: Three Bay Area Book Artists is presented as Northern California’s contribution to the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ (NMWA) Women to Watch 2027: A Book Arts Revolution, the latest edition of the museum’s hallmark exhibition series featuring national and international artists whose work is underrepresented on the global stage. Together, these creatives move the printed word forward, keeping traditions alive in a spirit of collaboration.
Closer Reading: Three Bay Area Book Artists will be on view at the CCA Campus Gallery from Sept. 2 through Oct. 23, 2026.
