About the Event

Join us for a conversation about the exhibition A Radical Alteration: Women’s Studio Workshop as a Sustainable Model for Artmaking. NMWA Library Director Elizabeth Ajunwa will moderate a discussion with exhibition curator Maymanah Farhat and Natalie Renganeschi, acting director of Women’s Studio Workshop (WSW).

The panel will explore the exhibition’s themes, including the organization’s sustainability practices, a decades-long commitment to artists’ books, and WSW’s influential artist residency program. Hear about the curatorial vision, the collaborative process behind the show, and how WSW’s history continues to shape innovative models for book arts and the broader landscape of feminist artmaking today.

About the Curator

Maymanah Farhat is an award-winning curator, writer, and university lecturer specializing in underrepresented artists and forgotten art scenes. She has curated exhibitions for museums, nonprofits, and university galleries throughout the U.S. and abroad, including the Tacoma Art Museum (Washington), Bainbridge Island Museum (Washington), Minnesota Museum of American Art, San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco Center for Book Arts, The Gallery at VCUarts Qatar, and the Beirut Exhibition Center (Lebanon). Her publications include a chapter in The Routledge Companion to Art and Activism in the Twenty-First Century (2023). Farhat is currently a lecturer at California State University, Fresno.

About Women’s Studio Workshop

Women’s Studio Workshop (WSW) is a visual arts organization based in Kingston, New York. Since 1974, WSW has brought more than 5,000 artists from around the globe to work in printmaking, hand papermaking, letterpress printing, photography, book arts, and ceramics. More than 6,500 Ulster County youth have participated in the workshop’s Art-in-Education program. WSW’s Artist’s Book Grant program has published more than 245 artists’ books, collected by major libraries and museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, and the Library of Congress, among others.