Táňa Kellner

Essay by Ann Marie Kennedy

Táňa Kellner has built a formidable career as a visual artist, and along the way pioneered work in the field of hand papermaking that expanded possibilities for its use as an expressive medium. Her contributions to the emerging field of papermaking, through her own work as a studio artist and her visionary leadership at Women’s Studio Workshop, have supported the contemporary use of hand papermaking processes in artmaking well beyond its traditional role as a substrate for drawing or prints. In her artistic practice, spanning over four decades, Táňa has explored how the expressive nature of paper finds its essential role within a range of art forms including; print, video, collage, editioned artists’ books, sculpture, painting, and photography. 

What began as an impulse to build community with like-minded artists in the early 70s led Táňa to embrace many roles in the art community. In 1973, while a graduate student at Rochester Institute of Technology, Táňa met her partner Ann Kalmbach. As newly minted MFAs, they faced limited opportunities, particularly as women. Their response was to create a community, with Anita Wetzel and Barbara Leoff Burge, in which women’s artistic practices could thrive. Anita sought a grant for an art center and, with a borrowed etching and litho press, Women’s Studio Workshop was founded in 1974 in a rented house in Rosendale, New York. Táňa, Ann, Anita, and Barbara were the official co-founders of this artist-centered organization for women, which continues to provide opportunities for women artists to this day. 

In a recent conversation, Táňa reflected on her early days in the field of hand papermaking. As a grad student at RIT in painting, Táňa gravitated towards printmaking. The focus on technique and materiality resonated with her earlier European training in the arts (Táňa is originally from Czechoslovakia) and her conceptual interests at that time. A printmaking exhibition at the Brooklyn Art Museum in 1976 was her first exposure to handmade paper. As Táňa describes, “it had a different look.” It was a look that she tried to achieve when casting pulp into deeply etched plates to create the television format of the Bicentennial Minutes portfolio (1976). The paper castings didn’t work out as she hoped, but her attempt led to a deeper dive into papermaking. In 1979, a papermaking studio was added to the attic of WSW’s first building, which already contained equipment for silkscreen and etching. In this space, Táňa spent many hours mopping the linoleum floor as she began acquiring the skills and mastery of this new medium. 

Táňa began working with pulp as a painting medium, using collage to provide color at first, as pigments to color pulps weren’t readily available. Her early pulp paintings were vibrant and expressive abstractions. She continued to explore paper pulp’s unique qualities as a medium through working with shaped paper, stencils, and layered marks. An early appeal of the process for Táňa was “the lack of control” and the ability to layer and work outside of a defined frame. She learned the process of casting with rubber moulds from Lynn Forgach, who was working on sculptural paper castings with artist Lynda Benglis and was instrumental in helping to establish WSW’s paper studio. Táňa’s pulp painting became more monumental and sculptural, as evidenced in the installation, Family in 1985 (See Family and related work). Colorful, oversized totemic figures represented her relatively small family. She began adding cast areas to the 2-D works and has continued to explore paper casting in her work. 

Táňa’s drive to understand and effectively use this emerging art medium contributed to the development of the papermaking facilities at WSW. In the early years of the paper studio, it was challenging to source materials, tools, and equipment for papermaking. The studio began with blenders, hand-built screens, and vats. Pulp production was significantly improved with the acquisition of a Davis Hodges beater. In 1983, Women’s Studio Workshop moved to their current location on Binnewater Lane in Rosendale, into the historic building of the former Rosendale Cement Company Store and Post Office. The paper studio was a custom-built addition in the rear of the first floor, which took more than a year to construct. Bakery carts were adapted for drying paper and a welded steel paper press was added. Woody Woodruff built a vacuum table (in my opinion, the best papermaking vacuum table in existence) and Hollander beater to support operations. An adjoining porch allowed for storing and cooking fibers and expanded into garden areas nearby for growing and harvesting fibers. 

As WSW solidified its commitment to supporting the careers of women artists through classes, internships, and residencies, the papermaking studio became a hub for production papermaking and a locus for artist’s projects. The addition of on-site housing allowed artists to remain focused on a project for several weeks or even months. The Summer Arts Institute (SAI) is a seasonal workshop program which has consistently brought in leading papermaking artists to conduct workshops. In this context, the paper studio acts as a laboratory; a supportive and well-equipped area for students to consider the opportunities of paper as a medium, with paper artists sharing their expertise. Until 1996, paper production was an important activity in the studio, as Táňa and other staff produced colorful and functional sheets of handmade paper for sale. Táňa often mentored WSW’s interns, guiding them through the craft of sheet formation to produce consistent and well-formed sheets. For many young artist-interns this was their first introduction to the medium and they consider WSW, under Táňa’s guidance, a turning point in their careers. 

Women’s Studio Workshop demonstrated its commitment to supporting the careers of women artists through classes, internships, residencies (both in-house and international), and teaching opportunities. Ann Kalmbach, as Executive Director, and Táňa, in her role as Artistic Director, formed the primary leadership of the emerging organization. As a cooperative and non-profit, however, countless staff, board members, and volunteers supported WSW’s mission over the decades. Ann and Táňa took on projects that helped the art center thrive and were of interest to them creatively, such as artist’s book publishing. First explored in 1979, WSW remains the largest publisher of artist-produced, editioned artists’ books. This publishing venture was a means of combining media and creating multiples while also expanding the mission of WSW from fostering the making of artwork by women to placing these works in significant collections. Working in a supportive and creative community to create an editioned project is a unique opportunity for women artists. Within the scope of an artist’s book project, handmade paper was one offering that an artist could choose to sample or incorporate as a primary medium. The availability and physical proximity of different media and techniques has allowed artists to integrate whichever best support the content of their project. 

As both creative and life partners, Ann and Táňa have a successful history of collaboration. KaKe Art is the publishing imprint of their efforts in creating editioned artists’ books (and other works) together. Táňa’s interest in printmaking, photographic processes, and hands-on labor found its mission in creating artwork in book formats. Táňa has produced 26 limited edition artists’ books, 22 of them as KaKe Art. Among the many titles are:  My 9 Migraine Cures, Your Co-Worker Could be a Space Alien, Pistol, pistil: botanical ballistics, and Your Leader Could be a Tyrant, How to Tell. As a collaborator, Ann tends to contribute the concept and, in early works, often became the model or subject of the book. Táňa has a more production-oriented role, making the material choices and focusing on the logistics and labor, to bring the ideas to fruition. 

In her own practice, Táňa works with whichever medium is “specific to an idea”; papermaking, photography, printmaking, sculpture/public art, collage, painting, installation, or video. “The craft is not the message, it’s the medium to get the message out”. Táňa made use of the qualities of cast paper to share the experience of Eva and Eugene, her parents, who were both Holocaust survivors. In the two volumes of Fifty Years of Silence (1992), she individually cast their arms, hand-marking the numbers embedded on them to reveal stories that had not been told for many decades. This process took over two years in production. Along with family photographs and screen-printed text, each of the 50 copies contain a paper-cast arm, connecting the viewer intimately with a painful subject. 

Táňa continues to work with handmade paper in integral and expressive ways, combining paper pulp with other media or allowing its qualities to enhance the message of her work. In Eye Witness, from 2001, she printed, using photo emulsion, one hundred eyes onto rounded cast forms. The forms were cast over stockings filled with sand, and the challenge of repeatedly casting and printing on a curved surface demonstrated Táňa’s technical creativity and abilities in working with paper pulp. These eyes, lined up on a wall, gaze back at the viewer and bear witness to an unknown political landscape, while appearing to be part of a landscape themselves. Another work in cast paper, Bread from 2010, pairs oversized cast handmade paper bread loaves with a video installation. 

It is challenging to convey what WSW in action feels like. Although the studio has now expanded to multiple buildings, forming more of a campus on Binnewater Lane, all of the media are housed in a single building. Walking through Printmaking in the front of the building into Papermaking in the rear and then upstairs, a visitor or student might encounter an artist printing pages for a book, a papermaking demo, or a group of local school children experiencing a new artform for the first time. Activities are overlaid, conversations are continued on the back porch over a meal (often potluck style), and an artist’s talk in the evening brings the community together. Over many decades, this cross-pollination has allowed for a fertile environment for exploring ideas and supporting voices in women’s and women-identified communities. 

As the Artistic Director of WSW for 43 years, Táňa Kellner has mentored hundreds of women, in all stages of their careers. She has been instrumental in guiding artists through the production process of editioning an artist’s book and taking creative risks in their own practice. Seamlessly integrating papermaking into the breadth of media supported by WSW, Táňa has promoted activities that exposed countless artists and viewers to the possibilities of papermaking as a material choice for expression. Táňa has had an impact on several generations of women artists, many of whom have gone on to form their own communities. They have benefited from the work ethic, the creative support, and the unique inspiration of a women’s artist community to continue to innovate in the field of hand papermaking.

Acknowledgments:

The author would like to thank Mary Hark for her many valuable suggestions during the editing of this essay and Táňa Kellner for her considerable help with important details.  - AMK