MCADians Featured as McKnight Book Artist Fellows

Faculty member Paula McCartney, Lisa Nebenzahl ’79, and Sonja Peterson ’90 make up the majority of the 2020 and 2021 McKnight Book Fellows, which is currently exhibiting at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA). A partnership between MCBA and the McKnight Foundation, the Book Artist Fellows offers two transformative fellowships to mid-career book artists living and working in Minnesota.

2020 recipient McCartney works with books, photographs, and ceramics to illustrate her collaborations with the natural world, and considers ways that light activates both objects and environments. She has stated that "the style I am most drawn to is called “stones” and dialogs in process and look with both the photographs of the rocks and the ceramic sculptures".

Nebenzahl, another 2020 recipient, creates work that treads on the themes of resilience and fragility, loss and persistence, and the passage of time, using shadows and lights to explore these ideas, working with the natural world of plants, water, and the sky. "My current work explores challenging definitions of landscape and still-life." says Nebenzahl. "As an interdisciplinary artist, working with several media allows me to use a wide range of processes to explore printmaking, case/box-making, folding, and montage".

2021 recipient Peterson works in handmade books, collage, stencils, sculpture, and large hand-cut paper stories. Her statement reads that "the slow process of cutting stories into visual networks is an action that fulfills a need to reexamine and unravel histories of the endless matrix of power structures and systems in today’s world and retell stories of their making".

The 2020 & 2021 McKnight Book Artist Fellows
On view until April 1st
MCBA Main Gallery (Minneapolis)

Learn more

• The 2020 & 2021 McKnight Book Artist Fellows (mnbookarts.org)