2016

Organized by Professor Nicole Hand-Bryant (special assistant to the dean and co-director, Black Dog Press), Murray State University, Murray, KY, USA

The prints in this portfolio are inspired by the poetry collection Appalachian Elegy and its author—acclaimed social activist, feminist theorist, artist, and native Kentuckian bell hooks. The twenty-five printmakers who contributed to this project offer a variety of beautiful and compelling interpretations of hooks’s work; they are artists who believe, as hooks writes, that “(t)he function of art is to do more than tell it like it is—it’s to imagine what is possible.” The diverse group of participating women artists have garnered national reputations and reside in twenty different states. These artists were asked to create a print inspired by a single poem or the book as a whole, combining this inspiration with their own unique mark and voice as an artist and feminist.