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Artists’ Biographies

Jinane Abbadi

Abbadi is a Moroccan-born visual artist residing in San Diego. Her interests include colonial and postcolonial studies, Orientalism, and the issues of colonial power dominance and their influence on identity and creativity. Abbadi received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts and interdisciplinary studies from San Diego State University. She serves on the board of Karama, San Diego, an independent nonpartisan organization that seeks to promote greater understanding of the issues facing the Arab and Islamic worlds. She has been working in the areas of painting, printmaking, and bookmaking and has been associated with Brighton Press since 2004. www.jinaneabbadi.com

Merilyn Britt

After working for many years in commercial book publishing, Britt began creating limited-edition books by hand and dyeing paper with plant-derived pigments. Her paintings, books, and woven paper compositions have been exhibited in the San Diego Museum of Art, and the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library. They are included in the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego.

 

Brian Cohen

Cohen is an educator, artist, and writer. He graduated from Haverford College and completed his master’s degree in painting at the University of Washington. In 1989 he founded Bridge Press to further the association and integration of visual image, original text, and book structure. As a printmaker, Cohen has shown in forty individual exhibitions, including a retrospective in 1997 at the Fresno Art Museum, and he has participated in over 150 group shows. Cohen’s books and etchings are held by major private and public collections throughout the country. www.bridge-press.com

Robert Cremean

Cremean was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1932, and was educated at Alfred University and the Cranbrook Academy of Art. In 1954 he received a Fulbright scholarship to study in Italy. His work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally, and he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale 34. With the exception of the pieces in process in his studio, all of his work is held either in private or public collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Orange County Museum, and Stanford University Library, Special Collections. Comprehensive bodies of work are held at the Fresno Art Museum and the Crocker Art Museum in California. A catalogue raisonné THE ART OF ROBERT CREMEAN—An Encyclopedic View was published by Manuscript Press in 2017. Cremean lives and works in Burgundy, France.

Liz Hawkes deNiord

DeNiord, primarily a painter of large abstract canvases, works occasionally in printmaking, finding it an excellent medium for unexpected outcomes. Her work can be found at www.lizhawkesdeniord.com and Magcloud book

Miya Hannan

Hannan is a visual artist who combines sculpture, installation, and two-dimensional media. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions both in the United States and abroad. Hannan worked as a radiation technologist in her native Japan until 1998, when she moved to the United States to pursue her art education and to learn English. She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and is currently an assistant professor of art at the University of Nevada, Reno. www.miyahannan.com

Eric Lindbloom

Lindbloom, born in 1934, was an independent photographer who had over thirty solo exhibitions over his career, including at Gallery 292 in New York City, the Driskel Gallery in Provincetown, and the Center for Photography in Woodstock. He had two monographs of his photographs published: Angels at the Arno (Godine), and Salt Grass (Lodima Press). Lindbloom’s photographs are in public collections, including the New York Public Library, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Alinari Museum in Florence, and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. His work is represented by the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York. He died in Poughkeepsie, New York in 2020.

Nelle Martin

Martin, a native of California, is the Master Printer and Production Designer at Brighton Press, where she began as an apprentice in 1987. She has a BFA in painting, printmaking, and sculpture from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a Certificate in Architectural Drafting from the Phoenix Institute of Technology. Her artist’s books are housed in numerous public and private collections in the United States. She has taught at San Diego State University and the Art Institute of San Diego. Her paintings and books have been exhibited both locally and nationally.

Harry Mattison

Mattison has professionally photographed in the Middle East, Europe, Central America, and Africa for over twenty years. He has had photographs in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, Le Figaro, Paris Match, Double Take and Stern, as well taken photos for various national agencies like the Human Rights Commission of Honduras. In 1982, he was awarded the Robert Capa Gold Medal for photography and was a 1999 recipient of a Washington D.C. Arts Council Grant. Harry has exhibited and published his photographs widely, including at the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum, the International Center for Photography, and had a twenty-year retrospective of his photography in 1994 at The William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Its Social Consequences. He has taught at the University of Minnesota, the Corcoran School of Art, the University of New Orleans, and the Ansel Adams Workshop and is Professor Emeritus at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.

DeLoss McGraw

McGraw was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, in 1945. He was educated at the Otis Art Institute, California State University, Long Beach, and the Cranbrook Academy of Art. His paintings, sculpture, and books have been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe. McGraw’s works are held in numerous public collections including the Getty Research Institute, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the Library of Congress. He lives and works in Oklahoma.
 

Manuel Neri

Neri is known primarily for his figurative sculpture in plaster, bronze, and marble, and for his participation in the San Francisco Bay Area Figurative movement during the 1950s and 1960s. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a NEA Individual Artist Grant. His work is held in numerous public and private collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, Smithsonian Institution, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Olda Procházka

Procházka was born twenty miles from Mahler’s birthplace in Bohemia, Czechoslovakia, in 1927. He was educated at Charles University in Prague where he later became a professor of philosophy and taught from 1954 to 1980. From 1966 to 1968 he was a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota and Columbia University. During the 1970s Procházka began to exhibit his sculpture and drawings in several museums and institutions in Czechoslovakia. In 1980 he immigrated to the United States, and eventually to San Diego where he began making etchings with Bill Kelly at Brighton Press. He died in San Diego in 2003.

James Renner

Renner is one of the founding members of Brighton Press, with which he has also published three artist’s books. These books are housed in over thirty public rare book collections, including the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress. He has had seven solo shows of his sculptures, drawings, and collages along with numerous group shows at venues including Taylor Bercier Fine Arts in New Orleans, Rico Maresca in New York City, and the Fresno and Oceanside Art Museums in California. He was born and still resides in San Diego. www.jamesrennerart.com

Faith Ringgold

Ringgold is a painter, mixed media sculptor, performance artist, activist, and writer born in Harlem, New York, best known for her narrative quilts. She has won numerous awards such as two National Endowment for the Arts awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the NAACP Image Award. She taught art at the University of California, San Diego from 1987-2002. She has written and illustrated seventeen children’s books. Her work is held by numerous museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of New York, the Guggenheim Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.  www.faithringgold.com

Derli Romero

Romero was born in Sinaloa, Mexico. He studied at the National School of Painting, Sculpture, and Printmaking “La Esmerelda,” in Mexico City. He has exhibited his paintings and graphic art in Mexico and the United States. He worked as a printer at Brighton Press in the 1990s and went on to found Nihil Obstadt Press in Morelia, Mexico. Romero’s work is held in several public collections in the United States and Mexico, including Stanford University, Dartmouth College, and Temple University. www.derliromero.com

David Schirm

Schirm was born in Pittsburgh in 1945. He received a full scholarship and graduated from Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1967. After returning from a tour in the U.S. Army in Vietnam, he attended Indiana University and received an MFA in 1972. He taught at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Cincinnati, UCLA, USC, Otis Art Institute, and The University at Buffalo. His work has appeared in over thirty solo exhibitions at national and international venues. His paintings were included in several major group exhibitions, including Directions at the Hirschhorn Museum, The Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, and Painting and Sculpture Today at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. He is the recipient of two Fulbright Fellowships to India and Sri Lanka and was awarded two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in Drawing and Painting. Schirm was named a Distinguished Alumnus of Indiana University and is listed in Who’s Who in America and in Who’s Who in American Arts.

Harry Sternberg

Sternberg achieved a national reputation as a painter, graphic artist, author, filmmaker, and teacher. Born in 1904 on the Lower East Side of New York, he remained there for the next sixty-three years, working as an artist and teacher. He influenced generations of young artists at the Art Students League where he taught for thirty-four years. His first one-man show was held at the Weyhe Gallery in 1932, and he exhibited at the first Whitney Museum Invitational Annual in 1937. He had numerous one-man shows at museums and galleries here and abroad. He is represented in the permanent collections of many museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Sternberg died in 2001.

Fernando de Szyszlo

Szyszlo was a painter and printmaker born in Lima, Peru. He studied at the School of Plastic Arts of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. After his graduation in 1948, he traveled to Europe where he studied the works of the masters, particularly Rembrandt, Titian, and Tintoretto, and absorbed the varied influences of Cubism, Surrealism, and abstraction. While in Paris he met Octavio Paz and André Breton and was part of a group of expatriate Latin American artists and writers. Upon his return to Peru, Szyszlo became a major force for artistic renewal in his country breaking new ground by expressing a Peruvian subject matter in a nonrepresentational style. He taught at Cornell and Yale Universities. He died in 2017, in Lima, Peru.

Julia Talcott

Talcott is a printmaker, illustrator, and owner of Studio 80 near Boston, Massachusetts. She is a graduate of Williams College and the Cranbrook Academy of Art where she received her MFA. She has taught at the Art Institute of Boston, the New England School of Art and Design, and Monserrat College of Art. Creator of the 1996 Christmas stamp for the US Postal Service, she has received four certificates of design excellence from Print Magazine. Her work is held in many private and public collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Detroit Institute for the Arts. www.juliatalcott.com

Ian Tyson

Tyson is a sculptor living and working in Provence, France. He has been making artist’s books for almost fifty years. He founded Tetrad Press (1970-95) followed by ed.it, in 1995. Recent exhibitions include “Sculptures and Wall Drawings,” Eric Linard Gallerie, Droma, France, “Dialogues,” Couvent de la Tourette, Eveux, France, and “Livres d’artiste / estampes,” L’Ami Voyage, Avignon, France. His work is in many public and private collections in Europe and the United States.

Jenny Yoshida Park

Yoshida Park studied art at UC Berkeley and is an MFA graduate of San Diego State University in graphic design and book arts. She publishes her own editions of artists' books under the imprint Evidence of the Hand Press. Her own work questions the authority of our traditional hierarchies of knowledge and draws from the gut feelings, trivial flotsam, idiosyncrasies, tragedies, and embarrassments that get edited out.

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