Join MAD and The New York Public Library for a conversation in The Theater at MAD on the interplay between fabric and printmaking in contemporary art with artists Valerie Hammond, Bang Geul Han, and Jacquelyn Strycker. All three artists have pursued a rigorous multimedia inquiry of handcraft and materials that extends to forms of printmaking. The conversation will be led by Madeleine Viljoen, Curator of Prints and the Spencer Collection at the New York Public Library. Viljoen is curator of NYPL’s current exhibition Line & Thread: Prints and Textiles from the 1600s to the Present, which includes works by Hammond and Strycker. The artists and curator will explore how the merging of print and textiles encourages experimentation in each artist’s creative practice.

About the panelists

Valerie Hammond maintains a fluid artistic practice, distinguishable for her organic approach and deft interaction with different mediums. In all of her work, there is play between the material and the immaterial, the physical and the spiritual: the dichotomy between what is seen and the sensation it provokes. The works inhabit a space she is constantly searching for, straddling the indefinable boundary between presence and absence, material and immaterial, consciousness and the unconscious. Her artwork becomes emblematic not only of the people whose hands she has traced or the subjects she is drawing but of her own evolving artist process-testimony to the passing of time and the quiet dissolution of memory.  Her work can be found in both private and public collections such as the Walker Art Center, the Library of Congress, The Fine Arts Museum, Houston, The Progressive Art Collection, the Fidelity Collection, The New York Public Library’s print and drawing collection, The Chazen Museum, The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, The Grand Palais Museum, Paris and the Getty Museum. The recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, Hammond has exhibited in solo and group shows nationally and internationally.

Bang Geul Han was a 2023 MAD Artist Studios resident. Working in video, performance, code, and weaving, Han’s art practice uses text as a site of disclosure and declaration that blurs and complicates the distinction between public and private. Whether in the form of virtual reality or experimental textiles, her works function as alternative archives that highlight both the systemic limitations and the subversive potential of language and technology.

Han’s work has been shown in venues including The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Queens Museum, NURTUREart, A.I.R. Gallery, The 8th Floor at The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, Smack Mellon in New York City, Pérez Art Museum in Miami, and Centro Internazionale per l’Arte Contemporanea in Rome. She is a recipient of the Creative Capital Award, Artist in the Marketplace program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, A.I.R. Fellowship, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace program, MacDowell Fellowship, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Han received her MFA in Electronic Integrated Arts from NYSCC at Alfred University in Alfred, NY, and her BFA in Painting from Seoul National University in Korea.

A 2023 MAD Artist Studios resident, Jacquelyn Strycker is a Brooklyn-based artist working in painting, printmaking, collage, and fibers-based media. She is concerned with the relationship between decoration and function and invested in material exploration and handicraft.

Strycker has a BA in Visual Arts from Columbia University and an MFA from Tyler School of Art. Her work is in the collection of The New York Public Library, and has recently been exhibited at Print Center New York; Weatherspoon Museum, Greensboro, NC; Kunstraum Gallery, Brooklyn; Annmarie Sculpture Garden & Arts Center, Solomons, MD; Tyger Tyger Gallery, Asheville, NC; Peep Space, Tarrytown, NY; Collar Works, Troy, NY; and Piano Craft Gallery, Boston; She has participated in residencies at Institute for Electronic Arts, Alfred, The Women’s Studio Workshop, and the Vermont Studio Center. In 2023. she was a member of the inaugural cohort of the Print Center New York’s New Voices program.

Madeleine C. Viljoen, Curator of Prints and the Spencer Collection, is responsible for The New York Public Library’s collection of prints and illustrated books. She holds a PhD in art history from Princeton University, and her articles have appeared among others in Print Quarterly, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, Oxford Art Journal, and The Art Bulletin, as well as in catalogues and essay collections.  At the Library, she has organised numerous exhibitions, including several centered on the subject of women in the graphic arts.