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Words Become Matter, on View Now
Organized by the Arkansas Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts (ACNMWA), the exhibition Arkansas Women to Watch 2026: Words Become Matter is on view through April 18, 2026, in the Underground Gallery at the CALS Roberts Library (401 President Clinton Ave.). Roberts Library visiting information is at https://robertslibrary.org/visit/location-hours/.
Artists’ books take many forms: pressed, painted, folded. Words Become Matter celebrates three nationally recognized Arkansas artists who use text and shape to make objects that carry words: K. Nelson Harper (Fort Smith), Acadia Kandora (Fayetteville), and Rebecca Resinski (Conway).
Nelson Harper of Fort Smith specializes in combining traditional letterpress technology with new digital techniques, often adding humor. Under the name Ars Brevis Press, she has produced many artists’ books and broadsides. She is an Emeritus Professor of Graphics at the University of Arkansas–Fort Smith. Acadia Kandora is a printmaker who favors zines to explore the natural landscape and her relationship to it, as well as the intersection between the imaginary and the concrete. She teaches at the University of Arkansas, where she earned her MFA. Mail artist Rebecca Resinski is a classics professor at Hendrix College in Conway. She publishes her intricate and delicate chapbooks and pamphlets under her imprint Cuckoo Grey. She also is a co-founder of Heron Tree, an online poetry journal.
The exhibition was curated by Catherine Walworth, who is the Jackye and Curtis Finch, Jr., Curator of Drawings at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, at the invitation of the ACNMWA. One of the artists will be selected to represent Arkansas in a major exhibition of book art in 2027 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC.
Curator’s Statement from Catherine Walworth:
Artists’ books are unique works of art that engage the idea of a book—pages of text and often images, fastened between covers—but where artists go from there is up to them. They can play with all manner of materials and methods, from handwork to mechanical means of printing. They might even complicate the solitary act of reading, for example, by creating public performance. More conceptually, books are about sequencing and flow, revealing and concealing, and bound structure versus spirited unfolding and unfettering. Each of the artists on view here invites you to question the boundaries of “bookness.” And each does so by combining arts—including photography, sculpture, and design—and a love of literature.
The quest throughout the state of Arkansas for women-identifying book artists—an underrepresented field of art—has been a winding journey, but also a gift. It has led me to some of the most edifying encounters with smart, witty, powerful women. Not every studio visit led to a selected artist for Women to Watch, but all were memorable conversations with people who amazed me. I visited a woman who advocated for herself and her career during an era when it was unimaginable, a woman with a flair for strong language who has built an indomitably creative space for herself and other artists, and an educational leader gracefully tearing down perfectionism and overwork. I encountered deep wells of generosity, openness, bravery in the face of illness, and joy for what matters. In all of these conversations we were surrounded by paper on every surface—each home, office, studio, and classroom became a magical paper cave in which I listened to stories and turned gorgeous pages.
In the end, I selected three women at different points in their careers, living in three different cities, and each with a unique creative project. It was important to me that book arts be shown in their variability. The exhibition includes an artist who uses her background in photography, letterpress, and graphic design to humorously complicate traditional book structures; an artist with elegant visual restraint who creates concrete poetry and her own gifting economy through mail art; and an artist whose cheeky love of zines and nature come together as physical sanctuary for her inner world.
Walworth had this to say about each of the artists and their work:
Katie Harper makes the most traditional artist’s books of the three selections, and yet hers are perhaps the most unexpectedly diverse. Harper is foundational to Arkansas book arts, having created the program at the University of Arkansas–Fort Smith. To do so, she brought her background in graphic design and photography to bear, as well as her keen wit for wordsmithing. She is also a letterpress artist with a studio called Ars Brevis Press. I appreciate the fact that each of her artist’s books is completely different and uses a unique set of processes and skills. Harper tailors her material to the end goal. The selection that I’ve chosen includes books, broadsides, and different types of bindings and folding techniques, as well as an installation.
Acadia Kandora’s studio is covered in her prints, but it was her zines that I particularly came to see. She showed me her risograph machine and the zine archive she is assembling at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. As she makes all of her work, she throws paper scraps into what she calls her “doom boxes” and then, drawing on her sculpture background, uses these scraps to build her floral sculptures. I appreciate that the throughline among all these is an homage to nature and her emotional relationship to it. There were works of Kandora’s that dealt with some traumatic events in her life, but what I took away was that nature is a healing place for her, so I focused on those works as a unifying theme between her zines and sculptures. I liked that she had brought the performance element, as well, with her shopping cart and pop-up community zine garden project in Fayetteville.
Rebecca Resinski is a unique mail artist. Under her workshop Cuckoo Grey, a name derived from passages in Irish poetry and Shakespearean prose, she creates pamphlets based on concrete poetry and historic literature. The rigorous elegance of Resinski’s works and their intelligent wit is utterly appealing. Her visual forms include typed interpretations of stitched samplers, ancient architecture, abstract art, and the paths of bees. I also appreciate her gifting economy designed to operate outside of capitalism. She makes her works democratically from laser-printed paper, which relates to zine culture. For my studio visit, she laid out her pamphlets in a university classroom based on their themes of Line, Words, Type, and Form (and even drew a visual chart map on the chalkboard!), and I made sure to select a representative sample of each of these categories for the exhibition.
All photos by Kim Boyd Vickrey, Fine Art Portraiture.
Read more about the Arkansas Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts on the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas: https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/arkansas-committee-of-the-national-museum-of-women-in-the-arts-539/.
