The Great Indoors opens January 4th at Peep Space
Kicking off 2025 with an exhibition at Peep Space in Tarrytown
DECEMBER 2024
Another year’s in the books, and I am getting ready to start 2025 off and running! I’m very pleased to have work included in The Great Indoors, a group exhibition at Peep Space in Tarrytown NY. I’m excited to show work with a fabulous group of artists, as well as to be able to share some of the work I made during my residency at Women’s Studio Workshop earlier this year. This is the first time I’ll be showing this work as an installation outside of my own studio. We just did install last week and the show looks awesome. You can check it out starting on Saturday Jan 4th, but if you can, come celebrate with us at the reception on January 18th.
2024 was a year of figuring out a new work-life-studio balance. I returned to freelancing and collaborated on some truly awesome book projects with Letra Muerta, Warren Lehrer and others. I created a seed packet design and Risograph edition for Hudson Valley Seed Company. I had an amazing residency at Women’s Studio Workshop and made exciting new work. I was invited to be the judge for the SCAD student artists book competition and got to visit my alma mater for the first time in years. I opened Bookshop/Bookshop, a *bookshop* based out of my studio, focusing on artists books, zines and prints. I participated in book fairs and artist markets, including the Pittsburgh Art Book Fair. I continued teaching at Parsons, Center for Book Arts and Strudel Media Live. I also connected more with my local community of artists through Peekskill arts alliance and a local crit group and I’m looking forward to continuing that in 2025. 2024 brought a lot of change for me, it was often difficult and frustrating but little by little I find myself moving closer to the kind of life I want to be living.
I am also preparing for 2025 to be a challenging year. Entering another year in which there is still a US backed genocide in Palestine, Sudan, and Congo, and as we also prepare for a second Trump term makes me fearful and despairing. However, reflecting on friends and connections I’ve made with artists near and far, as well as the ways that being in community, making art, and finding time to experience joy, rest and pleasure amidst the difficult and brutal times we have been experiencing, has been sustaining to me. This is helping me avoid becoming complacent and looking away, and instead renew my own commitments to myself and others related to making change in the world in the small and big ways we can every single day.
“Tomorrow belongs to those of us who conceive of it as belonging to everyone; who lend the best of ourselves to it, and with joy.”
~ Audre Lorde
Continue reading below for more info about Peep Space and upcoming winter workshops. I’ll have some more announcements about other shows and events coming up in the next few months.
Happy New Year!
<3 Liz
~ Whats Happening ~
The Great Indoors
Jan 4 - Feb 8 | PeepSpace 92 Central Ave, Tarrytown NY
Opening Reception: Saturday January 18th 2-5pm
PeepSpace presents The Great Indoors, a group exhibition featuring work by Yeon Ji Yoo, Matthew William Robinson, Natalie Colette Wood, Rachel Sydlowski, Elizabeth Castaldo, Erin Treacy, and Krista Dragomer; co-curated by Yeon Ji Yoo and Rachel Sydlowski. The Great Indoors invites us to bear witness to hidden landscapes of memory, myth, and imagination shaping our understanding of self and others through the interiors, landscape, and objects. This collection of furniture forms, prints, paintings, and collages, presents a transformative force for change, inviting engagement with the complexities of modernity in all its beauty, complexity, and failures. Read More Here.
Collaboration with Hudson Valley Seed Company
I am honored to have made the artwork for the Mazurkia Zinnia seed pack for Hudson Valley Seed Company. The other plants and artists included in the 2025 line up of Artist Packs are all so gorgeous. Check all of them out at Hudson Valley Seed Co.
Purchase Marurkia Zinnia seed packet
Purchase Mazurkia Zinnia Risograph Print
~ Classes ~
Handmade Accordion Bindings for Photobooks
Strudel Media Live
Jan 25 - Feb 15 | Saturdays 11-1
ONLINE CLASS Advance or begin your exploration of handmade photobooks with this 4-session class where you’ll learn all about accordion structures. We’ll begin with folding concepts and hinging together multiple pages to make a longer accordion book, then move on to creating a book that can be adapted so the pages can frame your photos. We’ll make an elegant leporello accordion with a hard cover, and finish up with a fun flag book. Methods of getting photographs and other content onto pages will be discussed, along with suggestions for different types of paper, including inkjet papers. We’ll also look at examples of photobooks that use the accordion format. Students can choose to create their own project that will be presented during the last class session.
CMYK Photopolymer
Center for Book Arts
Feb 5- March 5 | Wednesdays 6-9
In this workshop students with some letterpress experience will learn the steps for making full color, photographic prints on a letterpress using the CMYK photopolymer plate technique. In the first session of the class on Zoom, Castaldo will teach students about color separation, how to work on prepping images in photoshop, and the proper settings for both ordering plates and for in-studio output. Then in the remaining classes in CBA’s studios, students will learn how to properly mix ink for CMYK printing as well as learn the proper registration techniques for printing photographic images on letterpress. Class size is limited to ensure an optimal student-to-teacher ratio. Register now before the remaining spots fill up!
Handmade Photo‑Zine Workshop
Strudel Media Live
March 16 | Sunday 12-3
ONLINE CLASS Zines are small books that are made quickly and cheaply (usually), and are often given away or sold for an affordable price. This 3-hour Mini-workshop is perfect for artists interested in exploring how making zines by hand can fit into their photography practice. We’ll go over how to make two different zine structures, as well as methods for creating layouts for them using either InDesign or Photoshop or analog options. Students can come ready with a sequence of 8 to 10 images or other content they would like to try out, and have a mockup in progress by the end of the class!
Photopolymer Crash Course
Center for Book Arts
March 29-30 | Weekend 11-5
The letterpress has so many more capabilities than its classic wood and metal type uses. Photopolymer plates are a new school material that brings versatility, convenience, and a wealth of design options to the old school world of letterpress. In this workshop, students will learn how to prepare plates from hand-drawn illustrations and/or digital images. Then students will learn how to make plates using CBA’s exposure unit. Finally, the class will set up the press and print!
This workshop is designed for individuals with some letterpress experience.
Full Coverage: Repeat Printing for Wall Installations
Center for Book Arts
March 13 - April 10 | Thursdays 6-9
In this five-session in-person class, participants will learn to create large wall installations out of small modular prints.
Students will learn how to turn their drawings and other artwork into a repeatable module that can be transferred to a linoleum block for carving or turned into a polymer plate. Students will then learn how to print these patterns on the Vandercook presses, allowing you to make many multiples of the prints, which can then be trimmed and tiled to create large repeat patterns. The multiples are suitable to use for creating large scale wall installations, wallpaper, or even for covering three dimensional objects.
Students will have several options of substrate, such as linoleum, photopolymer and fun foam to work with and the imagery can be combined with wood type from CBA’s type collection as well. The class will contextualize this concept by looking at examples by artists working with repeat pattern and tessellation such as Lanette Scheeline, MC Escher and Julia Rothman.
Virtual Bookbinding II
Center for Book Arts
March 12- April 9 | Wednesdays 6-9
ONLINE CLASS In this beginning hardcover bookbinding class, you will learn to make several different hardcover bindings. Students will gain a foundational understanding of hardcover bookbinding including how the structure beneath the cover can affect the final result. Students will develop the skills needed to create a variety of hardcover books that will prepare them for building more complex hardcover designs such as the inboard cloth-bound book. In the process, students will learn about the historical and contemporary uses of the structures learned in the book arts and artists books.
Vandercooking: Image Making for Letterpress
Center for Book Arts
April 12- 13 | Weekend 11-5
The Vandercook presses are useful tools for a variety of projects and can be fun to use for many image based processes that can stand alone or be used in combination with hand set type. This workshop will cover a variety of hand made image making techniques such as pressure printing, collagraphs, and linocut.
Through these techniques, you will explore color, transparency, shape, and layering of imagery to create a series of prints. This class will focus on a playful and spontaneous approach to letterpress, but the resulting prints can be used as the beginnings of an artist’s book, a printed edition, or a series of unique prints, and next steps for these types of projects will be touched on as well. Anyone with an experimental spirit will love this class. Letterpress experience will be helpful but is not required.
Fun Fact: Image making on the letterpress is so special because while it is a tactile craft that’s made slowly, it can be reproduced infinitely and shared widely, while still maintaining that human-made feeling.
