Claire Van Vliet
Lives and works in Newark, Vermont
Aunt Sallie’s Lament, 1988
Janus Press, West Burke, Vermont
Edition of 150
Incorporating Kaufmann’s poem about a quilter’s remembrances, this book is the first of three versions of Aunt Sallie’s Lament by Van Vliet. In every version, a diamond quilt square pattern emerges, along with the quilter’s muttered refrains, as each page is turned.
The concertina binding, based on an interlocking structure by Hedi Kyle, has a removable paper spine that allows the book to be extended and reveal all sixteen stanzas at once. Van Vliet created an altered limited-edition work of the same title in 2004. An offset trade edition was published in 1988 by Chronicle Books.
Relief prints by Claire Van Vliet, pulp paintings by Claire Van Vliet and Katie MacGregor
Letterpress with relief prints, pulp paintings, cut paper pop-ups, paper stitching, and compact disc
Janus Press, Newark, Vermont
Edition of 120This book is accompanied by a recording of Hildegard von Bingen’s medieval music by Anima.
Woven and Interlocking Book Structures: from the Janus, Steiner
and Gefn Presses, 2002
Letterpress and digital printing
Janus Gefn Unlimited, Newark, Vermont
Edition of 200
Claire Van Vliet collaborated with Elizabeth Steiner to create this manual, which provides detailed instructions for making sixteen types of book structures, examples of which accompany publication, enclosed in four slipcases. The models for the structures were executed by Audrey Holden. The Kohler Art Library has many of Van Vliet’s books, such as Aunt Sallie’s Lament, Bone Songs, Moeraki Boulders, and Beauty in Use, among others, which utilize these non-adhesive structures to bind the book together.
Printmaker and typographer Claire Van Vliet has been making artists’ books under her Janus Press imprint since 1955. The Canadian native received her education in California, first receiving an AB from San Diego State University in 1952 and then an MFA from Claremont Graduate School in 1954. She then taught printmaking and typography at the Philadelphia College of Art, now the University of the Arts. Then, at Warrington Colescott’s invitation, she became his sabbatical replacement at the University of Wisconsin—Madison from 1965-1966. She set up the type shop, buying equipment including a Vandercook press, a mimeograph machine, and three typefaces. Her students included Bill Weege, who would go on to teach at the UW himself, and Lois Johnson, with whom Van Vliet would later collaborate. Rather than rely on teaching for her income, Van Vliet decided to focus on creating prints and artists’ books. She says her prints supported her “book habit” early in her career, but that reversed around 1975. That is likely thanks to her innovative book structures and handmade paper techniques like “pulp painting,” in which she layers pigmented paper pulp to design an image. In 1989, she received a “Genius Grant” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. “I moved here because I like the clouds,” she says of the landscape that inspires her subject matter. “It is one of the cloudiest, with the most variety of clouds in the United States right here on this plateau in northern Vermont.”
