Katherine Kuehn
American, b. 1956; MFA 1985
Lives and works in Portland, OR
The Fox and the Farmer: A Modern and More or Less (Moral-less) Fable, 1985
Text by Thomas P. Pinkert, illustrations by Ruth Lingen
Letterpress on handmade paper
Salient Seedling Press, Madison, Wisconsin
Edition of 145
Pinkert’s text was inspired by woodcuts found in a 1780 Spanish edition of Aesop’s Fables. The deluxe version of this work is housed in a case of red cloth-covered boards. The printer’s errata sheet offers corrections to the original colophon. Another version was more economically bound in paper in an edition of 150 copies. The Kohler Art Library also holds a copy of this variant, which is described by the publisher as the “proletarian version.”
Journal Liftings, 1987
Text by Walter Hamady, illustrations by Pati Scobey, printed by Katherine Kuehn with the assistance of Walter Tisdale and Barbara Tetenbaum
Letterpress and linocuts on handmade paper
Salient Seedling Press, Madison, Wisconsin
Edition of 210
The paper is Katherine Kuehn’s handmade Prairie Palm Box.
Initially, Katherine Kuehn studied art history at the University of Toronto, but then she took printmaking courses there and in Connecticut. Ultimately, she left for the University of Wisconsin—Madison, where she fell in love with the type shop as an undergraduate. She began working for Walter Hamady at his press in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, and earned her BS. As a graduate student, she helped curate the 1980 Elvehjem Museum of Art show Breaking the Bindings: American Book Art Now, and she repaired books at Memorial Library with conservator Jim Dast. She began collaborating with a number of artists during her time at the UW, and many of them credit Kuehn with teaching them as much about printmaking and bookmaking as their instructors. After graduating with her MFA in 1985, she ran the Silver Buckle Press for 18 months. In 1987, after 10 years in Madison, she moved to New York to work with Joe Wilfer and Ruth Lingen at Pace Prints. She established a book arts program at Whitman College in Wala Wala, Washington, and she taught for three years at the Oregon College of Art and Craft. After a second stint at Pace, she returned to Portland, Oregon, where she works as a printer, printmaker, book artist, and owner of Salient Seedling Press, known for exquisite typography on handmade paper and elegant bindings.
