“The Nature of Witness” with Bill Kelly and Michele Burgess

BILL KELLY

Both an artist and a writer, Bill Kelly is the founder of Brighton Press, former director of the San Diego Print Club, and current director of Art Around Books, a gallery in Vermont devoted to books and images. His current exhibition is “Witness in the Grass,” a thirty-year retrospective of his prints at the University of San Diego, where he has taught printmaking and drawing for the past twenty-five years. His personal work is housed in numerous public and private collections in the United States, including the Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts in San Francisco, the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis, the Toledo Art Museum in Ohio. Kelly was awarded a Pollack Krasner Foundation Grant in 2002 and continues making art and books in Vermont and California.

MICHELE BURGESS

Michele Burgess works in book arts, printmaking, painting, and sculpture. She is the director of Brighton Press and collaborates with other artists and poets on projects that involve the book as an art medium. Her ongoing series, “The Stratigraphic Archives” is an exploration of the processes, forms, and markings that reflect the patterns, gestures, and atmospheres of both quiet and cataclysmic events—natural and human made. She is interested in the relationship of these events to the human condition and the conditions of nature at its most fragile. Burgess’s artist’s books are housed in over eighty libraries and museums in the U.S., Canada, and Europe.