Artist Member
Diary of an Immigrant’s Daughter, 2014
6.25 w x 9.25 h x 2″ d
Concertina, pages are my Mom’s recipes torn from magazines and newspapers Name on cover is the label my Mom had on the stash of recipes.
Linen fabric and paper over book board
2013, while helping Mom move into a smaller space, I found a milk crate full to the brim of newspaper and magazine clippings: recipes spanning 50+ years. The crateful of recipes proved daunting. I had also found a little bag labeled, in Mom’s handwriting, Recipes 2002–2004. Though over 2″ thick, it was much more manageable. “Diary of an Immigrant’s Daughter” is those recipes, intact as I found them, with the actual label ‘stuck’ onto the cover, as Mom had stuck it on the bag. Some recipes have handwritten alterations and side notes, many are scotch-taped together. A few recipes predate 2002, likely used during that time and hence mixed in. The linen cover to this book is intended to visually impart the sense of importance Mom held for her life, and it is meant to clash with the Bisquick, Jello, and cake-box recipes that are its pages. These recipes struck me as cultural propaganda seeming to say, “buy this cake mix, use this flavoring, shop at this grocery store and…voila! No longer the daughter of a poor Eastern European immigrant, you are a fully-integrated American housewife.”
Bibliophyllo, 2019
Phyllo dough ‘leaves’ simulate pages in this ‘book’ baked,
‘Bound’ with caramel (butter and brown sugar) and sprinkled with gold food-grade sparkle dust
approx. 12 x 8 x 2”
Rejoice with the Truth, 2006Concertina with photographs and image transfers
White linen book cloth, Canson Mi-teintes paper, laser printed and manually torn, with wintergreen oil-transfer technique on previously inkjet-printed photographs, linen binder’s thread and decorative beadsThis is the first artist book I made, at a Summer workshop where I learned to experiment with concertina binding, in Kingston MA. I brought my exploration of text-image juxtapositions—that I had been working on since the early ’90s in graduate school—for the first time out of flatland. In addition to exploring text and image, I explored ratio and shape interrelationships.
Donna Stepien
BIO
I’ve taught communication design and typography at New York and New England colleges and universities for 30+ years. I’ve led book/journal making classes at a women’s shelter, in a UNESCO-funded program in Eastern Europe, and at after-school, art, yoga, and craft centers. I’ve taught professional development workshops to K-12 teachers including a co-developed co-taught Massachusetts Department of Education Grant-sponsored teacher-education course using design to teach Math and Science. I recently designed a course for teachers of all levels, “Creating Engaging Lessons using Design Activities,” and I’ve taught bookmaking to people of all ages—as young as five!—integrating mindful, meditation-inspired philosophies and creative and thoughtful exploration in all of my work and teaching.
My education includes: BA (Psychology with Fine Arts area study), Daemen College; MBA, Canisius College; MFA, State University of New York at Buffalo; and Graduate credits from Goddard College, Landmark College Institute for Research and Training, and Harvard Graduate School of Education. My writings and artwork have been published/exhibited in the US and abroad.