“Sometimes it is only after a loved one has passed away that we have the opportunity to learn about aspects of their world through the items they left behind,” Jennifer Martinez Wormser SC ’95, director of the Denison Library, said.
On Feb. 6, Scripps College’s Denison Library and Clark Humanities Museum unveiled “Marking Time: Examining a Mother and Daughter’s Relationship Through the Prints, Collages and Artists’ Book of April Katz,” a body of work by April Katz. Katz gave a lecture about the collection to students, faculty and community members before the exhibition’s opening reception at the Clark Humanities Museum.
“Marking Time” is a window into Katz’s late mother’s history and an homage to her life.
An artist and printmaker, Katz is the Morrill Professor Emeritus at Iowa State University and former president of the Southern Graphics Council. Last year, Katz donated her “Marking Time” series of prints, collages, artist’s book and related archival materials to Denison Library, where they form part of the library’s collections related to women’s lives and accomplishments.
The show was curated by Martinez Wormser, the Sally Preston Swan Librarian for Denison Library.
“Your mission to collect materials by and about women and to build on the library’s collection of artist’s books attracted my attention,” Katz wrote in an email to Wormser.
After her mother, Bernice Edythe Ladisky Katz, passed away unexpectedly in April of 1992, Katz came across her monthly planners.
“I remember throwing them in the trash, walking out of the room, and then turning around to retrieve them,” the artist said. “They were a record of her recent past.”
Grieving the loss of her mother, Katz revisited some of her previous artwork, adding tracings from her mother’s planners to old prints. Through this process of incorporating pieces of her mother into her own work, Katz began the “Marking Time” series.
By tracing 14 years of calendar days from her mother’s planner, Katz unveiled her mother’s daily life.
“The act of tracing my mother’s written entries felt like a kind of postmortem collaboration,” Katz said. “My hand followed hers.”
Vibrant and full of allusions to her mother, Katz’s collage monotype “Remember who you are” marries a breadth of souvenirs relating to her mother’s life with a recurrent calendar grid, creating a repetition that invites the viewer into the minute details of the scene.
“The repetition of the calendars’ grids unifies the complex whole,” Katz said. “Unexpected juxtapositions and the complex layering of ink that printmaking offers encourage close and sustained study by viewers.”
“The whole concept of time and the repetition of that is a really beautiful way of processing hard moments,” attendee Mikayla Stout SC ’25 said, reflecting on themes in Katz’s work during the gallery opening.
“The act of reading the book is like an ‘unweaving’ of the days,” Katz said.
Katz’s initial prints from 1992 later became part of her book “Marking Time: Her Days,” which explores memory and the experience of passing time. Katz described how she organized the book, systematically binding the pages on different sides, the translucent paper allowing the viewer to see through to the next page as a representation of the passage of time.
“The act of reading the book is like an ‘unweaving’ of the days,” Katz said.
In curating “Marking Time,” Martinez Wormser placed Katz’s mother’s calendar alongside other women’s calendars from the twentieth century that exist in Denison’s archives.
“Katz’s ‘Marking Time’ series creates another opportunity for us to reflect on the day-to-day routines of women’s lives, from paydays to birthday parties and PFLAG meetings,” Martinez Wormser said.
The layered quality of printmaking provides “information that gradually unfolds through sustained looking,” Katz said of her prints. Being able to experience her work in a gallery setting allows for this tangible viewer experience.
“Katz’s layers of printmaking processes and collaged images create a bit of a scavenger hunt for her viewer,” Martinez Wormser said. “I’m always finding something new in her prints.”
Toward the end of her talk, Katz asked her audience to consider how the people in their lives see them change from day to day, as she was able to see her mother change from day to day through her calendars.
The calendars preserved “the details that made up her life and the lives of those she cared about,” Katz said of her mother.
“Marking Time” and other archival materials are on display in The Clark Humanities Museum until Feb. 19, 2025.
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