Tucked inconspicuously among some 180 items in the Women's Studio Workshop (WSW) twentieth anniversary retrospective was a small book to which four women each contributed four silkscreen prints on handmade paper. Ann Kalmbach, Tatana Kellner, Barbara Leoff Burge, and Anita Wetzel made 4 x 4 in 1981, seven years after they founded WSW in Rosendale, New York, and began a program of classes, fellowships, residencies, and internships. Certain shared interests of the founders are evident in this playful work: collaborative effort combined with individual creativity, handmade paper, printmaking, and book arts. WSW offers residencies which enable artists to work in its shop, as well as smaller grants for artists to complete projects in their own studios. Approximately eighty artists who have benefited from these programs or worked on the staff were each invited to submit two examples of self-selected work to the retrospective. These items, which included prints, bookworks, sculpture, and photography, were exhibited along with most of the books from the archive of editions produced by the WSW Press since 1979. The exhilarating result did not convey a specific message so much as a sense of expanding possibilities, especially in the fields of book arts and papermaking. WSW books take many forms. In Ann Kresge's 1993 Air Born, five elements--Earth, Wind, Fire, Water, and Air--are saluted in lists of adjectives inside a cloth-covered storage box. Kresge dedicated unbound kozo sheets with etching, chine colle, and letterpress images to individual elements. She laminated these to a radiating bamboo frame and each can be flown as a kite. You Waters! (1990) by Sue Bucholz takes its text from the Book of Daniel and expresses its global imagery through groups of concentric quarter-circle pages. The concertina structure of the book is not unusual, but the combination of handmade paper and acetate with several methods of printing contribute to a dynamic sequence of evolving colors and patterns. The exhibition curators displayed Pati Scobey's The Back of Time free-standing. Two wheels of jagged-edged pages radiate like the spokes from either end of a back sheet, which serves as an axle. The arrangement of pages also suggests the hands of clocks marking the hours. Scobey hand-painted saturated, almost fluorescent colors and collaged them onto the intaglio-printed deep blue paper. Possibly the most memorable works in the exhibition were Tatana Kellner's B-11226: Fifty Years of Silence and 71125: Fifty Years of Silence, each stored in a square pine box. The center of each volume--of each page--has been die cut to make room for a hidden object, a realistic pink forearm and hand, cast in paper pulp and "tattooed" with a number. As a child, the artist saw numbers tattooed on her parents' arms, codes to a terrible history which was not discussed: the Holocaust. Kellner asked her mother and her father to write accounts of their experiences. She has printed the original handwritten Czech in sepia on translucent pages and interleaved them with the English translation of these riveting, understated narratives. Family photographs, enlarged and printed in half-tone, suggest the distance between experience and memory, and remind us that a picture is not the equivalent of a thousand words. Reading this book, one may come close to capturing the magic of ancient illuminated manuscripts, the power of the word allied with the object to communicate at the most profound levels. Margarita Becerra Cano printed the letterpress text of her Satanic Loves (1993) on a green-dyed cotton and linen rag with carrot pulp. Quoting various church fathers, Cano uses the religious persecution of women as her subject. "The angels fell because they lusted after women," Sculpius Severus wrote in the fifth century. Cano's soft Liquid Light photographs contrast with the vitriol of her sources. Antonym, by Susan Fateh, is a one-of-a-kind book in dense, waxy, black handmade paper. Fateh has marked in bright oil pastels on its irregular, pierced surface to create a tactile object. For a few resident artists, WSW provides the first opportunity to make a book. Other artists have never made paper. Binda Colebrook, who had limited papermaking experience, took an experimental approach in making Loose Wire and Limbo. Each unframed sheet of free-formed cotton pulp paper contains printed fragments from old books and ruled sheets. Using a squirt bottle containing a solution of iron filings, Colebrook drew directly on the thick, bumpy paper, marking and staining it. Her emphasis on direct process creates a tension between a field of precise but meaninglessly fragmented text and the barely controlled but coherent pattern of rust in which it is embedded. Laura Moriarty's wall-mounted Bestias Inmundas lies at another extreme of technique and content. She appropriated imagery from Mexican romance comics and photocopied them onto square sheets of sisal with fine-textured, short horsehair. Most of the ninety-six unframed panels are untinted, but occasional squares of soft pink, yellow, green, and blue interact with similar or repeated images, particularly those of weeping women and frowning men. At least one artist used paper in a sizeable sculptural work. J. Catherine Bebout covered her suspended, quasi-ritualistic, vertical objects of wood in abaca, stained to mimic patined and rusted metal. These Artifacts suggest crosses, tools, and weapons, as well as the human body, and were displayed as though in an archaeological museum. Although a few works in the show did not incorporate paper, it is certainly the most consistent material in use at WSW, an institution which has played a strong role in the recent development of book arts in this country. As one of the first shops to bring the art of hand papermaking to the attention of the public and a consistent supporter of artists working in this medium, WSW deserves congratulations for its two decades of solid service to the arts community.