A panel discussion with conference organizer Don Russell, George Mason University, and Skúta Helgason, Director, Artbook Retail for D.A.P., Joan Lyons, founder, VSW Press, and Megan N. Liberty, independent artist book critic and archivist, will be moderated by Tate Shaw, VSW Press editor on Thursday, September 19, 7pm.

View the discussion on VSW’s twitch.tv channel (no need to sign up).

About the panelists:

Skúta Helgason has worked in books since his time as a student of time-based media at Visual Studies Workshop, from 1979-1983. Helgason has worked in virtually every aspect of book production, publishing, and distribution, managing Washington Project for the Arts Bookworks, working for Rainer Verlag in Berlin as a Publisher Associate, and as founder and director of Stop Over Press in Berlin in 1991, which is still active today. Helgason has been a Creative Consultant for D.A.P. | Distributed Art Publishers and is now Director of Artbook Retail. His books investigating the veracity of documenting daily life are part of international public and private collections.

Don Russell was highly active developing programs at Visual Studies Workshop when he organized the Options in Independent Publishing conference and book fair in 1979. Russell has produced over a hundred exhibitions and public art projects since then including as Executive Director of Washington Project for the Arts, Washington D.C., and now as University Curator for George Mason’s College of Visual and Performing Arts. He is co-founder and Director of Provisions Research Center for Art & Social Change, providing creative resources for community-engaged public art projects. Russell is President of Art Resources International.

Joan Lyons is the Founding Director of Visual Studies Workshop Press where she was responsible for the production and publication of 450 titles from 1972–2004 as well as over three-dozen of her own artist’s books. Lyons is the editor of the influential Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook (1986) and Artists’ Books: Visual Studies Workshop Press 1972–2008 (2009). She has exhibited her work in photography and book art internationally for decades. Numerous public collections around the world hold work by Lyons including DeCordova Museum; J. Paul Getty Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Minneapolis Institute of Art; National Gallery of Canada; Norton-Simon Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery.

Megan N. Liberty is an independent arts writer, editor, and archivist focused on artists’ books and publishing. She is the Art Books section editor of the Brooklyn Rail and is co-founder of Book Art Review with Center for Book Arts, New York. Liberty curated the multi-venue exhibition Craft & Conceptual Art: Reshaping the Legacy of Artists’ Books and is author of numerous other catalog essays. She has interviewed and written profiles of such artists’ book institutions as Printed Matter, Franklin Furnace, and Siglio Press. Liberty was a 2023 Visual AIDS Research Fellow and a 2019-20 AICA/USA and Creative Capital/The Andy Warhol Foundation’s Arts Writing Workshop participant.