Sylvia Solochek Walters

Sylvia Solochek Walters (born 1938) is an American artist and educator. She has produced drawings, paintings and collage works in her career, but is best known for complex woodcut prints created through the "reduction and stencil" process. Her work combines elements of realist, decorative and formalist art, flat and illusionistic space, and varied patterning and textures. She has largely focused on portraits, still lifes and domestic interiors, and collage-like combinations of personal symbolism—concerns that writers often align with early feminist art. Her work belongs to the public art collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, New York Public Library and Library of Congress, among others. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, national printmaking competitions, and publishing organizations, for her book design and editing. Walters served as a longtime professor and chairperson in the art department at San Francisco State University before retiring as Professor Emerita of Art in 2009. She lives and works In Oakland, California.

Early life and career Sylvia Solochek was born in 1938 and raised by a traditional Jewish family in Milwaukee. The school was one of three Midwestern centers—with University of Iowa and University of Indiana, Bloomington—leading a printmaking renaissance in the United States; its faculty included renowned printmakers Warrington Colescott, Dean Meeker, and Alfred Sessler who, in addition to German Expressionism and Japanese woodblock prints, particularly influenced Walters.

After graduating, Walters taught art—a rarity for women then—at schools in New York, Wisconsin and Nebraska while working as a book designer and making art. She served as director of the UMSL Gallery for ten years, developing public panel discussions and exhibitions such as "American Women Printmakers" (1975), which included work by Louise Nevelson, Judy Chicago, Pat Steir and herself. In 1977, she founded and became the first chairperson of the school's new independent art department.

Sylvia Solochek Walters, And Ruth Said, woodcut, 11.5" x 23.75", 1967. In 1984, Walters moved to San Francisco, where she was hired as chairperson of San Francisco State University's art department, serving in that post until 2004, before retiring as Professor Emerita in 2009. on women and African-American printmakers and artists such as Warrington Colescott, John Gutmann, Chiura Obata and Ruth Weisberg.

Work and technique Walters is best known for hand-printed, "reduction and stencil" woodcut prints exploring genres including portraiture, still life and interiors. Describing her print Summer Self-Portrait (1977) in American Color Woodcuts: Bounty from the Block, 1880s–1990s, artist and art historian James Watrous summed up such work as "gracious in likeness and elegant in artistic ordering, with a sublimation of subject and sensitivity to form." St. Louis Post-Dispatch writer Mary King described the "vertically curling and knotting" central form of the woodcut Fragment I as an "agitated tower of textures and line shapes" that was "only incidentally a figure." Depicted in thorny, ropy lines that thickened into shapes, divided or slid into one another like branches or flowing liquid, they drew comparisons to the work of Leonard Baskin.

Walters complemented her early printmaking with brightly colored, more personal pastel drawings and oil paintings of figures, still lifes and scenes such as Umbrellascape, a nearly abstract, rhythmic composition of overlapping beach umbrellas and furniture. In a 1971 solo show, she exhibited such prints (e.g., Bazaar I, Shield I, Byzantine Becky), which paired forthright portraits and symbolic motifs suggesting subconscious processes with subtle surfaces, blazing color, and diverse drawn and stamped patterns. Perhaps more significantly, the qualities of that medium influenced her printmaking palette toward subtler, secondary and intermediate colors. In subject matter, she turned from the metaphorical to more neutrally handled imagery drawn from her immediate environment—initially domestic still lifes and scenes, and later, portraits of her husband, self, friends and colleagues—that gradually revealed minute details and motifs of a personal nature.

Sylvia Solochek Walters, Women's Work is Never Done, woodcut, 14" x 27", 2008. Walters's later printmaking explores personal narratives involving rites of passage, loss, ritual, aging and healing, and animal and environmental issues. It often incorporates multiple images and motifs from nature, culture, family albums and art historical sources, such as Chinese pottery (e.g., La Grande Cascade, 1983) or Japanese prints. Becky's Babies (2004) tells a metaphorical story using narrative panels inspired by family anecdotes and Hebrew illuminated manuscripts; Dearest Daughter (Lost Lessons) (2014) appears to depict a diary page and letter fragment along with woodcut images of animals, Hokusai's "Wave" and a father and daughter.

She has received awards from the Southern Graphics Council International (Tradition in Printmaking, 2014), She was awarded two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in conjunction with her work in the Women's Caucus for Art. She also assistant-edited (to Maryly Snow) California Society of Printmakers: One Hundred Years 1913–2013, which won an Art Libraries Society of North America award.