In Conversation: Kate Van Houten on Atelier 17 with curator Madeleine Viljoen & writer Christina Weyl

On the occasion of the two-part exhibition ‘Takesada Matsutani / Kate Van Houten. Paris Prints 1967-1978’, please join us for a conversation about printmaking, and the legendary print studio Atelier 17, with artist Kate Van Houten, New York Public Library curator Madeleine Viljoen, author of ‘The Women of Atelier 17’ Christina Weyl and moderated by editor of Ursula Magazine Randy Kennedy.   

This event is free, however, due to limited space, reservations are required. 

About ‘Takesada Matsutani / Kate Van Houten. Paris Prints 1967-1978' 
Lifelong partners in art and life, Takesada Matsutani and Kate Van Houten first met in 1967 while working at Atelier 17, the celebrated print studio established in Paris by Stanley William Hayter. Hauser & Wirth New York presents a two-part exhibition exploring the couple’s overlapping oeuvres and deep involvement with printmaking over the years through a selection of etchings, screenprints, photography, painting, sculpture and various ephemera on view at the gallery’s 18th Street location in New York City. The first installment of this presentation will focus on works made using intaglio techniques, while the second will foreground hard-edge silkscreens in vibrant color. Through these works and related public programs, ‘Paris Prints 1967-1978’ will draw visitors into the intimate creative dialogue that has unfolded over half a century between two remarkable individuals in love with both artistic innovation and one another.  

About Kate Van Houten 
Van Houten studied at Western College for Women in Ohio and at the Art Students League in New York before moving to Milan and later Paris. In 1967, she joined the Paris-based Atelier 17 printmaking workshop. With friends, she later set up a silkscreen studio. Her prints were first shown at the Galerie Zunini in 1968 and later alongside her paintings at the Galerie Haut-Pave. Van Houten has participated in printmaking biennales in Kraków, Poland; Brooklyn, New York; Conde-Bonsecours, Belgium; Bradford, England; Bhopal, India and Chamaliere, France, along with solo exhibitions in France, Japan and the U.S. Her work is represented in public and private collections throughout the world. 

About Madeleine Viljoen 
Madeleine Viljoen, Curator of Prints and the Spencer Collection, is responsible for The New York Public Library’s wide-ranging collection of prints and illustrated books. She holds a PhD in art history from Princeton University, and her articles have appeared among others in Print Quarterly, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, Oxford Art Journal, and The Art Bulletin, as well as in catalogues and essay collections. In 2022, she co-curated the exhibition Fortune and Folly in 1720 about the first global financial collapse of 1720 and co-wrote the associated stand-alone volume Meltdown! Picturing the World’s First Bubble Economy (2020).  At the Library, she has organized numerous exhibitions, including Daring Methods: The Prints of Mary Cassatt (2013), Printing Women: Three Centuries of Female Printmakers (2016) and A Curious Hand: The Prints of Henri Charles Guérard (2017). Most recently, she contributed essays on early modern women printmakers to the exhibition catalogue Making her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400-1800 (Baltimore Museum of Art and the Art Gallery of Ontario, 2023-2024) and on women’s self-portrait prints to Female Printmakers, Printsellers and Publishers in the Eighteenth Century: The Imprint of Women 1735 – 1830 (forthcoming 2024). 

About Christina Weyl 
Christina Weyl is a New York-based curator. She has organized numerous exhibitions and published widely about twentieth-century printmaking and women artists. Most recently, she curated A Model Workshop: Margaret Lowengrund and The Contemporaries, which was on view at Print Center New York in fall 2023. 

Weyl maintains a deep interest in Atelier 17, the avant-garde printmaking studio, and has recently founded The Atelier 17 Project, a non-profit organization that advocates for projects commemorating the centennial of the workshop’s founding in 1927. Her book, The Women of Atelier 17: Modernist Printmaking in Midcentury New York (Yale University Press, 2019), highlights nearly 100 women artists who advanced modernism and feminism at Atelier 17 when it was located in New York City between 1940 and 1955. 

In 2014, she co-founded the Association of Print Scholars, a non-profit professional organization. She holds a PhD in art history from Rutgers University. Prior to graduate school, she worked Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl, which represents the publications of the Los Angeles–based artists’ workshop Gemini G.E.L.