The Road is Closed is a reduction color woodcut created in 2009 by American artist Sylvia Solochek Walters. It is pencil signed, dated and editioned 4/14. Walters developed a technique of combining the use of one wood block that was reductively cut and multiple acetate stencils to apply her colors. The Road is Closed was printed by the artist on a fibrous laid Japanese paper and the image measures 14 x 26-3/4 inches.
Walters wrote about her work: “For many years I used my prints to tell visual stories about family, memory, rites of passage, grief and loss, aging and healing. More recently I’ve focused on the environment, the slaughter of wildlife and other troubling calamities impacting the natural world. My images are pulled from nature, material culture, current events and the written word, family albums and art history – all loosely collaged in the field to suggest how their relationships build towards a larger narrative. Like most of the prints I’ve made in the last fifty or so years, these prints are reductive woodcuts made with stencils. They rely on a build-up of many colors, delicate surface detail and organic textures. I fell in love with the woodcut as a student many years ago and have yet to find anything to compare with its expressive potential for my own work.”
Sylvia Solochek Walters (née Solochek), printmaker, educator, and administrator, was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on 24 August 1938. She completed her undergraduate and graduate degrees (B.S., M.S., M.F.A.) at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and began her teaching career in 1963. She taught painting, printmaking, and art history for several years at public and private colleges in Wisconsin, Nebraska, and New York State.
Walters moved to St. Louis, Missouri in 1967 eventually joining the staff at the University of Missouri where she founded and chaired the art department, and, for ten years served as gallery director. In that capacity she developed public panel discussions and exhibitions such as American Women Printmakers (1975) which included work by Louise Nevelson, Judy Chicago, and Pat Steir. In 1984, Walters was invited to join the faculty and to chair the art department at San Francisco State University. She was chairwoman until 2004 and was awarded Professor Emerita status in 2009.
While she taught relief printmaking at San Francisco State University, Walters produced a body of highly detailed reductive woodcuts. Her work, which began in the late 1950s with strong black and white figurative compositions, gradually incorporated more subtle narratives. She developed an inventive technique combining stencil and wood that allowed her to use a full color palette in her prints using a single block of wood.
Walters is a member of and exhibited with the California Society of Printmakers and her work has been featured in over 300 exhibitions. She received awards from the Southern Graphics Council International, Northern California Print Competition, Colorprint USA, Vermillion, and the St. Louis Artists’ Guild. Walters was also the recipient of two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Sylvia Solochek Walters’ work is represented in the collections of the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, University of California, Berkeley; the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, Madison; the Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; the New York Public Library, New York; the Oakland Museum of California; the Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California; and the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
