Sam Regal is the Reference and Instruction Librarian at CalArts. She holds an MLIS from UCLA and an MFA in Poetry from Hunter College. Her writing has most recently appeared in "Art Documentation" and "Women Talk Money: Breaking the Taboo" (Simon & Schuster, 2022). She makes artists' books and fronts the LA-based band Rx.
Essay 
Democracy of Feeling: Auratic Artists’ Books at the Women’s Graphic Center by Sam Regal
Artists' books printed in multiples achieved deep emotional resonance when infused with the care and craft characteristic to the feminist art movement. The Women's Graphic Center, housed at the Woman's Building in Downtown Los Angeles, evolved into a dynamic ecosystem of print art experimentation, providing feminist artists the tools and community to innovatively approach the artists' books form. Writer and art librarian Sam Regal positions these works within California print history and interrogates the problematics of their reductive library classification and belated institutional embrace.