Magical Secrets About Thinking Creatively
Monday, August 14, 4:00-5:00 PM
by Kathan Brown and Janice Fraser
A conversation with Kathan Brown, hosted by Janice Fraser.
About Kathan Brown
Kathan Brown is an artist, writer, printer, and entrepreneur who founded Crown Point Press, publishers of artists' etchings, in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1962. On the Press's twenty-fifth anniversary, the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted an exhibition of its work, and its thirty-fifth anniversary was celebrated by an exhibition at the National Gallery, Washington D.C. Archives of its work are owned by The National Gallery and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Brown's initial publishing program focused on local artists-etchings by Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud. They were the first two projects she published. Artists began coming to Crown Point from New York in the early 1970s, and by the end of the decade Brown was inviting artists from around the world. The Crown Point artist-list includes Chuck Close, Sol LeWitt, John Cage, Shahzia Sikander, Richard Tuttle, Kiki Smith, Peter Doig, Pat Steir, Laura Owens, Fred Wilson, and many others. In the 1980s Brown added Asian woodcut techniques to Crown Point's etching program, and took American artists to Japan and China to work with printers in those countries.
The Press has two active websites (www.crownpoint.com and www.Magical-Secrets.com) and in San Francisco, with a staff of ten, operates a public gallery and two large private etching studios. Each year, five or six invited artists work at the Press for two weeks at a time with the technical assistance of Brown's printers. Kathan Brown is the author of six books, the most recent of which is Magical Secrets About Thinking Creatively: The Art of Etching and the Truth of Life (Crown Point/Prestel 2006). It deals with ideas about creativity that she has learned from working closely over four decades with some of the most influential visual artists of our time.
About Janice Fraser
Janice Fraser is the CEO and a founding partner of Adaptive Path. She has worked in high-tech media for more than 15 years as an entrepreneur, interaction designer, and editor. She joined the internet back when the blink tag was big, and began to pioneer consumer Web applications for Netscape in 1996. Her current work focuses on leadership for user experience managers and the role of user experience in the changing landscape of product innovation.