The Road is Closed

Sylvia Solochek Walters

Walters' work began in the late 1950s with strong black and white figurative compositions, and gradually became incorporated more subtle narratives. She developed an inventive technique with stencils, which allowed her to use a full color palette in her prints using a single block of wood.

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, printmaker, educator, and administrator, was born in 1938 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After completing her undergraduate and graduate degrees (B.S., M.S., M.F.A.) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Walters taught painting, printmaking and art history for several years in Wisconsin, Nebraska and New York State. She moved to St. Louis in 1967 eventually taking a position at the University of Missouri St. Louis where she founded and chaired the art department, and, for ten years, headed the gallery.

In 1984 Walters was invited to chair the art department at San Francisco State University - a position she held until 2004. She became Professor Emerita in 2009. During these years in California, she also taught relief printmaking at the university and continued to produce a body of highly detailed reductive woodcuts.