The Adored and Aggrieved

Sylvia Solochek Walters

Sylvia 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. Sylvia Solochek Walters learned the technique of color reduction woodcut at the University of Wisconsin, Madison from printmaker Alfred Sessler, considered by many to be the originator of the reduction woodcut.

The artist commented on this image: "The Adored and Aggrieved" pairs the image of a Praiseworthy Chicken as conceived in ancient religions and cultures -- with a huddled flock of "industrial chickens," demeaned and awaiting an unsavory fate. If it was once thought of as a symbol of wisdom, courage, and maternal love, today the chicken has largely lost its lofty place in our imagination as well as its ability to live its life and express iself naturally in the everyday world. The difference and inequities seen in this print between the revered bird and its lumpen maltreated cousins could also echo our own divided class structures."

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.