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KELIY ANDERSON-STALEY: Wilderness No longer at the Edge of Things by Galina KurlatNovember 19, 2025

In Wilderness No Longer at the Edge of Things, Keliy Anderson-Staley expands the notion of both the artist book and the family archive. Drawing from documents discovered in her family’s off-the-grid cabin, an isolated homestead that existed from 1979 to 2019, she creates unique images silkscreened or photographically printed directly onto these original materials. In this work, landscape imagery converges with archival family photographs and handwritten records, forming a layered visual history. The project unfolds across both bound artist books and unbound wall installations, the latter assembled as expansive collages that extend the narrative beyond the page and may incorporate objects gathered from the home itself.

Throughout the works, we witness the family growing up even as the means of documenting their lives shift with time. Anderson-Staley’s exploration of her upbringing becomes not only a personal history but also a record of how vernacular image-making evolves across a generation and how those changing technologies shape the way we remember. The past was never truly black and white, though that is often how it reaches us: filtered through the limitations, aesthetics, and omissions of the images that survive. In this way, the images we accept as our family history both obscure and reveal a shifting truth, reminding us that memory is always mediated.

This presentation breaks from expectations of traditional memoir structures to create lyrical and layered books. Revisiting her family dynamics and trajectory with a reflective, at times questioning gaze, she constructs a narrative that is felt rather than recounted, one built from fragments, textures, and the material memory embedded in the documents themselves.

Website: andersonstaley.com
Instagram: @andersonstaley

Anderson-Staley is currently exhibiting in: “WORD: Text-based art and design” at the Bruce Gallery at PennWest Edinboro in PA and in “A Yellow Rose Project” at Griffin Museum in MA.

© Keliy Anderson-Staley, This Shrinking World, vol 1 (open page spread), Artist’s book: grommet and linen thread-bound cyanotypes and silkscreen on found notebook paper and digital offset prints, oil pencil. 48 pages including cover, 11 x 9 inches (11 x 18 inches open), 2021, unique

“Wilderness No longer at the Edge of Things” is an ongoing exploded autobiography edited into large paper-based installations and dozens of artist’s books. My non-linear visual memoir follows a single homestead in the Maine woods from its construction (1979) to its destruction by fire (2019). The project touches on my upbringing in an off-grid cabin, my father’s dodging of the Vietnam draft (contrasted with his father’s direct justification of the war in a report delivered to JFK), the biological father I only learned about when I was 12 and my mother’s struggles in these contexts.

Each of my artist’s books is unique. They are composed of hand-printed photographs; marked, cyanotyped, silkscreened, and redacted documents; and papers sourced from my family’s archives. My titles, thematically linked to the contents of each book, are drawn from academic books by my grandfather, an economist (“Raw Materials in Peace and War,” “This Shrinking World”), from illustrations in those books (“Travel Time in Days from Boston”) and phrases from my father’s extensive hand-written notebooks (“Catastrophe of Red,” “Deeds and Measures”). Four of the original artist’s books are in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston Hirsch Library; others have been exhibited in exhibitions alongside my paper-based wall collages, most recently in a solo exhibition at the Riverside Art Museum in California.

The books are supplemented by large, wall-covering paper installations (wall books) that extend the subjects and processes of my book practice. The installations function like books that can be seen in their entirety at once, fully opened and pinned to the wall. Like my bound books, the assemblages bring together text, image and paper forms in anti-narrative formats.

I print via silkscreen and photographic processes directly onto documents I recovered from the cabin, forming palimpsests whose layers challenge and erase each other, creating new associations. I walk an uncomfortable line between total obliteration of the original archive and preservation — highlighting narrative details from a self-conscious, subjective, feminist perspective. My process of making and remaking, taking apart and reassembling, define an idea of family history as an evolving story, in continual flux. I am interested in how photographic technologies of different historical moments shape our perceptions of those eras. I explore how public history and private archives intersect and identities are forged within these contexts.

Keliy Anderson-Staley is a Houston, Texas based artist who works in a range of photographic processes, books arts, and printmaking. She is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2008 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow and a 2013 George and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellow. Additional support for her work has come from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, Puffin Foundation, and Houston Arts Alliance.

Collections holding her work include the Library of Congress, Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, Grace Museum, Houston Airport System, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and Portland Museum of Art. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at Akron Art Museum, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Southeast Museum of Photography, Shelburne Museum, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Morris Museum of Art, Riverside Art Museum and Zillman Art Museum. She completed major public commissions for the Cleveland Rapid Transit Authority and Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport. Her work has been written about and reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, Photo District News, Photograph, Art New England, ARTnews, B&W Magazine, Oxford American, Camerawork, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. On a Wet Bough, a monograph of her tintype portraits, was published by Waltz Books in 2014.

Anderson-Staley has a BA from Hampshire College and an MFA from Hunter College. She is Professor of Photography | Video at the School of Art, University of Houston.

© Keliy Anderson-Staley, Origin Stories on Yellow with Pink Envelope, paper collage made from cyanotype, silver nitrate and ink on notes, letters and other paper, with writing original to the documents, 68 x 72 inches, 2021, unique

© Keliy Anderson-Staley, Edge of Chaos (image represents two separate page spreads), Artist’s book: Coptic stitch-bound cyanotype, silver gelatin, photocopy, silkscreen, 8.5 x 7 inches (8.5 x 14 inches open), 2024, unique

© Keliy Anderson-Staley, Raw Materials in Peace and War, Volume 1 (image represents two separate page spreads), Artist’s book: slotted stitch-bound, cyanotype on found notebook paper, 48 pages, 11.5 x 10 inches (8 x 20 inches open), 2020, unique

© Keliy Anderson-Staley, Ghost Archive, paper wall book: cyanotype, acetate, vellum, carbon paper, mat board, chair made by my father. 96 x 144 inches, 2024, unique. Installation view at Riverside Art Museum (2025)

Tags: Alternative Process, Artist Book, Black and White, Cyanotype, Family History, Handmade Artist Book, Keliy Anderson-Staley, Personal History