Thalia Graeff

Wolf Humanities Center Undergraduate Fellow

20252026 Forum on Truth

Thalia Graeff

History of Art

CAS, 2026

Thalia Graeff is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences from New Hope, Pennsylvania. She is majoring in Art History and minoring in Cognitive Science, Fine Arts, and French. Her interests within art history include modern and contemporary works on paper and women artists. Outside of the classroom, Thalia has worked at the Barnes Foundation, the Institute of Contemporary Art, and the University of Pennsylvania Press, and is currently an intern at the Locks Gallery. She is also one of the business managers for Bloomers Comedy, managing all things related to design and social media.

Artists' Books by Women: Selections from Penn Libraries

This curatorial project brings together contemporary artists’ books made by women that center women as their primary subject. Drawn from the University of Pennsylvania’s Special Collections and Libraries, the works presented in this mock-exhibition demonstrate how the artists’ book has become a powerful tool through which women artists explore a broad spectrum of themes—from feminist engagements with history to reflections on personal memory to constructions of entirely fictional narratives. In addition to examining the content these books present, this project centers the physicality of the artists’ book itself as a site for meaning-making. It considers questions such as how the book’s material qualities contribute to its message, and how the portrayal of information within the book form—through its tactile, sequential, and intimate modes of engagement—differs from more static, public displays such as exhibitions or installations. By bringing these works into dialogue, this project highlights how women artists use the book as a venue to revisit and reinterpret historical and personal narratives, ultimately revealing the artists’ book as a powerful tool for constructing new records—new “truths”—that shape how women’s histories and experiences are documented and understood.