Hester Stinnett

Hester Stinnett (born 1956; lives Philadelphia, PA) is a printmaker with a BFA from the Hartford Art School, University of Hartford, CT, and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University, Philadelphia, where she is Professor Emerita.

Stinnett works with a variety of processes, including monoprint, risograph, screenprint and lithography. She frequently incorporates her mother’s writing in her pieces, drawn from handwritten notes she made as reminders while she suffered from dementia and was struggling to retain her memory. These elements in Stinnett’s work resemble the hidden language we all experience that can only exists between a parent and a child. She says, “Underlying my work is the interaction of human purpose with the unpredictable events of the world, and how deft and fragile that purpose is.”

Stinnett’s work has been exhibited widely, and is held in numerous private and public collections, including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Philadelphia Art Museum; and National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. She was awarded a Pennsylvania Council Artist Fellowship; was an Artist in Residence at the Fabric Workshop & Museum; and has presented workshops at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine and Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado. With Lois M. Johnson she wrote Water-based Inks: A Screenprinting Manual for Studio and Classroom, published by the University of the Arts Press.