We’re still painfully processing her passing from the waking world on October 16, 2022, whether we knew the luminous Carol Zaloom as a longtime personal friend or only ever saw her iconic hand-colored linocut prints on the covers of books or in the pages of Hudson Valley One. That world was simply a better place with Carol in it. If you’re among those missing her, you need to get to the Woodstock School of Art this weekend: For two days only, from noon to 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, June 3 and 4, one hundred or more of her artworks will be on display in the Printmaking Studio.
This show is being organized by Carol’s husband, poet/performance artist Mikhail Horowitz, her son Kahlil Zaloom, friends Susan Hereth and Shengold and WSA instructor, board member and print shop director Kate McGloughlin, but no one is claiming curatorship; this is a labor of love, with many prints being loaned by friends who collected Carol’s work. It was Carol’s way to make it easy to be a collector, selling prints at affordable prices at her annual Open Houses as part of the Saugerties Artists’ Studio Tour, trading with other artists or bartering her work, doing book covers “for a minimal fee,” says Horowitz. “She was devoted to the larger arts community. She never refused anybody anything.”
That generosity of spirit manifested in myriad ways, including the near-legendary meals that Carol and Mik hosted at the 1852 stone-and-timber house on High Falls Road where she had lived since 1971. And it reflected the nature of her own history as a self-taught student and practitioner of art. There are no posh academic credentials to be cited from her résumé; she never even finished college. Japanese “Floating World” printmakers, the pre-Raphaelite movement, adventure novel illustrations by the likes of Howard Pyle and the Wyeths all inspired her, as did Palaeolithic cave painters. According to Horowitz, she made a trip to France in 1996 with fellow Woodstock artist Gay Leonhardt to visit “all the caves where visitors were still permitted,” and gave a series of workshops on prehistoric art at WSA, the Woodstock Library and the Barrett House in Poughkeepsie when she got back.
“I think she came out an artist,” says McGloughlin. “She always surrounded herself with art. She made art of everything. Her heart was her credentials. She also had a lot of full-bodied encounters with artists.” Among the most fertile of those “encounters” was a three-year romance with Jeffrey Jones, one of the leading painters and illustrators of comic books and science fiction/fantasy book covers in the 1960s and ‘70s. Along with Jones, Michael William Kaluta, Barry Windsor-Smith and Bernie Wrightson (and sometimes Charles Vess) ran an atelier in Manhattan called The Studio, which became tremendously influential in their field. Carol was one of his Muses and models, but he also taught her a great deal about artmaking, about “how to see.” She did her first linocut – an image of Pegasus for a homemade Christmas card – in 1967, at Jones’ urging.
“I wanted to be an illustrator so badly as a kid,” Carol Zaloom, née Smith, related in a lengthy 2022 interview about Jones’ life and legacy in Spectrum Fantastic Art Quarterly. “I was a Catholic girl being raised in Georgia, and I wanted to go to the School of Visual Arts. Nope, that’s not happening, and my parents sent me to Marymount in Virginia, which is not an art school, obviously. So, I never really got an art education, but I often have said that three years with Jeff Jones was a major art education.”
After moving to Saugerties with her first husband, musician Chris Zaloom, Carol bore two sons, Django and Kahlil, and renovated and decorated their “rescue house,” which had come with no plumbing or electricity (it’s still heated only by a wood stove). She later went to work for the Woodstock Times, doing photography and running the darkroom for a decade. That’s how she met Horowitz, who moved in with her in 1989, after Carol and Chris had split up.
To polish her printmaking skills, she began taking classes with Bob Angeloch at WSA. “She loved Bob’s peculiar way and he loved hers. She became a guest lecturer on Lascaux; we asked her to give a workshop, and then a class,” McGloughlin remembers. “She became a great favorite quickly.” In 2011, one of Carol’s designs – a deer in a tangled forest – was WSA’s featured limited-edition fundraiser Annual Print (possibly still available from WSA’s online store). Scenes of animals, often observed in the woods surrounding her own home, are a recurring theme in her artwork, along with images from various world mythologies.
Carol’s work was much sought-after for book covers and illustrations. You can find it adorning works by Shengold, Sigrid Heath, Janice King, Will Nixon, Michael Perkins, Tad Richards, Gail Straub and Janine Pommy Vega, as well as in periodicals such as Yankee magazine, Sky & Telescope and Chronogram. She illustrated a series of Horowitz’s poems in broadside format. She was given solo shows at The Chapel + Cultural Center at Rensselaer in Troy and Donskoj Gallery in Kingston, and was awarded three Certificates of Design Excellence by Print magazine. Her illustration of a winged cat, rendered in granite, permanently adorns the Catbird Playground at Carl Schurz Park, adjoining Gracie Mansion in Manhattan. She even painted images from ancient and Renaissance art onto a series of baseballs, which became collectors’ items.
Next Tuesday evening at Diamond Mills Hotel & Tavern in Saugerties, Carol Zaloom’s legacy will be honored with a posthumous Special Citation as part of the 11th annual Ulster County Executive’s Arts Awards. According to Mikhail Horowitz, a book of Carol’s work may eventually be in the offing, once her estate is settled. For now, we get a chance to see a lot of her work – including a few new prints from old blocks, where originals couldn’t be located – gathered in one place at WSA on Saturday and Sunday. Don’t miss it. The Woodstock School of Art is located at 2470 Route 212.
Join the family! 
