Siri Beckman

Siri Beckman was born in Chicago, Illinois. She made her way to Maine in the late 1970s where she was “called” to wood engraving quite by accident when she received a grant in 1985 to study in England. Here she discovered private press books, one of the historic origins of wood engraving developed in England during the last half of the eighteenth century. This led to graduate school in 1990 at the University of Arts in Philadelphia where she earned an MFA in Printmaking and Book Arts in 1992. Beckman has been practicing this art form ever since.

Beckman’s early wood engravings are strongly influenced by her environment and daily life in the Maine fishing town of Stonington, Maine, where she lived up until a few years ago when she relocated to Bath, Maine, where she continues to maintain a studio. Throughout her career, Beckman held several teaching positions at colleges and at the Haystack Mountain School of Craft. In 1997, Beckman received her first Artist in Residence at Acadia National Park, followed by five other residencies in the western United States, including Badlands, Rocky Mountain, Hovenweep, Grand Canyon, and Mesa Verde National Parks. These experiences awakened Beckman to color. Over the next fourteen years, she moved through journal keeping in watercolor, painting with oils, to printmaking with multiple blocks. Beckman’s work has been in numerous exhibitions in Maine and beyond and is in the collections of the Library of Congress, Farnsworth Art Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum, Harvard University, and several other institutions.

In 2024 Down East Book published The Prints of Siri Beckman: Engraving a Sense of Place, a hard cover book featuring more than 100 of her enchanting prints. This volume is a celebration of her life’s work and legacy. Text by Beckman discusses the process of wood engraving and her passion for printmaking and book arts, while author Carl Little establishes Beckman’s place in the canon of Maine art.