Spudnik Press Cooperative and the Chicago Printmakers Guild are thrilled to be teaming up to present three professional development opportunities designed specifically for our members. After polling the audience, we lined up seven outstanding guest presenters to share their insight and expertise, including Dan Devening (Devening Projects), Jason Teegarden-Downs (Delicious Design League) and Allison Glenn (Monique Meloche). In conversation with one another and attendees, the series will address self-promotion and marketing for artists, ethical pricing, commissions, and how to build relationships with galleries, collectors, and curators.

The series kicks off on Wednesday, August 13 with a free panel discussion with Angela Bryant, Anna Marie Wilharm, and Renee Robbins.

Best Practices Detail and Registration

This Saturday, The Hubbard Street Lofts, will again host Printers Ball. This year is the tenth anniversary, and we are thrilled to highlight a few of the artists who contribute to the success and reputation of Spudnik Press Cooperative. Artists include a mix of Teaching Artists, Studio Assistants (current and past), artists we’ve collaborated with, and artists who have private studios within our printshop. Many artists are producing their work here at Spudnik. Others have set up their own shops. All are using print in innovative and fresh ways, and are excited to share their artwork at the tenth annual Printers Ball!

Perfectly Acceptable; Matt Davis
Perfectly Acceptable offers simple and affordable Risograph printing, design, and consultation services for cartoonists, zinesters, and anyone interested in printing on a small- to medium-sized scale. We are pleased to announce that we will be debuting the first of our series of artist prints at Printer’s Ball 2014, by Andy Burkholder, alongside a number of other Riso-printed goodies. Perfectly Acceptable is run by Matt Davis in a private studio in Spudnik Press’s Annex. 

Alamo Igloo; Keith Herzik
Dog lover, Keith Herzik has been making screen printed concert and show posters in Chicago since before the millennium.  Recently Keith has focused on hand printed art book zines entitled Alamo Igloo.  A new three-color woodblock print designed by Keith published by Spudnik Press, is currently in production.

Hoofprint Workshop; Liz Born and Gabe Hoare
Hoofprint Workshop is a Chicago-based printmaking studio specializing in fine art editions. Processes they use include relief, intaglio, plate lithography, monotype, and screenprinting. They work with emerging artists, students fine-tuning their craft, and clients who are looking to commission a custom design or have their own imagery reproduced by hand. They work with 4 artists each year to create innovative editions that represent the collaboration of the artist and team of skilled printers. By subsidizing printing costs for these projects, we encourage artists to make ambitious works that expand their studio practice, and re-contextualize existing themes. Their shop is located in the Heart of Chicago neighborhood between Pilsen and Little Village in a re-purposed funeral parlor.

Kim Morski
Currently, she is working on a body of prints that explore the conflation of domestic and scientific activity in St. Louis, Missouri in the 1950s. After World War II, the United States Army contracted with private corporations and a select group of scientists to spray zinc cadmium sulfide with a fluorescent additive over certain parts of St. Louis as part of a biological weapons development program. They researched particle dispersal patterns and their effects on unknowing St. Louis residents. In response to this information, she is interested in constructing images that represent the concept of duality and hiding one narrative within a more desirable one.  Her current artwork includes screenprints, as well as an edition of small books and collages.

Rough Ray Press
Rough Ray Press is the design studio and print shop of artists Bailey Romaine, Becka Cooling, and Nick Humber. The press is an aesthetic project that supports these artists’ independent and collaborative approaches to printmaking. We produce books, multiples, and fine art prints, as well as works on commission, including but not limited to book covers, invitations, and posters.

Additional Artists:
Rar Rar Press
Ilyana Schwartz
Brad Vetter
Matt Harlan

Additional Vendors:

Cushing
Chicago’s print and digital communications expert, Cushing has stood for premier reprographic imaging since 1929. From small and large format color graphics to cross media marketing campaigns, the company offers an assortment of cost-effective print solutions. A city of Chicago-certified Women’s Business Enterprise (WBE), the organization’s philosophy is firmly rooted in going the extra mile to provide optimal customer service. From short run to wide format color printing and cross media marketing, our network provides access to over 200 industry partners, across the globe.  Projects are executed with care and precision. 

Through out the spring, we have had the honor of working with animator and printmaker, Ali Aschman, as our 19th Artist in Residence.

From March through May, she has been diligently working in the studio, creating a ton of new artwork.  Her portfolio of woodcuts and screenprints that will be used to create a stop-motion animation, integrating the process of printmaking with a filmed narrative. Ali starts with flat prints, then cuts, collages, and photographs to create new environments reminiscent of the dioramas we made as youth. Within these hand-made worlds, characters enact mysterious, melancholy narratives that question innocence, violence, and moral grey areas.

Her allegorical new animation will screen in The Annex at Spudnik Press as part of her solo exhibition, The Wrong Story, on July 19. Spudnik Press Cooperative’s next resident will begin their sojourn in September of 2014. Applications will be available on July 1.

We are thrilled to announce that we just brought home our newest addition to the Spudnik family: Our very own Risograph! Staff has a little work to do before we will be able to authorize artists. But rest assured, this Risography will be making itself useful in the near future.

More details are coming soon!

Hold on tight, Spudnik is switching things up! Beginning Tuesday July 1st, we will no longer be offering an orientation on Monday evenings. Instead we will be offering studio orientations regularly on Tuesdays & Fridays. Don’t worry—they are still free and you still do not have to make an appointment.

Why the switch up? By offering orientations on Tuesdays and Fridays Spudnik will be able to do a better job providing consistent and reliable orientations. To maximize our bandwidth, the weekly orientations will now align with our business hours.

What’s that you say? Monday is the only day of the week you have available?! Spudnik still offers by appointment orientations for those who cannot make the standing orientation sessions. Here is the Recap:

Spudnik Orientations:

MONDAYS:  6 pm sharp
TUESDAYS:  6 pm sharp
FRIDAYS:  Noon sharp

Featured Artists:

Ali Aschman

Dates:

July 19 – August 23, 2014

Location:

The Annex @ Spudnik Press

Opening Reception:

Saturday, July 19, 6:00-9:00pm

Press Release:

The Wrong Story is a solo exhibition of relief and silkscreen prints made while Aschman was Artist in Residence at Spudnik Press from March through May, 2014, and an accompanying stop-motion animation created from the printed works. Aschman employs symbolic motifs such as ropes, braids, ladders and hands, which through intuitive association form a fractured narrative about moments of convergence and separation between individuals. She embraces incoherence and ambiguity to communicate the fragmented and uneasy experience of encountering another person’s reality. Limbs detach, bodies open to reveal hidden objects, peculiar figures gather among stepped archways, hesitating to touch, in an endless loop with no discernable climax or resolution. The Wrong Story wavers at the frayed edges of a narrative, unraveling the artist’s desire for both connection and solitude.

Artist Bio:

Ali Aschman is a Chicago-based artist whose practice encompasses printmaking, animation and installation, exploring forms of experimental narrative across media. She received a BA from the University of Cape Town in South Africa, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited internationally in numerous gallery exhibitions and film festivals, and was recently inducted as a Visual Arts Fellow by the Luminarts Cultural Foundation. Ali will be spending the next few months at several residency programs around the United States, creating animations and works on paper.

This week our online store has gained prints from two of our most recent Artists in Residence: Veronica Siehl and Hannah Ireland.

Veronica Siehl spent her summer 2013 residency creating a series of cyanotype and letterpress prints. She combined a series of poems with cyanotypes to create suites of delicately printed poems. Additionally, Siehl completed a series of large cyanotype prints.

Hannah Ireland based her Fall 2013 residency work on exploring and creating around a hiking trip in Spain and Portugal in the summer of 2013 – specifically walking portions of the long distance hiking track the GR11, which follows the peak of the Pyrenees, and El Camino de Santiago del Norte, a pilgrimage route along the northern coast of Spain to Santiago de Compostela. According to Ireland, she was interested “in how recognizable imagery from nature and the actual locations I visited – which are tangible, real, and lasting – will combine with abstracted imagery from the subjective memory of my experience there – which is intangible, enigmatic and changes as time passes.”

This spring, Spudnik Press has working with Keith Herzik, known both for his gig posters and his non-linear colorful zines under the moniker Alamo Igloo. When creating our short list for who we would like to work with in 2014, we got obsessed with the idea of translating a loose hang-drawn line to a carved wood block. We aspired to merge the best of two distinct print processes: The loose, flowing, and graphic marks of a screenprint and the textural physicality of a relief print.

We still have lots of carving, proofing, and printing before we are ready to unveil this year’s print. In the mean time, Spudnik just joined Instagram and will share progress as we complete this epic print! Plus, pre-orders will be available soon!

This week we are adding two unique sets of prints to our online store:

In 2010, a group of Spudnik artists collaborated to produce a suite of prints to celebrate Issue #1 of Artiface Magazine. The suite consists of 10 stylized and colorful prints that each correlate with a written work found within the magazine.

Printers Ball is a celebration of literary and printmaking culture in Chicago. Join us for a summer afternoon and evening of conversation with more nerds than you can shake a stick at.

Are you a secret nerd?

Plan your Printers Ball itinerary:

Brain Frame Comix Reading
Bookmaking w/ Leah Mackin
App Development Ink-U-Bator
Printmaking Demos
Comic Jam with Trubble Club
Chip Kidd on Design

Plus a BEER GARDEN sponsored by Maria’s Packaged Goods and more!

For full details, check out printersball.org

Three more collections of prints from some of our past artists in residence have been added to our online store: Ingrid Olson completed her residency in the summer of 2011. Interested in the concept of slowing down time, Olson enlarges her works in an attempt to make small moments less manageable. Her process begins by enlarging original grease pencil drawings which carry the slight texture of paper through the mark making. During her residency, Olson completed a series of singular screen printed drawings, enlarged from smaller charcoal drawings. During her summer 2010 residency, Jessica Taylor Caponigro examined the psychological affects of seemingly faux luxury materials and artificial domestic items. She is interested in the dichotomy of synthetic materials and their ability to maintain beauty while inherently retaining a sense of their own failure. During her residency, Taylor Caponigro printed a subtly complex edition of etchings; wallpaper patterns inspired by class differences in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1874). Nicole Kita was our artist in residence in the fall of 2011. During her residency, Kita investigated the mimetic qualities, transactional symbols, and legitimizing practices of ritual, or symbolic healing. A healer evokes symbols or metaphors in dramatic action and aesthetic performance that provide a material language through which a patient can express, understand, or transform the personal or interpersonal conflicts underlying his or her illness.