Lotería takes its name and structure from the iconic Mexican card game, repurposing its symbolic imagery as a framework for deeply personal storytelling. Each piece in the series functions like a card drawn from the deck — a moment, a symbol, a feeling — mapping Santana’s relationship to her own cultural identity across the full arc of her life. That relationship, as the work makes clear, is not a simple one. The exhibition holds space for the embarrassment and shame that can accompany cultural identity, particularly across generations and geographies, alongside the profound love, gratitude, and pride that run just as deep and just as true.

Through this series, Santana revisits pivotal stages of her life, pairing personal memory with the cultural symbols that have traveled with her family across generations. The result is a body of work that is at once a family portrait, a self-portrait, and an act of reclamation — a chance to look back at inherited culture not with the eyes of a child who wanted to fit in, but with the clarity and appreciation of an adult who understands what she was given.

Karla Santana is a first generation Mexican-American designer and illustrator from Chicago. As a self-proclaimed “serial-hobbyist,” she enjoys exploring a variety of mediums from Risograph printing, screenprinting, sewing, and crochet, and more. She often combines multiple mediums to create whimsical pieces that integrate nostalgic elements of her childhood with playful characters and a vibrant, character-driven visual language.

Lotería is on view at Spudnik Press, 1821 W. Hubbard St., Chicago, IL 60622. Gallery hours are Monday-Saturday 10am-6pm.

Programs at Spudnik Press are partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council Agency, the Driehaus Foundation, and the Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation.

Featured Artists:

Joshi Radin Flores | Steve Harhaj | Kelly Kristin Jones | Colleen Keihm | Alysha Kostelny | Nyeema Morgan | Siena Peterson | Alex Scott | Candace Turner

Dates:

March 14, 2025 – April 12, 2025

Location:

Spudnik Press Annex Gallery

Event:

PRESSed Together | Opening Reception

Friday, March 14

5:00pm CST

Visiting the Exhibition:

Visitors can make an appointment by emailing info@spudnikpress.org. Please include the date and time you would like to visit, and number of people in your party. We are typically able to accommodate visits between 10:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. Monday – Saturday and occasional weeknights.

About the Exhibition:

“PRESSed together” is the culminating group show of the artist cohort of Spudnik’s inaugural Community Mentorship Program. This exhibition is a collaboration of multiple communities with Spudnik Press, with 8 selected artists engaging in 6 weekly sessions on monotype printing under the guidance of Spudnik Press Teaching Artist and Mentor Anders Zanichkowsky. The curated prints from the program duration are available for purchase, benefiting participating artists, the organizations they represent, and Spudnik Press.

About the Cohort:

Joshi Radin Flores

Joshi Radin Flores is an artist and writer living in Chicago. Working independently and collaboratively, she generates and examines practices of valuation and questions investigating nature, cosmology and expanded landscape. She completed MFA (2016) and MA (2018) degrees in Photography and Visual and Critical Studies as a New Artist Society merit scholar at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her collaborative artist research group with Linda Tegg and Brian M. John, A Program for Plants, received a Shapiro Center EAGER grant for their investigations with plants and empathy. She has performed at Queens Museum, exhibited in the US and abroad, presented at conferences on art and ecology and published essays on art and nature. She had her first solo show of photographic works in the fall of 2017 and held the 2017 Dangler Curatorial Fellowship at The Art Institute of Chicago. She currently lectures in the photography department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Steve Harhaj

Born in Chicago in 1949, Steve Harhaj joined the Chicago Studio in 2007. As an artist driven by process, repetition, and an interest in the natural world, Harhaj layers color and form to create idyllic landscapes populated by decoratively stylized imagery – chirping birds, perky tulips and daisies, ruffly clouds within clouds, and singular almond-shaped leaves that appear to float mid-air. Working across painting, drawing, and collage, his compositions are usually anchored by arches, multicolored grids, or radiating square patterns he describes as boxes, and given charmingly descriptive titles like Trees + Flowers + Leaves + Birds or Box Box Box Box Box Box Fence. He also often incorporates elements typical of classic Americana such as stars, American flags, county fairs, and picket fences. Using these recurring motifs, archetypal symbols, and patterns, he has devised an easily recognizable aesthetic reminiscent of folk art, and artists like William L. Hawkins and Morris Hirschfield.

Kelly Kristin Jones

Kelly Kristin Jones was raised on the West Side of Chicago and received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the recipient of a number of awards and fellowships including a 2024 Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship Award and an Individual Artists Program Grant from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. She was a featured artist in the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial and the 2023 Chicago Humanities Festival.

Colleen Keihm

Colleen Keihm (born in Levittown, NY and currently residing in Chicago, IL) received her BS from Drexel University and her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is currently the Executive Director of Latitude which maintains a community digital lab and artist residency. Her work has been exhibited in Chicago at Flatland, Roman Susan, Filter Photo, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid. She has been an artist in residence at Hatch Projects at the Chicago Artist Coalition, Institut fur alles Mogliche in Berlin, Germany, and Writing Space in Chicago. Her work is a part of the photography collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and she is a proud member of the Midwest Photographers Project.

Alysha Kostelny

Born and raised in Chicago, Alysha Kostelny currently lives on the Northwest Side. Kostelny’s approach to art-making is driven by experimentation, curiosity, and an exploration of various surfaces, textures, and applications of paint. She enjoys researching modern and contemporary artists, gleaning inspiration from myriad concepts and processes. Kostelny has a natural inclination toward hard-edge abstraction, though her work often straddles both abstraction and representation. Drawn to simplified organic forms and geometric shapes, she translates source imagery (often referencing art history, architecture, or the natural world) through reductive, bold color fields.

Nyeema Morgan

Nyeema Morgan’s work references familiar cultural material such as recipes, fables, canonical artworks and jokes to prompt reflection on the soft aesthetic power of systems of knowledge, information production and the mechanics of representation. Her conceptually layered works, ranging from large-scale drawings to sculptural installation and print based media, raise questions about how we articulate and construct meaning within a complex system of socio-political relations.

Siena Peterson

Siena Peterson is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago, IL. Her art practice is made up of various media including oil paint, charcoal, and performance work. Her work is an ongoing study of the personal battle of one’s internal and external self and is a way for her to document the bodily space that we inhibit and emotional depth hidden within. She received her BFA from The University of Illinois at Chicago in Interdisciplinary Education within the Arts and a minor in Fine Arts. Her work has been featured at The Hyde Park Art Center, Martin Gallery, Fulton Street Art Collective, and Figure One Gallery, among others. She was a selected resident of the LAUNCH Invitational Residency at the Chicago Artists Coalition in 2019, as well as the DAWA Artist Residency and Bridge Residency Cohort in 2022.

Alex Scott

Alex Scott was born in 1987 and is a Chicago native. Known for his use of simplified forms and flat, bright colors, Scott’s fresh, direct approach to drawing and painting embodies a sense of nostalgia. His preferred materials are ballpoint pen, colored pencils, and acrylic. Scott’s influences range from cartoons and comics to classic mystery-comedy movies to children’s books, gaining continued inspiration from favorite books once read – The Phantom Tollbooth, Sam and the Firefly, In a People House by Dr. Suess, as well as books found in the studio. Neat arrangements of recurring characters, household objects, numbers, text, and symbols are frequently organized by letters of the alphabet and at times appear reminiscent of hieroglyphics. He often repetitively recreates past drawings or characters from memory with ease and accuracy, which results in slightly shifting iterations over years. This ongoing body of work exists across both individual works on paper and series of drawings in distinct sketchbooks. Recent exhibitions include EXPO Chicago, the Outsider Art Fair in NYC, Hand Drawn Circle at Intuit, and Dog Show curated by KG, among others. His work is part of the ArtBank permanent collection in McCook, Nebraska.

Candace Turner

Born in 1990, Candace spent most of her 20s living at the notorious Shapiro Developmental Center, Illinois’s largest state institution. In 2019 she transitioned into a community setting, something she describes as having “saved” her. Candaces work embodies the sense of freedom she feels having been able to leave the institution. Groups of tattooed, scantily clad women imbue confidence as they lounge at the beach, dance together in their home, or pose nude in compositions that allude to historical masterpieces. Simple line work and flat fields of color create a consistent, distinct style that reflects Candace’s years of commitment to her practice. Candace’s brilliance is still blossoming as she embraces her freedom and develops a sense of self as a professional artist and a self actualized individual.

Program Mentor:

Anders Zanichkowsky came to Chicago in 2019 after getting their MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where they concentrated in printmaking and religious art & studies. They are an interdisciplinary artist who also works in papermaking, textiles, neon, video, poetry, and performance, and they are the owner of Burial Blankets, weaving custom shrouds for green burial that are meant for enjoyment and reflection during life.

In 2016 Anders was an artist in residence with The Arctic Circle sailing expedition in Svalbard, and their work has been shown across the U.S. and abroad including The Wisconsin Film Festival and the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art. Anders has taught all ages and backgrounds with a focus on printmaking, drawing, and DIY-style professional development for working artists, including while on staff at Spudnik from 2019 – 2021.

Program Curators:

Jill Nahrstedt is an artist, mother, surfer, and traveler exploring relationships between the self and place. She accomplishes this through the use of color and images in her paintings, pivoting between realism and abstraction, combining them both in some pieces. Jill is seeking the layers that make a life.

She is the founder and curator of Far North Side Gallery, a micro gallery in Chicago. Her work has been shown throughout the United States and can be found on several walls as Murals in Chicago where she lives with her husband and two children. Nahrstedt also prints serigraphs of local architectural groupings, dabbles in surf art, and paints portraits of stranger-neighbors she sources from social media.

Yang Pulongbarit-Cuevo is a papercut artist based in Chicago who began as a political cartoonist in the Philippines. Her work often draws inspiration from nature, anatomy, music, and folklore.

As an immigrant born and raised in an archipelago with rich cultural heritage contrasted by a history of political unrest, Pulongbarit-Cuevo also creates pieces informed by societal observations and emotional abstraction. Her work has been shown in exhibitions in California, New York, Illinois, and the Philippines, as well as publications including The Chicago Reader. She is currently serving as a board member for the Guild of American Papercutters and is working as managing director for Spudnik Press. On weekends, she hosts a weekly show for 107.1FM, an independent radio station in North Center Chicago.

Participating Organizations:

Arts of Life is a Chicago organization that advances the creative arts community by providing artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities a collective space to expand their practice and strengthen their leadership skills.

Latitude Chicago is a nonprofit community digital lab in Chicago that maintains high-end printing and scanning equipment, processes 35mm and 120 color negative film, operates an artist in residence program, and organizes ongoing arts programming.

——————–

Programs at Spudnik Press are partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council Agency, the Driehaus Foundation, and the Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation.

This project is partially supported by a Chicago Arts Recovery Program grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events.

Logo designed by Riesling Dong

Amanda Lilleston & Lisa Matthias

Dates:

7/16/2021 – 8/31/2021

Location:

Spudnik Press Cooperative

Events

WaterBodies | Artist Talk & Virtual Reception
Tuesday July 20
7:00 p.m. CST

Visiting the Exhibition:

Visitors can make an appointment by emailing info@spudnikpress.org. Please include the date and time you would like to visit, and number of people in your party. We are typically able to accommodate visits between 10:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. Monday – Saturday and occasional weeknights.

Exhibition Statement:

WaterBodies features immersive relief prints by Amanda Lilleston and Lisa Matthias. 

Amanda Lilleston explores interconnected systems of biology and physiology. In her work, human beings are integrated into the larger ecosystem. Translucent prints depicting tissues, organs, and anatomical structures are layered with botanical and zoological forms. The membranous quality of the paper allows tendons, arteries, and tissues to connect and create new pathways unhindered by physiological limitations. Blood, bones, and the botanical are suspended in water and susceptible to its density, nourishment, and perpetual movement. Organic forms shift and adapt together. They shape and are shaped by their environment. 

Lisa Matthias’ artwork builds on this worldview where nature is not a separate entity but is a web. Her prints featured in WaterBodies stem from a collaboration with a colleague and scientist studying algae, aquatic ecology, and a microscopic group of algae called diatoms. Diatoms are intricately patterned single-celled organisms responsible for producing a large proportion of Earth’s oxygen. Her large scale prints embrace ambiguity. They are abstract and referential, expressive and structured, graphic and sculptural. They are simultaneously architectural and biological and could reference man-made constructions, microscopic worlds, or they could be otherworldly. 

By bringing together prints by these two artists, WaterBodies invites viewers to consider the relationships within and between humans and the natural world. With a focus on biological forms, these larger-than-life prints embrace a sense of wonder and appreciation for anatomy and ecology. They urge us to seek out unity and harmony with the biological environment that we are unmistakably a part of.

Image Credit:
(Left) Amanda Lilleston, Waterform (detail)
(Right) Lisa Matthias, Diatom Construction II (detail)

Farnaz Khosh-Sirat and Hope Wang

Dates:

5/21/2021 – 7/2/2021

Location:

Spudnik Press Cooperative

Events

The Hunger Will Wake Us | Artist Talk & Virtual Reception
Sunday, June 6
1:00 – 2:00 p.m.
Zoom Meeting ID: 9199 0613 028

The Hunger Will Wake Us | Artist-Led Gallery Hours
Sunday, June 13
1:00 – 4:00 p.m.

Press Release:

This exhibition brings together new print work from Hope Wang and Farnaz Khosh-Sirat, who each explore the translational process of materializing digital animations and poetry text into print. Together they reflect on events of displacement through the metaphor of simultaneously losing and finding new meaning and new form via the act of translation.

Hope Wang uses printmaking, handweaving, painting, and photography to reimagine spatial association and visual perception. Wang references the architectural landscape as a malleable document of visual language where building facades become eroded, redacted, and defaced. Farnaz Khosh-Sirat is an Iranian light artist whose work employs digital tools to enhance human experiences of the sublime. Through the use of Persian architectural structures and patterns, Khosh-Sirat personifies human fragility in the contrasting positions between man and nature.

By reconfiguring fragments of hyper-specific architectural details, their works become “false” copies and traces of their constructed memories. These palimpsests’ postures of longing aren’t just decorative, but also serve as coded languages of their own.

Image Credit:
(Left) Farnaz Khosh-Sirat, Leyl (detail), screenprint on steel, 2021
(Right) Hope Wang, the night croaked with the ache of cicadas (detail), paper collage, 2021

Teresita Carson Valdez, Sam Hensley, Miller & Shellabarger, Yasaman Moussavi, Kianni Pleasant-Bey, Joshi Radin, Don Widmer

Juror:

Ruby T

Dates:

11/9/2020 – 1/9/2021

Location:

Spudnik Press Cooperative (Annex)

Events

Shelter in the Speculative | Virtual Reception & Artists Talk
Monday, November 30
7:00 – 8:30 p.m. 
Zoom Meeting ID: 966 4803 1564

Shelter in the Speculative | Gallery Hours
Most Mondays 2:00 – 6:00 p.m.
Most Thursdays 2:00 – 7:00 p.m.
Most Fridays 10:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Sunday, December 12, 1:00 – 3:00 p.m. with Don Widmer
Most Saturdays, 10:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m. with Sam Hensley

Press Release:

For the 2020 Member Exhibition, Juror Ruby T has selected artworks that have a powerful physical presence: works that feel like a form of shelter, or are an extension or impression of the artist’s own body. During the pandemic, and mass movements for revolution, this exhibition asks: What kinds of physical and relational structures will we need, or need to build, in order to survive? How will the warmth and softness of our bodies guide us? 

In Audre Lorde’s 1978 essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power,” she defines the erotic as “…a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire.” She goes on to write: “In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.”

Kianni Pleasant-Bey includes excerpts from Lorde’s essay in Fever Dream, a soft altar space rooted in protecting and nurturing Black femmes/womxn and all that they embody. Sometimes prayerful, sometimes geometric, sometimes grim, all of the works in this exhibition show reverence for the power of the erotic and the sensual to help us navigate pleasure, illness, rest, memorial, and violence. 

Like a body, an artwork experiences and projects a physical life as it moves through the world. Experiencing art in this time of pandemic, we can more closely approach an artist’s work than we can the artist. With their rich textures and tactile materials, the works in this exhibition are further activated by proximity. 

Yasaman Moussavi’s Revelation paper pulp sculpture references the traditional central courtyard of Persian domestic architecture as a site of spatial and social interactions, along with family correspondence as a means of emotional and social exchange between family members in and far away from home.

Teresita Carson Valdez’s work draws inspiration from translation as world building, the histories of cloth, the palimpsest, the creation of new traditions and archeological imagery as markers of temporality. Her screen-printed and dyed cloth sculpture, A novena for the plague, feels like a sacred object for private prayer, made public via the extreme circumstances of the pandemic, undergirded by the movement of bodies through global trade and displacement. 

Even when viewed remotely, these works still insist on an awareness of our own spatial relationship to the artists’ bodies and internal worlds, via the stand-in, or symbolic object of the work. Miller & Shellabarger‘s Untitled pressure prints show layers upon layers of hands, giving the impression of being reached toward, or beckoned. The process for creating these images relies on physical pressure or force to create this bodily imprint, underscoring the labor and rhythm of human relationships— a theme at the heart of this collaboration between the married artists. Their gestures shift between moments of togetherness and separation, private and public, protection and pain, and visibility and invisibility. 

Don Widmer’s Darkness and Light, an artist flag book, presents quotes by Etty Hillesum, a Dutch mystic and writer, who documented her life during the German occupation of Amsterdam and her experiences at Westerbork concentration camp. The harsh, stacked geometry of the black book evokes a prison cell block, rooting our current crises of incarceration and fascism in the historical. 

Joshi Radin’s CardboardRecord006_1, made from found packing materials and used clothing in infant proportions, feels like an ultrasound from outer space after the aliens got their hands on our cardboard waste. The print records the marking of an absent body, as both a unit and a package, on a horizontal plane. 

Sam Hensley’s Little Like Yourself presents an animatronic sculpture of a mythical creature resting atop a miniature bed, its breathing slow and belabored. This piece evokes reclaimed experiences of chronic illness and disability, in which rest may be proudly claimed and celebrated. Beds become more than of convalescence, but also soft zones of  pleasure and even performance—bed as stage, stage as shelter, shelter as communion between bodies near and far.   

This exhibition’s optimism comes from its insistence on human touch, physical care and pleasure, and the act of sheltering each other, as if to say: “Even during apocalypse, even when we must rebuild everything, we will still have our bodies and each other’s bodies.”

Image Credit, clockwise from top left:

• Yasaman Moussavi, Revelation 2, 2019, handmade paper and screenprint (detail)
• Kianni Pleasant-Bey, Fever Dream, 2019, mixed media (detail)
• Joshi Radin, Cardboard Record 006, 2020, monotype (detail)
• Teresita Carson Valdez, A Novena for the Plague, 2019, screenprint, silk, dye discharge (detail)
• Sam Hensley, Little Like Yourself, 2019, animatronic sculpture and zine (detail)
• Miller & Shellebarger, Untitled 2, 2019, pressure print
• Don Widmer, Darkness and Light: Words of Etty Hillesum, 2020, artist book (detail)

Candida Alvarez, Alexandra Antoine, Judith Brotman, Andrea Carlson, Celeste DeLuna, Brendan Fernandes, Azadeh Gholizadeh, Erin Hayden, Benjamin Merritt, Jessie Mott, Paul Nudd, João Oliveria, Steve Reinke, Joe Tallarico, Selina Trepp

Dates:

8/24/2020 – 10/31/2020

Location:

Spudnik Press Cooperative (Printshop & Annex)

Events

Open House
Saturday, September 13, 2020
1:00 – 5:00 p.m.

Press Release:

With Renewed Urgency is our annual exhibition featuring new prints by 15 artists, created through our Residency and Invitational Publishing Programs. This exhibition reflects on the unique power of a printmaking studio to breathe new life into the art making process, and how we depend on art during times of crisis for solace and meaning. Our title and theme With Renewed Urgency is also a chance to reflect on how the current pandemic has escalated already existing social emergencies that many of our featured artists have long been making work about. The call of Andrea Carlson and Celeste De Luna’s Indigenous Futurism rings even louder, as capitalism and colonization turn COVID-19 into an economic disaster. Others like Selina Trepp and Benjamin Merritt give us critical and pleasurable ways to reconsider what it means for an artist to remain homebound, reduce their material consumption, or need to rest because of an illness.

Other show highlights include a collagraph impression of the pelt of a plastic animal by our first international Resident Artist, João Oliveira, organized in collaboration with Comfort Station and funded by the MacArthur Foundation’s International Connections Fund. The prints from Ten x Ten show a collaboration between visual artists and musicians exploring the translation of artistic gestures across media.

The Spudnik Press Cooperative Residency Program provides professional printmakers unfettered studio access for new projects. The Publishing Program welcomes artists from a variety of contemporary disciplines, ranging from painting and drawing to performance and experiential art making, to enter a centuries-old tradition of developing a fine art print in collaboration with professional printers. Through these programs, Spudnik Press invites a diverse range of artists to continue printmaking’s unique history as a fine art, a master craft, and a social practice. With Renewed Urgency showcases traditional process and new experiments in screenprint, intaglio, relief, collagraph, and digital printing, as well as an impressive range of monotype techniques and prints that used the plate-making process as a form of sculpture. By installing the exhibition throughout the printshop in which the artwork was produced, we embrace our goal of encouraging artists and audiences to move through a variety of creative roles: making, experiencing, learning, and teaching. Placing the artwork into an active print studio highlights connection among the creative, the analytical and the technical processes of art making.

Image:
Left: Benjamin Merrit, Nap Suite
Right, clockwise from top left: Alexandra Antoine, Nkrabea: A coming together; Jessie Mott, OF SOUND AND LINE; Selina Trepp, 7 beats, don’t want to do 8, it’s too square; Azadeh Gholizadeh, Memory Bubbles

Featured Artists:

Lauren Anderson, Atlan Arceo-Witzl, Alana Bailey, Ryan Basile, L. Berger, Lilli Carré, Veronica Corzo-Duchardt, Luke Daly & Bailey Romaine, Anya Davidson, Jo Dery, JNL Design, Alex Fuller, Craig Hansen, Walker Kampf-Lassin, Angee Lennard, Cynthia Marris, Keara McGraw, Michelle Miller, Jennifer O’Neill, Colin Palombi, Adam Paul, Mike Pennekamp, Chloe Perkis, Jason Pickelman, Joey Potts, Reba Rakstad, Brad Rohloff, Jill Ruzicka, Mary Sea, Emily Serruto, Derek Smith, and Joe Tallarico

Dates:

2/17/2020 – 4/8/2020

Location:

Spudnik Press Cooperative, 1821 West Hubbard, Chicago IL 60622

Corresponding Events:

Charlie and the Hashbrown Factory: 10th Annual Spudnik Press Chili Cook-Off

Exhibition Statement:

From zine fests to shows at The Hideout to Spudnik’s own “Heavy Metal County Fair” themed chili cook-off, our artists have designed stunning visuals for some of the city’s most well loved and experimental events in theatre, literature, music, and the arts. Don’t miss this deep dive into our archives, which includes 3-D posters, wearable posters, and posters so smart they come with books!

This 13-year retrospective of the Chicago arts scene through handprinted posters features screen, offset, and risography prints produced at Spudnik Press Cooperative through both open studio and in-house publishing programs.

Featured Artist:

Jessica Christy

Dates:

11/15/2019 – 1/18/2020

Location:

Spudnik Press Cooperative, 1821 West Hubbard, Chicago IL 60622

Corresponding Events:

Domestic Tides / Indigenous Mind | Opening Reception & Artist Talk

Exhibition Statement:

Domestic Tides / Indigenous Mind explores a move from the prairies of North Dakota to the urban environment of Chicago. The exhibition considers Jessica Christy’s transplanted indigenous identity, one connected to place, in the midst of a culture shock. While exploring a new city, both foreign and known images were gathered: deer hair, parking signs, coyote tracks, municipal tickets, bird feathers, and corner store signs. Through self-applied cultural guilt and gender expectations, visuals emerge that suggest the artist’s voice is becoming comfortable in the 21st century metropolis.

As traditional printmaking moves from a commercial process to fine art editions to a contemporary medium, artists are continually exploring new matrices and substrates and their conceptual implications. The work in Domestic Tides / Indigenous Mind stems from a fascination with this contemporary shift. Images are transferred through print onto surfaces found and gathered in Chicago. The artist’s cultural and personal transition from the Great Plains to an urban Chicago environment is represented on found wood, fabric, and other surfaces through text and imagery gathered in a daily journal. Domestic Tides / Indigenous Mind employs these new substrates to intimately speak to the artist’s experiences of cultural disconnect, domestic struggles, and a general liaison with her new environment.

Download the Press Release

Artist Bio:

Christy is a native North Dakotan, born to two artists on the Sanger Art Farm, located at the northern edge of the Sheyenne River Valley. She received her MFA from the University of North Dakota in 2011 and has since created works that challenge the status quo of human activity and the resulting impacts. Heavily influenced by her upbringing in the Dakota and Lakota cultures, Christy weaves the Native experience into her work. She has shown both nationally and internationally, most recently at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Find further information at www.jessicachristy.com.

Image: Jessica Christy, Untitled (chic), 2019

Vidisha Aggarwal
Reevah Agarwaal
Lisa Armstrong
Cat Chen
Elke Claus
Kyle Dunlap
Lya Finston
Rita Gondocs
Elnaz Javani
M Kellman
Steve Kerber
Dave Krzeminski
Gary Lehman
Dutes Miller
Yasi Moussavi
Catherine Norcott
Trent Pierson
Hope Wang

Dates:

8/30/2019-11/2/2019

Location:

Spudnik Press Cooperative, 1821 West Hubbard, Chicago IL 60622

Corresponding Events:

Reception! Prints United: 2019 Member Exhibition

Press Release:

This exhibition highlights the thing that brings us all together: Print!

Prints United: 2019 Member Exhibition features a wide variety of print-centered art making that happens at Spudnik Press Cooperative. Printmakers and fans alike are invited to celebrate the work of our beloved print geeks, relief devotees, intaglio fans, serial serigraphers, and letterpress lovers.

From the Exhibitions Committee:

“At Spudnik Press, we all feel welcome, whether we wipe plates, roll ink, or squeegee shapes. We all have in common a deep curiosity about print and an appreciation for the way ink transforms our ideas into reality. This exhibition celebrates the cacophony of visual statements made each day at Spudnik Press.”

This exhibition celebrates the cacophony of visual statements made each day at Spudnik Press.  

Download the Press Release

Noah Breuer

Dates:

6/7/2019-7/27/2019

Location:

Annex of Spudnik Press Cooperative, 1821 West Hubbard, Chicago IL 60622

Corresponding Events:

Noah Breuer: CB&S Werkstätte | Opening Reception & Artist Demonstration

June 7, 2019 6:00 – 9:00pm

Press Release:

In his first Chicago solo exhibition, Noah Breuer presents prints and fabric wall hangings from his ongoing project that examines the visual legacy of “Carl Breuer and Sons” (CB&S), his Jewish family’s former textile printing business in Bohemia. The exhibition’s title, CB&S Werkstätte is a nod to the now-defunct family business that began in 1897 and was forcibly sold to Nazi-approved owners in 1942. Breuer acquired a rich digital collection of original CB&S designs and fabric samples during a 2016 research trip to the Czech Textile Museum and has used these images as the primary source material for his current work.  The exhibition features recent laser-engraved woodblock prints, large cyanotypes on cotton and an accompanying risograph-printed artist book published by Spudnik Press.   

In conjunction with the opening, Breuer will facilitate a demonstration that will allow exhibition attendees to use the laser-engraved surfaces of custom-built table-tops to make wax rubbings.  Attendees may collaborate with the artist and produce new artworks inspired by the CB&S factory designs.  The table-tops will be displayed and made available for use through the duration of the exhibition. 

About the artist:  Noah Breuer is an American artist and printmaker.  He holds a BFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design, and an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University. Breuer additionally earned a graduate research certificate in traditional woodblock printmaking and paper-making from Kyoto Seika University in Japan. Solo exhibitions include Spudnik Press Cooperative, Chicago, IL, Left Field Gallery, San Luis Obispo, CA, SPACE Gallery, Portland ME, and Zughaus Gallery in Berkeley, CA. He has attended residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Ox-Bow, Kala Art Institute, Hotel Pupik, Grin City and the University of Oregon. His artist books have been published by the San Francisco Center for the Book as well as Small Editions in Brooklyn, New York. His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Victoria & Albert Museum.  Currently, Breuer works as an Assistant Professor at Auburn University. 

Image:  Hops, 2018, woodcut, 22″ x 15”

Carris Adams, Claire Ashley, Judith Brotman, Elijah Burgher, Holly Cahill, Lilli Carre, Dana Carter, Tom Christison, kg, Jonathan Herrera, Richard Hull, Anita Jung, Raeleen Kao, Chad Kouri, Benjamin Larose, Judy Ledgerwood, Faheem Majeed, David Leggett, Caroline Liu, Jereon Nelemans, Paul Nudd, William J. O’Brien, Roni Packer, Steve Reinke, Kay Rosen. Alice Tippit, Orkideh Torabi, Amanda Williams, Brittney Leeanne Williams

Dates:

4/5/2019 – 5/25/2019

Location:

Spudnik Press Cooperative (Printshop & Annex)

Corresponding Events:

Opening Reception & Publisher’s Talk
Friday, April 5, 2019
6:00 – 9:00pm

Press Release:

Eternal Recurrence: New Editions from Spudnik Press Cooperative features prints by 28 artists who recently developed new print-based projects through the Spudnik Press Cooperative Residency and Publishing Programs.

The Spudnik Press Cooperative Residency Program provides artists unfettered studio access to produce a new body of print-based work. For the first time in 2018, the Residency Program was open to national artists in addition to local artists. Renowned printmakers Anita Jung and Tom Christison travelled from Iowa City to be our first regional visiting artists.

The Spudnik Press Cooperative Publishing Program invites artists representing a variety of contemporary disciplines—ranging from painting and drawing to performance and experiential art making—to develop a fine art print in collaboration with professional printers at Spudnik Press.

Together, these programs provide entry point into the unique facets of printmaking, such as its historical and cultural roots as a social art practice and its role in contemporary art practices.

The phrase Eternal Recurrence is borrowed from Steve Reinke’s print entitled Eternal Recurrence of Shame from his series featuring absurd, crude, humorous, and poetic aphorisms and short phrases. Reinke’s piece references a phenomenon Nietzsche calls “eternal recurrence” in a passage from The Gay Science. In the passage, Nietzsche asserts that existence may recur in an infinite cycle as energy and matter transform over time.

The artists included in this exhibition maintain a wide range of studio practices and experiential art making. Eternal Recurrence reflects the continual transformation of ink and paper to reflect artists’ visions and honors the act of creation as a continuous process responsive to a particular time and place–a particular recurrence of the infinite possibilities.

The work in Eternal Recurrence features screenprinting, relief, letterpress, intaglio, and monoprinting techniques, using a range of traditional and nontraditional materials and bringing together an impressive collection of artists. Each prints reflects the artist’s vision and dedication to their individual practices while showcasing the creative, analytical and technical processes of art making.

Image: Cerulean Blue Series #2, kg, 2017

Ashley Freeby
Jesse Meredith

Dates:

1/11/2019 – 3/16/2019

Location:

The Annex @ Spudnik Press

Corresponding Events:

Opening Reception & Artist Talk
Friday, January 11, 2019
6:00 – 9:00pm

Press Release:

Emerging from recurring conversations about access, authenticity and authorship, artists Ashley Freeby and Jesse Meredith make artwork around and through one another’s experiences, from outside of their own cultural backgrounds. Over the course of a year, they have worked in one another’s studios, traded primary research sources and conducted a series of structured conversations about their own personal experiences. Non-Constants presents recent work that has stemmed from this exchange.

Many of their collaborative artworks address racialized experiences in the United States and transpose them with survivalism and defensive preparation. Using a technique of doubling, one artist produces a piece through synthesis of conversations and research, and the other re-makes it, displacing its context.

At a time of polarization and broken lines of communication, Non-Constants asks viewers to consider the impact of their own presence in the environments they inhabit, to reclaim permission to be inquisitive and open, and think outside of individualized experiences.

About the Artists:

Ashley M. Freeby (b. 1986, rural Pennsylvania) is a multidisciplinary artist whose incisive exploration of American history builds a critical examination through found sources to reveal how the history of injustices against people of color inform our understanding of society today. Recent solo exhibitions, Unjustified Patterns, Kanzlei, Berlin Germany and Palimpsest: present through past, GalleryX, Chicago. In addition, she has participated in group exhibitions in Canada, Chicago and Pennsylvania. Freeby is a 2019 HATCH Projects resident at Chicago Artist Coalition, received An Artist Opportunity Fellowship from Vermont Studio Center and participated in a residency at Institut für Alles Mögliche, Berlin, Germany. She received a MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago 2018 and a BA from Bucknell University 2015.

Jesse Meredith is an interdisciplinary artist working with photography, sculpture, text and video to undermine power structures and complicate simplified narratives of belonging. Born in New York City (1987), he grew up splitting his time between rural Gilboa, New York and Brooklyn. Recent solo and group Exhibitions include Reckless Comfort, Extase Chicago, Do You Fear For Your Life, 062, Chicago, and 2,3,4: Dimensional Photographies, Ohio University Seigfred Art Gallery. He was awarded the 2018 James Weinstein memorial fellowship and is currently a Field/Work artist in residence at the Chicago Artist Coalition. He has also exhibited in, New York, Philadelphia, and Buenos Aires. He currently lives and works in Chicago. He received a BFA from SUNY Purchase (2009) and an MFA from SAIC (2018).

Image: Ashley Freeby & Jesse Meredith, And What Are We Up To This Evening?, 2018, graphite, acrylic, digital collage, 14″ x 28″