Spudnik Press is pleased to welcome Harlem Masimba West for a spring residency. During their time in the studio West will create an oracle and playing card deck produced through cyanotype and mixed-media collage. Drawing from personal history and experiences across Chicago, the project revisits formative moments through acts of revision, speculation, and remembrance, imagining how memory shifts when revisited through image-making.

These decks are designed in reflection of a “re-telling of” or alternate ending of specific memories they’ve experienced throughout the city. The deck is formed from reworked quilted prints of inherited photo archives depicting people, homes, and third spaces throughout the South and West Sides. Each playing card displays specific places, bodies, and moments in time that have deeply affected them.

The deck functions as an intimate record of relationships, neighborhoods, and encounters that continue to shape their understanding of place and belonging. Accompanying the cards will be a large-scale visual mapping project tracing patterns of movement, care, and connection between significant people and locations throughout the city.

In tandem with the deck, they’ll be cyanotyping a personalized quilted ecomap to track the movement patterns of people and places in the city that they hold reverence for. West’s practice is rooted in analog experimentation and archival inquiry, often exploring how Black life is carried through memory, sound, image, and everyday ritual. Through layered photographic processes and material transformation, their work considers the ways personal archives can become sites of reflection, inheritance, and world-building.

During the residency, West will use Spudnik Press’s facilities to expand their experimentation with cyanotype and print-based processes while continuing to develop this evolving body of work. West will give an artist talk on May 2oth at 6 PM to speak about their work and time at Spudnik.

Harlem Masimba West is a playground, sonic griot, and archival imagemaker from Out South Chicago. Anchored in analog media, their work centers the crossroads and portals that find Black folks. They’re a fellowship alum of Brooklyn Poets and Earthseed Family Archive Project, having been published in APOGEE and the Chicago Reader. They’re presently the 2026 Curatorial Resident at Elastic Arts, and artist in residence at Spudnik Press, ILA, and the Kimball Arts Center. At their center, West is an eldest sibling doing their best to honor the name their momma gave ’em.

This exhibition is a part of a summer of midwest riso exhibitions organized by Spudnik Press.  A sister exhibition, 1st International Milwaukee Riso Invitational,  is curated by Duncan MacKenzie, Ryan Peter Miller,  and Christopher Sperandio. will be taking place at Spudnik Press: 1821 W Hubbard St, #302, Chicago, IL 60622 from June 26-August 14, 2026 (opening June 26, 6-8pm)

Spudnik Press is a community printmaking studio where artists and makers come together to create, learn, and collaborate. Rooted in the belief that art should be democratic and empowering, Spudnik offers an affordable, welcoming space for printmakers of all levels — from seasoned professionals to first-time students. By sharing equipment, skills, and creative energy, members build something greater than any one artist could alone. Committed to accessibility and equity, Spudnik extends its reach through classes, exhibitions, free workshops, and community programming.

Spudnik Press is thrilled to present a new series for designers Design for Print with Amira Hegazy

This workshop series is built for designers and other digital image makers to translate their digital skills to physical making. We will take specific elements of the design process and decode them to print processes. We will highlight historical and theoretical elements that have woven through design practice from days of physical production to our digital workspaces. Expect to leave each workshop feeling more knowledgeable about your day-to-day design workflows and how to realize your designs through hands-on print practices at Spudnik Press. 

Note: Each workshop in this series is enrolled individually. You can register for a single workshop or sign up for the full series.

Workshop 1: Thinking Through Color — Understanding Single Color Production with the Risograph
May 10, 12-4pm

Print is, at its core, a subtractive and sequential medium — color is built layer by layer.  For designers who have worked primarily on a computer screen, developing an intuition for how color behaves in print is about reorienting how you see. This workshop, led by designer and educator Amira Hegazy, digs into the thinking behind color separation: how an image is decomposed into its constituent parts, how printing inks interact, and how the relationships between layers are designed rather than assumed. The Risograph serves as the workshop’s primary teaching instrument — its single-color-at-a-time process makes visible what is often invisible in more automated digital print workflows, giving designers a direct, tactile experience of the logic that underlies every multi-color print process, from offset lithography to screen printing.

Register

Workshop 2: Slow Type — Letterforms & Typesetting on the Letterpress
May 17, 12-6pm

Designers work with type constantly, but often take for granted the rules and nuances of elegant typesetting and type design. This workshop, led by Amira Hegazy, is an invitation to slow down and develop a more considered relationship with letterforms: their history, their construction, and the decisions embedded in their design. Drawing on a survey of typographic history, the session moves into a close examination of letterform anatomy — the relationships between strokes, counters, spacing, and proportion that give each type its unique voice. The workshop culminates in a hands-on letterpress activity, where setting type by hand makes abstract principles concrete. There is no better argument for understanding type as a physical, spatial thing than having to reckon with it as one.

Register

Workshop 3: Designing for the Printed Book
May 31, 12-4pm

Designing a book digitally can feel linear, spreads seamlessly connect and sequencing is quick and direct. But, a physical book is an object with its own logic. Books make demands that a computer screen never does — it has a spine, a sequence, a physical weight, and a relationship between recto and verso that no amount of scrolling can replicate. For designers, working in the book format means grappling with a set of structural and spatial considerations that are distinct from any other medium: how content is organized across a signature, how imposition shapes what is possible on press, how the rhythm of a layout accumulates across pages rather than resolving on one. 

This workshop, led by Amira Hegazy, approaches the book as a design problem in the fullest sense — one where form and content are inseparable, and where every decision, from margins to binding method, is also an editorial one. This workshop briefly explores the historical development of book form and how physical possibilities of the book have developed with the needs of production and readers.  Whether you are working on a zine, a monograph, an artist book, or a longer publication, the workshop offers both practical grounding and a more expansive framework for thinking about what a book can do.

Register

Workshop 4: Containers — Presenting Your Work Through Box Building
June 7, 12-6pm

Presentation is not packaging — it’s a critical design decision, the one that determines how a body of work is first encountered and held. For printed matter especially, the container is an extension of the object itself: it sets expectation, establishes care, and frames everything inside it. 

This workshop, led by Amira Hegazy, focuses on the design and construction of custom enclosures to explore how structure, material, and proportion work together to create objects worthy of what it holds. Participants will build their own boxes by hand, developing both the technical vocabulary and the design sensibility to think about containment as an intentional act. We will discuss how engineering containers go hand in hand with print design preparation and consider how the design and fabrication process are inseparable. Essential for designers working with product development, book editions, print portfolios, or any work where the experience of receiving matters as much as the work itself.

Register

Amira Hegazy is a Chicago-based designer, printer, bookmaker and educator whose work lives at the intersection of print, publication, and community. This four-part workshop series is designed specifically for graphic designers looking to deepen their print knowledge — from file setup to finished object.

Spudnik Press is pleased to welcome Chicago-based neon artist, printmaker, and metalworker Kacie Lees for a spring residency. During her time at the studio, Lees will develop a new body of work bringing together thermally-responsive inks and high visibility reflective fabrics.

Drawn to the visual language of early 20th century pseudosciences — including Rorschach ink blot tests and Thought Forms — her prints take on a nebulous, expressive quality that mirrors the uncertainty and wonder embedded in those early attempts to make the invisible visible. The resulting work is at once intuitive and investigative, evoking the turbulent, shapeshifting conditions of our early universe and inviting viewers to sit with ambiguity, pattern, and the limits of human perception. A public event will be announced in conjunction with the residency.

Lees will be in residence through May 13, 2026.

Kacie Lees is a Chicago-based neon artist, printmaker, and metalworker whose interdisciplinary practice explores nature and history through the phenomenon of light. Grounded in craft and informed by research into optics and chaos theory, she fuses time into matter, using light as both subject and medium to reveal shared atomic origins and ideas of universal interconnection. Fire and electricity are central to her process — from molten glass to radiant plasma, Lees creates sculptures that glow, existing somewhere between natural phenomena and human perception.

Lees teaches neon fabrication nationally at institutions including New York University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and strengthens the voice of glass craft through public workshops in Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Corning, and Seattle. She is the author and illustrator of Neon Primer: A Handbook on Light Construction, a 200-page, hand silk-screened technical manual that serves as a crucial resource to preserve material and fabrication history, define a contemporary visual language for neon, and expand its interdisciplinary reach.

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

Karla Santana
Lotería
Opening Reception: May 2, 6-8pm
May 2-30, 2026

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.

No printmaking studio can grow and evolve without the input of the community it serves. As Spudnik Press looks ahead to the future of its programming, equipment, and membership offerings, your feedback will directly inform the decisions we make in the months and years to come.

Whether you are a longtime member or brand new to our studio, we want to hear from you. Please take a few minutes to complete this short survey — your responses are invaluable to us.

As a thank you for your participation, we will be awarding free open studio credits to four respondents. Simply include your email at the end of the survey to be entered. Winners will be announced following the survey’s close on May 1st.

Take the 2026 Spudnik Press Survey → https://forms.gle/UYJrf3UbYnpgM1Ev7

Spudnik Press is pleased to welcome Chicago-based designer and illustrator Karla Santana for a spring residency. During her time at the studio, Santana will develop Loteria, a new mixed-media body of work exploring identity, heritage, and intergenerational memory through print and textile practices.

Santana works across a wide range of mediums, including Risograph printing, screenprinting, sewing, and crochet, often combining multiple processes within a single piece. Her practice draws from formative childhood experiences, integrating character-based imagery and vibrant visual language as a means of examining memory and identity. Beneath their bright palettes and approachable forms, her works carry layered reflections on belonging, family, inheritance, and cultural pride.

Loteria draws inspiration from the iconic Mexican card game of the same name, using its symbolic structure as a framework for personal storytelling. Santana outlines the complex  relationships to culture that can be shaped by periods of embarrassment and shame, as well as deep love, gratitude, and pride. Through this series, she revisits pivotal stages of her life, pairing each with cultural symbols that have followed her family across generations.The project offers a space to reconsider family narratives with appreciation and to arrive at a powerful realization: “wow, de verdad gané la lotería” (“wow, I really won the lottery”).

Throughout her residency, Santana will utilize Spudnik Press’s print facilities to expand the scale and technical complexity of the series. A public event will be announced in conjunction with the residency.

Santana will be in residcence through April 13, 2026

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

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

Deadline: March 30, 2026 

The Chicago and Vicinity Riso Biennial is a regional exhibition celebrating risograph printing as it is being made right now across the Midwest. The show brings together artists from Chicago and Illinois along with the surrounding states — Iowa, Missouri, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Indiana — working in a medium defined by experimentation, accessibility, and the particular beauty of ink on paper.

Risograph printing occupies a unique space — rooted in zine culture and independent publishing, but increasingly embraced by artists pushing at the edges of what the process can do. Its layered spot colors, soy-based inks, and analog unpredictability make it a medium that rewards curiosity and collaboration.

This biennial is both a survey and a celebration, and a cheeky nod to the Art Institute of Chicago’s now defunct Chicago and Vicinity exhibition. This show is a chance to bring Midwest riso work into conversation with itself and honor a tradition of showing regional art, grounded in the independent, artist-driven print culture of the Midwest.

Eligibility: Artists residing in Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Michigan, Wisconsin, or Indiana are invited to submit.

Submissions: Artists may submit up to 3 existing works made using risograph. Submissions are free and open via this link.

Key Dates: 

Submission deadline: March 30, 2026 

Artist notification: April 6 

Work due at Spudnik Press (1821 W Hubbard St, #302, Chicago, IL 60622): April 20, 2026 

Opening Reception: Sunday, May 3, 2–5pm
Epiphany Center for the Arts: 201 S Ashland Ave, Chicago, IL 60607

Show closing Jul 4, 2026

Work can be shipped or dropped off at Spudnik Press at the expense of the sender (we recommend that out-of-town artists work together to ship their prints in one package). The work will be retained at the end of the show as part of a permanent archive (or as permanent as Riso can be).

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

Applications Due March 9, 2026

Volunteer at Spudnik Press as a weekly Studio Monitor!

Our Volunteer Studio Monitor Open Call provides interested artists with printmaking experience 6 months of 24/7 access to our professional facilities, a flat file, and opportunities to expand their printmaking and studio tech skills. Through a weekly 4-hour commitment, Volunteer Studio Monitors support our Open Studio Hours while becoming more familiar with the Spudnik Press community. 

Open Studio at Spudnik Press provides studio access at a reduced price and is available to all who can print independently. You can learn more about the Open Studio sessions that we offer here. Each Volunteer Studio Monitor leads an Open Studio session each week. Their responsibilities include:

• Welcoming and supporting all guests
• Providing basic troubleshooting and printing assistance
• Collecting payments
• Restocking supplies, cleaning, and organizing the studio
• Seeking opportunities to improve the facilities at Spudnik Press

To fulfill these duties, all Volunteer Studio Monitors receive:

• 24/7 Keyholder access for the duration of their monitoring
• Authorization on all Spudnik Press facilities
• A flat file drawer to store work
• General orientation about the organization and their role
• Technical training on the various printmaking equipment at Spudnik Press

Important Dates:

• Deadline to Apply: March 9, 2026
• orientations and trainings scheduled the week of March 23.
• Monitoring schedule: starts March 30, 2026

SUBMIT INTEREST TO VOLUNTEER

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Programs at Spudnik Press are partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency and Builder’s Initiative.

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

We are again reaffirming our priorities. We stand with our communities, our neighbors, and one another. We support basic human rights for everyone, remain an ICE-Free Zone, and are committed to free expression.

We are expanding our Free Space program. Alongside free Monday open studio time, we now offer free one-color Riso prints for resistance pamphlets, posters, and flyers.

We can produce up to 100 copies per project. Send files to info@spudnikpress.org. Turnaround will be as fast as our tiny staff allows. 

Once a week, our studio is open to printers creating movement posters, pamphlets, and other materials for community sharing. We provide one screen-printing station and one Vandercook press at no cost. This time is reserved for producing materials intended for free distribution. Mondays, 10 am–2 pm. To book, email director@spudnikpress.org.

Know Your Rights flyers, protest signs, ICE-Free signs, and other organizing materials are available to anyone who wants them. We can also help distribute materials you provide—let us know if you’d like us to print a small run for sharing.

Free materials are available at Spudnik Press during open studio hours: Monday–Thursday, 10 am–10 pm, and Friday–Sunday, 10 am–6 pm.

We know that this offer may not fit all projects, so if you have something else in mind or have another need, reach out to us and we will do what we can, when we can.

This project began in October. We have been awed by the response from our community and inspired by the work of our colleagues. Below is a very incomplete list of other printers offering free materials.

In solidarity,

Meg Duguid

Meg Duguid, Executive Director
With Avery Johnson, Studio Manager
And Amira Hegazy, Michelle Savoy, Kristen Campos, & Angela Runge (Board of Directors)

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We’re inspired by our community and in solidarity with printers everywhere making prints available.

Empress Editions (Cleveland, OH)
https://www.instagram.com/p/DTlT9xgDsrQ/

Highpoint Prints (Minnesota)
https://www.instagram.com/p/DT_W8XREu02/

Madison Print & Resist Zinefest (Madison, WI)
https://madisonprintandresist.wordpress.com/

Matiz Press (Chicago)
https://matizpress.com/pages/free-protest-printing

Melon Press (St. Louis, MO)
https://www.instagram.com/p/DT01kGxCZBy/?img_index=1

Outlet (Portland, OR)
https://www.outletpdx.com/protest-posters

Paper Press Punch (Seattle, WA)
https://www.paperpresspunch.com/print-for-the-people

San Francisco Poster Syndicate (San Francisco, CA)
https://sfpostersyndicate.com/

Signal Return (Detroit, MI)
https://www.instagram.com/p/DTi-zRyAUHj/

Also if you don;t know where to start Just Seeds Artist Collective has made a ton of graphics available for you to print 

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A Brief Note on Sustainability

We launched this program in October not knowing how we were going to make it work. Since then, we’ve figured out how to stretch our staff and budget to keep it going.

We’re stepping out again, even without fully knowing how this will impact our bottom line. Quite simply, we can’t exist as a print shop without being committed to free expression and our collective humanity.

If you have any ideas, please share them. And if you have extra paper you’d like to donate to support this project, please drop it by.

Spudnik Press will be closed for the holidays during the following times:

Thanksgiving Week: November 24–30, 2025

Winter Break: December 21, 2025 – January 4, 2026

Keyholders will continue to have access to the studio during these weeks. However, staff will be unavailable, and we will not be responding to emails or inquiries until we return.