At the center of the event is a construction road roller turned printing press used to produce oversized prints outdoors throughout the day. The works being printed were created by invited artists and carved into large relief plates using CNC routing at the School of Visual Arts at Columbia College Chicago. Those plates come together here for a single day of printing, where each image is inked and run through the press in real time.

Artists participating include Atlan Arceo-Witzl/Nate Carder/Chris Flynn, Cecilia Beaven, Danny Vero Diaz, Hink, Taylor Hokanson, Jaclyn Jacunski, Avery Johnson, Duncan MacKenzie/Christian Kuras,  Amanda Ross-Ho, Cristal Sabbagh, H Marsh Schenck, Biddy Tran.

Their work spans printmaking, sculpture, installation, performance, muralism, photography, social practice, and experimental media, engaging ideas of identity, labor, technology, memory, migration, infrastructure, community, and systems of power.

Come by and spend time with us as the process unfolds across the day, as plates are inked, laid down, and pressed under the weight of the steamroller, revealing each print at full scale as it happens

About Spudnik Press

Spudnik Press is a Chicago-based nonprofit printmaking studio offering studio access, education programs, exhibitions, and professional resources to artists at every level. Through collaborative programming and public engagement, Spudnik supports contemporary printmaking practices while fostering an inclusive creative community.

About the School of Visual Arts at Columbia College Chicago

The School of Visual Arts at Columbia College Chicago offers programs in art, illustration, photography, and art history within one of the nation’s leading institutions for creative and media arts education. Columbia College Chicago is a private nonprofit college offering undergraduate and graduate degrees across the arts, media, liberal arts, and business.

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Atlan Arceo-Witzl is a biracial Mexican-American visual artist, second-generation printmaker, and third-generation educator based in Chicago, Illinois. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Studio Art from Skidmore College. He is currently an assistant teacher and shop tech at Columbia College Chicago while also maintaining a personal freelance and art practice. A short list of collaborators includes Pilsen Housing Cooperative, the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, Studio Elaine Mosaic, Chicago Tool Library, Chicago Printers Guild, Spudnik Press Cooperative, Code Switch Podcast (NPR), and the Chicago Reader. Exploring everyday rituals, icons, symbols, and communication, his works redefine midwestern identity as a hybrid of ancient and contemporary life. His pieces employ a satirical cartoon style infused with the flattened aesthetics of mesoamerican and Mexican folk art alongside an admiration for hand-painted signs. Printed ephemera, passing phrases, political movements, and palpable relics of the past are combined into graphic images championing a diverse liberated future.

Cecilia Beaven is a visual artist from Mexico City, based in Chicago. She holds an MFA from SAIC and a BFA from ENPEG La Esmeralda. Her multidisciplinary artwork has been showcased in solo and group exhibitions in Mexico, the US, Colombia, Sweden, Italy, and Japan. Cecilia has painted murals internationally, including a segment of the border wall between Mexico and the US.

Beaven’s recognitions include the Chicago Artists Coalition Residency (2024–2026), a 3Arts Fellowship (2024), the Radicle Studio Residency at Hyde Park Art Center (2021), the Leroy Neiman Foundation Fellowship at Ox-Bow School of Art (2019), and a Fulbright award (2017). In 2022, Forbes México named her one of the “100 Most Creative Mexicans in the World,” and in 2023, Newcity magazine included her in its “Art 50: Chicago’s Artists’ Artists” list.

Nathan Carder is a Chicago-based artist whose work investigates the uneasy intersections of the human body and constructed systems. Drawing from the visual language of medical conditions, procedures, and assistive devices, they examine how bodies are classified, repaired, disciplined, and optimized. Alongside these themes, transportation machines, vehicles, infrastructure, and mechanisms of movement, appear as symbols of control, progress, and compliance. Obedience operates as both the subject and strategy, framed through institutional logic and everyday rituals. Humor runs throughout his work, tempering clinical precision with absurdity and offering moments of relief that invite viewers to question authority, function, and usefulness.

Danny Vero Diaz is a first-generation Mexican, Chicago-based printmaker with a BA in Illustration from Columbia College Chicago, 2026. Diaz’s work is heavily Influenced by Mexican artisanal pottery and Mexican textiles, citing her mother’s textile explorations as her first gateway into the arts. Diaz integrates pattern and organic essences into her imagery through the technique of chine-colle – a method of collaging and printing etchings simultaneously. With contradiction and conviction, Diaz explores visual language through a feminine lens, a lens of yearning for connection, a lens of advocacy and transparent expression. Diaz’s goal is to nurture herself and others specifically through art and printmaking to achieve connection and community, the most important parts of our lives.

Chris Flynn is a printmaker and a percussionist, sometimes practicing both disciplines within the same body of work, other times borrowing from the sensibilities of one mode to strategize abstraction and storytelling within the other. Flynn teaches Printmaking and works with the Makerspace Facilities at Columbia College Chicago, where he earned an Interdisciplinary MFA in 2017. After earning his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999, Flynn was the Master Printer for Anchor Graphics until 2016, collaborating with an extensive range of artists and teaching printmaking to students of all ages and experience. Flynn’s printworks are made using a range of traditional and contemporary methods, such as etching, copperplate photogravure, photopolymer, lithography, Riso, and woodcut. Subjects take form as comparative anatomies, exploring juxtapositions of sense and scale through imaginings of the body and cosmos, puppetry and atmospheric buoyancy, nebulae, and other puzzles.

Hink is a muralist, comic artist, illustrator, and creature person from Chicago. They have traveled internationally to comic fests and have installed many murals across the Chicagoland area and beyond. No matter the medium, Hink is fueled by narratives that explore outsiders, the absurd, and the threads that keep us all connected. Hink’s master plan is to inspire others to get familiar with their own respective creature inside.

Taylor Hokanson is an Associate Professor of Art at Columbia College Chicago. Over the course of a twenty year career, his artwork has exhibited widely at international venues such as Ars Electronica (Austria), SIGGRAPH (Vancouver), ISEA (Hong Kong), and Techfest (Mumbai). His practice is also well-represented online, with research and teaching projects appearing on Instructables, Github, Linkedin Learning, and the Opposable Thumbs podcast. 

Taylor Hokanson’s art practice is situated on a rapidly collapsing boundary between the real and the virtual. When information, and even objects themselves, can be produced and shared in an instant across the globe, concepts like rarity, authorship, and ownership become as plastic as the data that give them shape. Hokanson problematizes the cultural fallout from this shifting paradigm by creating art objects and events that are confrontational, thought-provoking, and absurd.

Jaclyn Jacunski is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist who has exhibited locally and nationally in museums, public spaces, and galleries. She rearranges found objects, news images, and architectural elements; her current work explores neighborhood controversies and how ecological topics are affected by private property.

Avery Johnson is known for her sharp wit and eccentric fashion taste. She grew up in Los Angeles, CA, and resides in Chicago, IL.  Drawn into making through darkroom photography, Avery received a BFA in printmaking from Washington University in St. Louis, and now works as the Studio Manager of Spudnik Press. Her artistic practice reflects a commitment to rigorous process and dances between the mediums of photo, moving image, and print. In 2019, Avery founded a curatorial and publishing project, the Punish Babies, where she collaborates with a wide range of artists and organizations to produce unique projects. 

H Marsh Schenck is an artist/educator/curator who challenges American essentialism with an interdisciplinary practice informed by acts of care. His work is rooted in his experience as a disabled trans person and influenced by a transient, rural upbringing. Schenck integrates themes of identity and place by utilizing found and discarded materials, exploring various art methodologies, and examining social concepts of value, meaning, and connection. He earned his BFA in printmaking at Bradley University (2010) and his MFA in intermedia at University of Texas Arlington (2013). His work has been exhibited domestically and internationally at several institutions including, BWA Wrocław Galleries (Poland), 2nd Berlin Becher Triennial (Germany), The Modern Art Museum (Fort Worth), Urban Glass (NY), Traver Gallery (Seattle), MAC (Dallas), Compound Yellow (IL), and other locations throughout the United States. Schenck has received funding from the Dallas Museum of Art, the MAC Dallas, Penland School of Crafts, Pilchuck Glass School, Kotteman Foundation, and Southern Graphics Council International. He is the co-creator of the social project Mud Campaign, which provided free arts education and funding for LGBTQ+ youth in Texas. He has held memberships with BEEFHAUS (curator), 500X Gallery (VP), and Comfort Station (Gallery Manager). Currently, he teaches at the Art Institute of Chicago and holds the titles of Instructional Specialist and former Anti-racist Transformation Team Fellow at Columbia College Chicago.

Amanda Ross-Ho is an interdisciplinary artist and Professor of Sculpture at the University of California, Irvine. Her sculpture, installation, performance, and public works have been exhibited widely, nationally and internationally. Her work reshapes the collateral of time into experimental archives, monuments, and discursive tableaus. She was born and raised in Chicago and lives and works in Los Angeles.

Cristal Sabbagh’s interdisciplinary practice includes traditional portraiture, ceramics, and performance.  Sabbagh’s performance practice, rooted in improvisation and Butoh, walks a line between the everyday, the divine, the personal, and the political.  She embodies in her art transformational memories while simultaneously celebrating pop culture and the experimental. She also challenges power structures and awakens viewers’ senses. Cristal is the creator and curator of Freedom From and Freedom To events that are improvisational performance environments which interrogate movement and sound. In 2021 Cristal was awarded a 3Arts / Make a Wave Artist grant, and in 2023 she was awarded an Individual Artists Program grant from DCASE.  In January of 2025 Cristal was included in New City’s Top 50 Players issue: People Who Really Perform in Chicago, in their Dance category.

Biddy Tran was born in Rach Gia, Viet Nam. She left Rach Gia at three months of age and was imported to Santa Ana, California that Fall. Currently she is based in Chicago. 

For the past decade, her work has focused on questions of capitalist hegemony, postcoloniality, and hegemony within art, representation and imaging. In the spirit of undermining conventions of historic imaging and representation, the nature of Tran’s practice is interdisciplinary and research oriented. The work itself tends to take the form of interactive installation and architectural modification that incorporate and re-present traditional art objects (drawing, painting, photography, sculpture) as well as “new media” (video, sound, interactive media). Tran’s hope is that viewers will become aware of themselves perceiving and consuming “art” and reconsider the politics of representation as critical and active participants.  

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Steamroller prints has been made possible through a steamroller donation from VERO Design + Build, and Ink from Speedball Art Products. Programs at Spudnik Press are partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council Agency, the Driehaus Foundation, and the Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation.

Centering an evolving oracle and playing card deck built from inherited photo archives and personal histories, West’s practice considers how images can hold reverence, revision, and alternate ways of remembering. The conversation will focus on their process, research, and ongoing experimentation with analog media during their time at Spudnik Press.

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 presently the 2026 Curatorial Resident at Elastic Arts, and artist in residence at Spudnik Press, ILA, and the Kimball Arts Center.

Spudnik Press is turning 19, and we’re throwing a carnival to celebrate! Join us for a special Drink & Draw where we’ll be making decorations for our upcoming fundraiser. Come help us get the big top ready — paint signs, craft garlands, make props, and get into the carnival spirit while you drink and draw.

RSVP encouraged so we can plan accordingly — drop-ins also welcome.

Drink & Draw is a low-key, drop-in social workshop devoted to drawing practices. There are no pretensions, no prerequisites, and newcomers are always welcome. Drink & Draw occurs on the second Wednesday of every month and features a special theme and a guest artist. Admission is a suggested donation of $10–$20 but this time you are helping us, so pick the $0 option at RSVP). We provide the drinks — you just bring yourself (and your friends, and your family; children are always welcome).

Drink & Draw is generously sponsored by The Long Drink.

Nineteen years of ink, community, and creativity — and we’re celebrating under our very inky big top. Join us for a night of carnival fun as we mark another year of making Spudnik Press the creative home it is for so many Chicago artists. We can’t wait to celebrate with you!

Buy Tickets

Proceeds from the fundraiser will go to support our operations for the press, including staff, supplies, and rent costs. Your donation is vital to our work and allows us to continue our mission. Each year, we provide more than 3,000 hours of open studio access, dozens of classes, a residency program and free workshops. The studio costs $1,200 a day to run, so every dollar we raise counts.

$10 off with code EARLYBIRD10 through May 17

• Tickets $85(includes 50 game play tokens)
• Artist Tickets $50 (includes 30 game play tokens)
• The economy really hurts right now tickets: $35 (includes 10 game play tokens)
• Can’t make the event, but love us anyway donate here
• Sponsor a carnival booth with your name on it — $250
• Sponsor a pennant with your one-color logo — $25 each
• Join us as a corporate sponsor

Thank you to all who help:

We have profound appreciation for our Host Committee:

Cheryl Bever, Cassidy Kulhanek, Amira Hegazy, Jill Nahrstedt, and Angela Runge

Enormous gratitude to our Sponsors:
Speedball Art, Cream Wine Company, and Revolution Brewing

Loud applause for our Individual Donors and Annual Supporters:
Illinois Arts Council, Driehaus Foundation, Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, Vermont Community Foundation, and numerous individual donors

We’re endlessly thankful for the support and passion of our Staff and Board:
Meg Duguid, Avery Johnson, Olivia Childress (Staff),  Kristen Campos,  Amira Hegazy, Angela Runge, and Michelle Savoy (Board of Directors)

Spudnik Press 19th Birthday Party and Carnival
Friday, June 12, 6–10PM
Spudnik Press: 1821 W Hubbard St, Ste 302, Chicago, IL 60622