Spudnik Press Cooperative has 4 permanent staff. Our Board of Directors works closely with staff to guide overall policy and direction. Each year, we work with 4 Fellows who monitor our open studio program, and approximately 25 teaching artists.
Our Member Directory highlights the amazing community of artists involved with Spudnik Press Cooperative.
Vidisha Aggarwal is an interdisciplinary artist and curator based in Chicago. She received a Bachelors of Fine Art degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago(SAIC) in 2018. She has exhibited work at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Sullivan Galleries, and SITE Galleries. She has organized exhibitions at SAIC, SITE Galleries, the Design Museum of Chicago, Gallery no one, and Hairpin Art Center, while gaining exhibition making experience at the Graham Foundation, EXPO Chicago, Chicago Manual Style, and the Design Museum of Chicago.
My practice thus far has included creating experiential, interactive installations at a human scale that transform and manipulate the space around them through participation and interaction. An exploration that started with the intention to challenge the traditional roles of artists and viewers has now transcended into exploring more nuanced and personal topics of belonging, authorship, and agency that we as occupants have within the spaces that surround us. While I was previously drawn to the simplicity that my dyed and printed fabric constructions processed within the myriad of colors, textures and opacities employed, they lack a more concise language of mark making and representational content that could drive the work further. I would like to use silkscreen printing, as an extension of the drawing process, to translate images onto the fabrics that I have previously dyed and heat-pressed to combine the drawing, painting, and printing skills I have learned over the years with the surface that I have come to enjoy the most.
Atlan Arceo-Witzl is a Mexican-American visual artist and creator whose work is concerned with everyday rituals, icons, symbols, objects, and language. He is a recent graduate of Skidmore College with a BS in Studio Art, concentrating in relief printmaking, sculpture and drawing. He lives outside of Chicago in Oak Park, IL pursuing a career in the arts and enjoying the fascinating human game of communication.
The visual effect of a print changes depending on its context and the way it is utilized. Some display words and images to advertise or bring attention to an idea. Some adorn a blank space, adding richness to the foundation layer. Others are the couriers, the mortar between human communications.
At Spudnik, I am interested in producing a cohesive body of work. I hope to experiment with printing on various substrates and combining different printing processes including letterpress, screen printing, woodcut relief, and risograph. Through this series, I seek to further explore the dynamic possibilities in communicating through symbols.
Lisa Glenn Armstrong is a multidisciplinary designer and educator currently based in Chicago. She received her MFA in Motion Graphic Design from California Institute of the Arts in 2018 and her BFA in Graphic Design from DePaul University in 2012. She currently teaches DePaul University’s School of Cinematic Arts.
Ryan received his BS in Studio Art focusing in Communication Design from Skidmore College (2008) and his MFA in Visual Communication Design from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2011). His foundation in the world of Graphic Design with a comprehensive typographic education turned into a deep-seated passion when he met letterpress. Typographic forms spoke to him more so than any other medium he’d previously encountered; combining that love with paper into hand printed form was like discovering a new religion. Since Ryan’s discovery of letterpress in graduate school his life has been redirected around this method of printmaking, so much so that he quit an old job an hour after the purchase of his first press; in that moment he started his own business, Double Trip Press.
Molly Berkson is a multi-disciplinary artist working primarily in paper, print, book, and fiber crafts. She has a fondness for the subcultures and subcultural practices that employ amateur and anti-authoritarian ideologies, and an appreciation for craft in all its forms–in its distinct and intermingling boundaries. In her practice, she patchworks together these specific aesthetic practices and do-it-yourself methods.
Berkson lives in Chicago and is a teaching artist with After School Matters and ElevArte Community Studio. She recently exhibited work at After School Special in Milwaukee WI, Femme4Femme in Chicago as part of 2nd Floor Rear, and at the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY, where she was a studio intern in 2016. Berkson graduated with her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015.
At the same time, I began sewing my first quilt. By working in these methods simultaneously I felt the ways that these distinct skills are connected. Couching shaped sheets was like piecing quilt squares, building compositions from variations in texture and color of plant material. A woodcut printed on the surface was the top stitch connecting the pieces together.
Like quilting, these paper works used a type of waste material: ruderal plants and weeds were like the plant world versions of collections of unused textile scraps in the quilter’s studio. Fundamental to my work is an understanding that fiber craft and print media facilitate exchange, tell stories, and can occupy categorizations of both expert and amateur distinctions. Making quilt-like paper works at the Women’s Studio Workshop began to touch on these ideas.
At Spudnik, I want to push these quilt-paper pieces further. I envision this project developing over three parts: 1. Experiment with the handmade paper I already made, building up layers of prints, collaging techniques together, and developing concept. 2. Using this first step as research to make a new batch of ruderal plant quilt-paper, and then 3. Editioning prints.
Emma Bilyeu is a visual artist working out of her basement studio in Humboldt Park, Chicago. As a student of printmaking and book arts she likes to incorporate paper, letter shapes, book forms, and multiples into her work. With this she is able to explore ideas of communication and storytelling. When not in the studio, Emma is cuddling her dog, reading dystopian or self-help literature, or painting edges of business cards at Rohner Letterpress.
With access to Spudnik facilities, I will implement multiple printing methods for the completion of this project. The bulk of the case-bound book will consist of copperplate intaglio prints that include screen printed and letterpress elements. I hope to experiment with translucency though the use of transparent and/or clear substrates, building layered imagery.
I would like to use this book and supporting, framed visual elements as a vehicle to explore ideas of communication, more specifically communication between myself and those I love. With text-like elements in a book-like format I plan to address the benefits of transparency in dialogue all the while finding comfort in a hidden fog of silence or ambiguity.
Mary Clare Butler is an artist and designer from the south side of Chicago. In 2015, she co-founded Fata Morgana Press, an experimental studio in Bridgeport focused on the wiggly line between art and design.
Through process-driven offset and letterpress printing, her work investigates the relationship between modes of production and the environment. She received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Book and Paper Arts from Columbia College Chicago (2016) and her BFA in Graphic Design from the University of Illinois at Chicago (2009).
Jessica Christy is a printmaker, designer, and North Dakota native living in the Chicago area. 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 culture, Christy often weaves the Native experience into her pieces. Her work has shown both nationally and internationally, most recently at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Matt Davis is a printmaker and occasional cartoonist, illustrator, and designer. He runs a very small Risograph print shop called Perfectly Acceptable that offers affordable commission printing as well as a curated series of artist prints and books. He graduated from Oberlin College with a BA in Russian Language a few years ago.
Jazmin Dua b. 1991 a multidisciplinary artist focusing on photography and printmaking. Her art is a form of visual storytelling, interested in conveying moments of surveillance, life, and interactions. She devises rituals within her work creating photographs and prints of everyday experiences.
