Jessica joined Spudnik Press Cooperative in Spring 2015 as Development Manager, bringing her diverse background in nonprofit administration, fundraising and event planning. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Legal Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, followed by her Masters of Public Administration from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Stephanie Benhaim is a painter and printmaker born and raised in Miami, Florida. She received her BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon in 2014. Benhaim is known for creating monotype portraits that grapple with themes of diaspora and the erasure of identity. Her works have been published in Jai-Alai Magazine and OTPW Zine Works.
Eliz Kaple is a print and new-media artist based in Chicago, Il. Her practice relies primarily on printmaking, bookbinding, and video. Through the use of diagrams and architectural structures, she reimagines planes of perspective and reanimates inadequate spaces.
Darian Longmire is an interdisciplinary artist currently living in Chicago IL. He studied visual art and graphic design at Illinois State University, graduating in 2013. His work deals with conceptual approaches to exploring cosmology, the study of the universe. Monoprinting and assemblage currently drive his print based endeavors. Darian will be seeking MFA candidacy at a list of chosen institutions for the fall 2016 term.
Margaret Hitch is a printmaker, illustrator and sometimes poet hailing from the upper peninsula of Michigan. Last year, she received a BFA from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she spent a lot of time with litho stones and birch plywood. Margaret’s print works often illustrate or work in tandem with her poems. Through the fellowship at Spudnik, she hopes to make three small books that experiment with relationships between text and image.
Leila Abdelrazaq is a Palestinian, Chicago-based artist, author, and activist. Her debut graphic novel, Baddawi, was shortlisted for the 2015 Palestine Book Awards. She is also the author and illustrator of a variety of short comic zines. She views alternative comix as a powerful political tool in social movements.
Angela Davis Fegan is a native of Chicago’s South Side. She received her BFA in Fine Arts from New York’s Parsons School of Design and her MFA in Interdisciplinary Book and Paper Arts from Columbia College Chicago. Angela has mounted shows at Galerie F, Chicago Artists’ Coalition, the DePaul Art Museum, The Center for Book Arts (NY), the University of Chicago’s Arts Incubator and Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the Hyde Park Art Center, SAIC’s Sullivan Galleries, Columbia’s Glass Curtain Gallery, SPACES (OH) and Revolve (AVL). She has held residencies at the Chicago Artists’ Coalition, F4F, Connecticut College, the Hambidge Center (GA), Revolve (NC), and Project Row House (TX). Her work has been selected for book covers including The Truth About Dolls by Jamila Woods, Secondhand by Maya Marshall, and All Blue So Late by Laura Swearingen-Steadwell. Her lavender menace poster project has been written up by The Offing (LA Review of Books), Hyperallergic, Chicago Magazine, the RedEye, Go Magazine, Pop Sugar, the Chicago Reader, and Newcity.
Angela joined Spudnik Press as a teaching artists in our inaugural 2022 Teaching Artist Cohort.
Devin Owsley-Aquilia is a visual artist with great interests in printmaking, drawing, fibers and painting. Originally from Dayton, Ohio, she moved to Milwaukee to attend the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design where she received her BFA in printmaking in 2015. Her work in print involves various abstracted representations of anatomical form, material and growth that are used as personal symbols of progression and transition of identity. She has recently relocated to Chicago to further challenge her work in printmaking.
During this three month residency, I would like to work on a series of intaglio prints. In the past, I’ve always been interested in the variable print when working on an etching project using chine collé, a la poupé inking and other experimental monotype methods. For the past year I have been fascinated with the spitbite aquatint technique in combination with line work. The most intriguing part of this process are the subtle shifts that this technique allows in the image. For this project I would like to extend what I already know and make a series of edition-able, multiple plate prints allowing a larger color palette range. Being in this mode of working on multiple plates, I’m interested in how the image will develop through process, as well as challenge/ extend knowledge of color, form and printing skills.
Lisa Vinebaum is an interdisciplinary artist, critical writer, and educator. Her studio practice incorporates text-based installations and work with neon, performance and site specific interventions, textiles, video, photography and protest tactics. Current research and artistic investigations explore labor, performance and collectivity in the larger context of economic globalization and cutbacks to workers’ rights. Lisa Vinebaum holds a PhD in Art from Goldsmiths, University of London (UK); an MA in Textiles also from Goldsmiths, and a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal.
Scope of the project: I propose the creation of a series of silk screened, text based posters on paper exploring historical and contemporary labor issues and labor struggles. The posters will use typography, font styles, and layouts reminiscent of historical print posters and calls to action produced by American labor unions during the first part of the 20th century, a time when American workers fought for and won historical rights including the right to a regulated, eight-‐hour work day and the 40-‐hour work week; vacation and overtime pay; collective bargaining rights and the right to freedom of association; pension and health care benefits; and safer, regulated working conditions. Since the 1980s these hard won rights have been curtailed and even eliminated, owing to domestic and international factors, including economic deregulation and globalization; the rise of post-‐Fordist economic models and an emphasis on "free market" labor systems; corporate restructuring and a shift to more precarious, part-‐time and contract labor; and the emergence of the so-‐called "sharing economy". Hundreds of thousands of full-‐time, well-‐paid, unionized positions in the transportation, steel, manufacturing, garment and textile, meat packing, food, and other industries have been lost here in the USA, with part-‐time and migrant laborers forced into low paying, often dangerous jobs. The past ten years in particular have witnessed substantial (largely Republican-‐driven) attacks on public and private sector unions, collective bargaining rights, and pension and other benefits, as wages remain largely stagnant. Today, fewer Americans than ever belong to unions than at any time in the nation's history. Yet at the same time, workers are organizing in new and innovative ways — both through traditional unions and more alternative worker associations and cooperatives — to raise awareness about the need for better pay and working conditions. Workers across the country are fighting for living wages and higher minimum wages, workplace protections, immigration reform and protections for migrant and undocumented workers, health care benefits, and collective bargaining and organizing rights, for example.
This proposed residency project is part of a larger, ongoing series of work under the title New Demands? Initiated in 2011, New Demands? incorporates public performances, placard installations, neon, and participatory workshops, in an effort to connect the current crisis in times labor to historical struggles for worker's rights. By commemorating specific events in labor history and adapting slogans from past labor struggles, the project highlights the fact that past demands for better working conditions remain incredibly relevant and necessary today. New Demands? draws on archival research into the visual iconography, slogans, and demands of the American labor movement. Source material for this proposed residency project has been gathered from online historical archives, as well as an in person visit to the archives of the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) at Cornell University
Julia Arredondo is an artist entrepreneur who recently concluded her MFA at Columbia College Chicago. Originally from Corpus Christi, TX; Julia is heavily influenced by the small, family-based businesses she grew up around. Formally trained in printmaking and specializing in artistic forms of independent publishing, Julia founded Vice Versa Press and Curandera Press as her entrepreneurial debuts. Julia is currently launching an independent media channel, QTVC Live!, which focuses on live arts sales by underrepresented makers.
“Hate it or love it the underdog’s on top. And I’m gonna shine homie until my heart stop.” - 50 Cent and The Game
Craig Hansen received his BFA from Colorado State University in 2002. He moved to London shortly after graduating to work for a small web design firm and to have the experience of a lifetime. Once back in the states, Chicago was the destination and it has been his home for 11 years. He has spent time working for large advertising agencies, small branding companies, a multitude of freelance clients and in 2014 he stepped out on his own to found Principle—an interdisciplinary graphic design studio. He is also starting a teeny tiny skateboard company because apparently he isn’t busy enough already.
TotesFerosh (Josh Epstein) is a Detroit-born, Chicago-based printmaking artist whose fashion forward characters explore the inaccessible luxuries the masses yearn for. His ‘linocut’ printmaking method involves hand-carving intricate patterns into plates of linoleum, to be printed onto paper or canvas. By fusing distinctive, graphic figures with lavish patterns and backdrops, he delivers a distinctive story of minimalist excess.
