With Renewed Urgency: New Editions from Spudnik Press | Open House

Open House Covid-19 Safety Protocol

Visitors do not need to make an appointment. However, to allow social distancing, exhibition viewing will begin in the Annex and continue clockwise through the Printshop. Staff will greet visitors and help ensure everyone can enjoy the artwork while remaining 6’+ from other guests. Please arrive in groups of 3 or less. Masks are required to enter the building. Please contact angee@spudnikpress.org with questions regarding safety protocols or to schedule a private viewing.

Featured Artists: 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

With Renewed Urgency is our annual exhibition featuring new prints by 16 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.

With Renewed Urgency: New Editions from Spudnik Press Cooperative will be on view through October 31, 2020 at Spudnik Press, 1821 W. Hubbard Street, Suite 302, Chicago, IL 60622.

Gallery Hours
By appointment. Email angee@spudnikpress.org to schedule a visit.

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