UICB Students were busy of the summer attending workshops, creating work, and interning internationally. From identifying mystery Norwegian type to pulling prints on William Morris' handpress, students had some great experiences.
Third-year MFA candidate Harper Folsom attended Frogman's Print Workshop for two weeks during the summer, taking classes in photolithography and mokulito (lithography on wood). She displayed some of her work from Frogman's in a solo show at Prairie Lights at the end of summer and plans to use some of these new techniques in her thesis work.
Lionel Zaccardi, 2nd year MFA candidate, was awarded a UI Graduate College Summer MFA fellowship to continue typefounding studies with Stan Nelson, Museum Specialist Emeritus in the Graphic Arts Collection of the Smithsonian Institution. Lionel was also the Stephen O. Saxe Endowed Research Fellow at the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Cary Graphic Arts Collection, where they studied typographic punches, matrices, incunabula, and proprietary typefaces. Lionel also got to pull a print on William Morris' handpress at the Cary!
Third-year MFA Candidate, Poojana Prassana, interned at Halden Bookworks in Norway for four weeks. Halden Bookworks is a studio started by UICB alumni started by Radha Pandey (MFA '14) and Johan Solberg (MFA '18). Poojana spent her time learning historical practices of bookmaking in Central Asia and working with Norwegian metal type. "I familiarized myself with the European standards of letterpress, printed on German presses and learnt the Norwegian case layout. During the last two weeks, I printed a sentence from most of the case, scanned them and compared the typeface with those in old type specimens from Germany and Netherlands in order to identify them."
Nana Takano, 2nd year MFA candidate, received a full scholarship from Anderson Ranch with travel support from the UICB to participate in a workshop at Anderson Ranch in Aspen, Colorado. Takano learned Monotype printmaking from Sarah Smelser. "It was a huge moment when I realized how significant it is to push the limit of printmaking and expand my artist practices."
Clara Reynen, 3rd year MFA candidate, spent two weeks working as a Press Apprentice at Bread & Puppet Press in Glover, Vermont. Clara and other apprentices spent their days doing production work at the press, printing banners and flags for the circus, and learning more about the day to day operations of the press. Participating in communal life on the farm and learning about their Cheap Art philosophy has been a major source of inspiration for her thesis work.
