Grace Sippy (left), Fidencio Fifield-Perez (right)
Exhibition on view: March 7 - April 19, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, March 7; 6:30 - 9pm
Public gallery conversation with the artists and guest moderator Teréz Iacovino : Saturday, March 15; 5 - 6pm (recording available below)
Highpoint is pleased to present the 2024 McKnight Printmaking Fellowship Exhibition. The exhibition features work created throughout their fellowship year, including an incredible collection of mixed media print-based work that incorporates lithography, collagraphy, collage, letterpress, embroidery, bookmaking, and more. Although the body of work each artist presents differs, both collections are filled with highly detailed, delicate, subtle, and personal imagery, documenting themes of loss, memory, home, and meditation.
About the artists:
Grace Sippy earned her BFA in Printmaking with Honors at the University of Iowa and her MFA in Printmaking at the University of Alberta. She has taught at the University of Alberta, the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, and Highpoint Center for Printmaking. Grace’s work explores dualities, often between mind and body, and combines traditional and contemporary, hand-based and digital printmaking methods. She has exhibited nationally and internationally across Europe and Asia, earning much recognition in her field.
During the fellowship year, Sippy dove deep into exploration through a series of collagraph prints transforming garments once worn by her two young children. Sippy says, “The transformation of the garment to a printing matrix is a paradox, destroying the garment in the process but creating something new, a remnant of what was there. My fellowship work presents a reflection of loss and grief: of hopes of having a child, of a child since grown, and the loss of a child.”
Fidencio Fifield-Perez was born in Oaxaca, Mexico, but raised in the U.S. after his family migrated. His current work examines borders, edges, and the people who must traverse them. In his work, Fifield-Perez’s interdisciplinary practice centers on the materiality of paper ephemera, everyday self-documents discarded after fulfilling their purpose. Fidencio Fifield-Perez received his BFA from Memphis College of Art and an MA & MFA from The University of Iowa. He has completed artist residencies at The Studios at MASS MoCA, Ox-Bow, ACRE, Crosstown Arts, and the Galveston Artist Residency, among others.
Over the last year, Fifield-Perez has begun to reintroduce the figure into his work. This began with a beautifully rendered stone lithograph depicting his chosen family. He said that previous works, “relied on protection through abstraction. Important documents were shrouded and obscured by the depictions of indoor plants. But in new works, the bodies are present, while often furtive, cut, and embossed.”
We are also excited to welcome Teréz Iacovino to moderate a conversation between 2024 McKnight Printmaking Fellows Grace Sippy and Fidencio Fifield-Perez on their practice, work, and other related topics. The audience will also have the opportunity to ask questions of the artists and Iacovino during the conversation.
About Teréz Iacovino: Teréz Iacovino is the Assistant curator of the Katherine E. Nash Gallery, operated by the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota. Her curatorial practice is continually shaped by the artists she works with, the students she mentors, and her experience as a Latina and first-generation graduate working in academia. Iacovino is the recipient of a Curatorial Research Fellowship Grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and is a 2024 National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Leadership Institute Fellow. Recent publications include “Unpacking the Portmanteau: Locating Diasporican Art” as part of Nuyorican & Diasporican Visual Art: A Critical Anthology (Duke University Press).
Highpoint would like to express our gratitude to the McKnight Foundation for their generous support of this program and Minnesota artists. thank Mike Cloud (visual artist and Associate Professor, Director of Graduate Studies at Northwestern University) and Rachel Skokowski (Director of Galleries and Turner Curator at California State University Chico) for providing their expert insight in reviewing the applications for the 2023 fellowship. We’d also like to thank Miguel Aragon (visual artist and Associate Professor in Printmaking at CUNY College of Staten Island), Emma Nishimura (visual artist and Assistant Professor at OCAD University in Toronto), and Xuxa (Susana) Rodriguez (Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Curator of Contemporary Art at Duke University) for taking time out of their busy schedules to travel to Minnesota to conduct studio visits with Grace and Fidencio.
The McKnight Printmaking Fellowships are open Minnesota artist/printmakers who are at a career stage that is “beyond emerging” — defined here as artists who demonstrate a sustained level of accomplishment, commitment, and artistic excellence. Fellows are selected on the basis of the artistic merit of their work, and their dedication, interest, and contributions to Minnesota’s arts ecosystem.