Threshold Gallery

On view: July 5 - September 30, 2024

John Schulz uses collage, cut-ups, and the resultant unanticipated juxtapositions In his studio practice to open the visual potential of commonplace printed matter. This recent work in woodcut explores mid-century public domain romance, crime, and science fiction comics, fragmenting their graphic elements to liberate them from their original narratives and layering and recombining them to build new forms, often revealing an underlying lyric darkness.

Schulz is currently based in Saint Paul, MN. Originally from Superior, WI, John returned to the Midwest after teaching Printmaking and Drawing for twenty-five years at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He has also taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Appalachian State University, Boone NC; Penland School of Craft, NC; and the Frans Masereel Centrum, Kasterlee BE. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; New York Public Library; the Boston Public Library Rare Books and Manuscripts – Artists’ Books; and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp, BE.

An installation of prints by MEgan Wetzel

Threshold Gallery

On view: January 4 - March 30, 2024

“Has anyone ever asked you to close your eyes and imagine a place that makes you happy? This is my happy place. A white wooden bench in a field of flowers. I hope it makes you, the viewer, happy too.” - Megan Wetzel

Megan’s absorbing printstallation is made up of large, colorful, screenprinted and collaged panels flanking a central black and white lithograph that represent the artists’ happy place. These works are simultaneously stylized/abstracted but also representational. The exhibition will be on view through March.

Exhibition opening reception: friday, June 9; 6:30-9pm

Artist remarks at 7pm

Exhibition on view through July 22

Please join us at Highpoint for the culminating exhibition of the 2022- 2023 Jerome Early Career Printmakers. Through the generous support of the Jerome Foundation, resident artists Brandon Chambers, Brian Wagner, and Nicole Soley have been working industriously toward this exhibition since their residency began in September of 2022.

The nine-month residency provided the artists with access to the Highpoint cooperative printshop, technical support, and professional opportunities to create, learn, and show new work within a supportive studio environment. The exhibition includes images created using foundational printmaking techniques such as lithography and woodcut but also features less conventional print work like stop motion animation and transfer monotypes made with alcohol-based ink. The common thread binding the work of these three artists is the significance of thought informing it. The exhibition is conceptually charged; the founding thoughts, ideas, and feelings are poetically expressed through figures, text, scenes, and material.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS AND WORK:

Brian Wagner (they/them) was educated at the University of Minnesota Moorhead and shortly thereafter completed the professional printer program at the Tamarind Institute of Fine Art Lithography in Albuquerque. They draw upon their experience of growing up as a queer person in rural America and how that has been formative to their sexuality, identity, and transness as a non-binary individual.

I have spent this residency rendering densely-layered lithographs that explore the tenderness, loneliness, acceptance, and gentle anger of queerness and healing. These prints and writings consider the physical and emotional spaces of love, hurt, trauma, and remembrance of relationships in the forms of drawn landscapes and queer symbolism of the day-to-day life of a queer person. I view many of the scenes I draw as places of transition; shifting and ever-changing. Something that is cohesive with my own queerness. I spent most of this residency fighting the healing that was needed of me –– I think it’s easy for queer people to get used to resilience and ignore the trauma that we face every day, even from our own community and partners. In the laborious nature of lithography, I think it was only natural to have a bit of a breakdown and face the physical and emotional trauma that was being echoed and start to heal and it’s my hope that these spaces can offer solace to someone who has faced the same. – Brian Wagner

Nicole Soley (she/her) is an area artist and educator who studied at Minnesota State University Mankato. Using a novel approach along with a touch of sardonicism, Nicole’s traditional and sculptural prints tell stories that critique the culture of ‘American Dissonance’ we are collectively living in. She synthesizes lived experience and research to comment on education, gun culture, individual freedoms, and the harrowing upholding of the patriarchy.

​​Contemporary strife has moved me to create in order to process, distribute, and hopefully motivate political organizations to cause change. My personal experiences this year heavily influenced the trajectory of this work in newer experimental directions. I think that’s where the best art lives, though: in the fluidity and uncertainty of the human experience, propagating and releasing new truths to orbit an ever-moving molten core. Thank god for woodcut printmaking: carving was possibly the only gravity I felt while I was both lost and searching, grasping and letting go, disillusioned and fully standing in my own truth. – Nicole Soley

Brandon Chambers (he/him) completed his MFA at the University of Minnesota in 2021. A multidisciplinary artist, Brandon’s current research is into virtual reality as both a philosophical concept and a creative tool. His recent works employ geometry and grids to illustrate systems and visually establish a sense of clarity about the world. He states, “I am interested in merging nostalgia for the distant past with fantasies of the distant future as a way of conceptualizing the present.”

Semantic satiation is a phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to lose meaning for the listener. It becomes a meaningless sound. I wonder at the routines and archetypes we are inundated with throughout our lives. Was there an idea so important that it was repeated and repeated and repeated until it was lost?” His response as an artist is seen in the lithographs, monotypes, and drawings that contemplate this question. – Brandon Chambers

Highpoint would like to thank our panelists Jovan Speller and Jeremy Lundquist for their intensive review and evaluation of the submitted applications as well as the Jerome Foundation for their continued support of this important program. As well as Ruthann Godollei and Nancy Julia Hicks for visiting with the residents to conduct in-progress critiques.

About the panelists: 

Jovan C. Speller is a Minnesota-based artist originally from Los Angeles.  Her work interprets historic narratives through contemporary discourse. Her research-based practice is centered around elevating, complicating and inventing stories that explore ancestry, identity, and spatial memory. Speller is a recipient of a 2018 McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship and a 2016 Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship. She completed a residency at Second Shift Studio Space in St. Paul, and was awarded the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Minnesota Art Prize in 2021. She holds a BFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago, and studied art at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Speller's work has been acquired by national and international private collections and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Jeremy Lundquist was born in California, grew up in the Chicago area, and currently lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. He works in print, drawing, photography, video, installation, and cut and collaged paper. He has been an artist-in-residence at Ox-Bow, Harold Arts, Spudnik Press, Kala Art Institute and the Vermont Studio Center. He has been awarded the Grant Wood, Jerome and McKnight Fellowships. His work has been exhibited at Highpoint Center for Printmaking, the Chicago Cultural Center, Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois – Chicago, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, and additional venues nationally and internationally. He has taught at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Iowa, and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Currently he teaches at the Perpich Center for Arts Education, an arts high school run by the state of Minnesota.

ACCESS/PRINT & LOOK/SEE Student Exhibition
On display May 19th - June 3rd, 2023
Opening Friday, May 19th, 5:30 - 8 PM

*Also join us for the closing reception 
and Free Ink Day on June 3rd, 12 - 4 PM

Join us for the annual student exhibition opening on May 19th, 5:30 - 8 pm. The show will include artwork from the ACCESS/PRINT teen mentorship program, as well as LOOK/SEE, a showcase of youth artwork from Franklin Middle School and works from the Creative Clean Water Stewardship project, generously supported by a Hennepin County Green Partners Environmental Education Grant. Exhibitions are always free and open to all – come support the students and learn about these unique programs! 

There will also be live screenprinting! Local artists will assist with the printing process using designs made by the ACCESS/PRINT students.

Interested in helping out? We are looking for volunteers to help with the Student Exhibition opening. See details and sign up here.

“The ACCESS/PRINT class was full of students who quickly fell in love with printmaking and were very eager to experiment with different concepts, techniques, and media.” says the ACCESS/PRINT coordinator and teacher, Gabi Estrada. “These students were all brilliant young artists who were incredibly thoughtful in the conception of their projects and creative with the freedom they had to explore different print techniques. Everyone in this class was so inspiring and it was an immense pleasure getting to know them and watching their ideas come to fruition!”

ACCESS/PRINT is a teen mentorship program that supports creative youth with over 70 hours of studio time, printmaking tutorials, technical assistance, and support as they work to create a body of work. The 2022/2023 ACCESS/PRINT exhibition includes work by Tay Wright, Anastasia Kol-Balfour, Lee Greve, Aiyana Beaulieu, Mia Lambert, Sterling Rouleau, CJ Alexander, Catrielle Barnett, Zara Ridenour, and Emma Zauhar

Creative Clean Water Stewards is a year-long education program designed to teach students about clean water initiatives, rain gardens, and pollinators, and allow them to create artwork around sustainability. The exhibition includes poems and work by Ella Baker Global Studies and Humanities Magnet School, Whittier International School, and Burroughs Community School. Funded by Hennepin County Green Partners.

STUDENT ARTWORK HIGHLIGHTS:

South High School senior Mia Lambert created a final project on the themes of Asian American identity and religious iconography. Her series included a veil made up of screen-printed fabric scraps sewn together, a multi-layer screenprint created with translucent inks on mylar to mimic the appearance of a stained-glass window and relief-printed tree trunk slices. 

After learning about the use of printmaking in social movements through Access/Print, Southwest High School sophomore Anastasia Balfour was inspired to produce some of her own protest art. Through her print, she aims to disrupt racist stereotypes that are attributed to Black girls and women by drawing on her own experiences as a Black person, living in the predominantly white neighborhood of Linden Hills. 

Perpich senior Lee Greve chose to depict a series of extinct animals who were victims of the Holocene Extinction. Greve intentionally used a monotype technique to present these animals, in order to reflect the impermanence of animal species. 

Inspired by the prevalence of the Wild West in their childhood and their current interest in 70s glam rock, Shakopee High School junior Tay Wright created a series of “Rhinestone Cowboy” portraits. Wright chose to pair the more precise aesthetic achievable through screenprinting with more varied techniques like relief hand printing and blotted line monoprinting. 

Aiyana Beaulieu, who is also a senior at Perpich, wanted to draw from their Anishinaabe culture and depict the interconnectedness of humanity and nature. Through drypoint intaglio and monotype techniques, Beaulieu depicts a portrait of an Inuit woman surrounded by animals native to Turtle Island, rock formations, and constellations. 

Highpoint Presents: Jungle Press Editions

A partnership celebrating the breadth of work, techniques, and styles by 

fifteen esteemed artists with Jungle Press Editions

Closing Event:

Join us on Saturday, May 6th at 12 PM in the Highpoint Galleries for the exhibition closing and a public walkthrough with Director and Master Printer, Andrew Mockler. Andrew will share behind-the-scenes stories about the printing processes, details about works in the show, and will lead guests through the exhibition on display at Highpoint.

The event is FREE to the public, but we ask that you RSVP here

Highpoint is thrilled to present a selection of works published by Jungle Press Editions of Brooklyn, NY. The exhibition features an array of vibrant and experimental prints by fifteen artists, including Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Ellen Berkenblit, Jennifer Mack-Watkins, Nicole Eisenman, Sam Messer, and others. Join us for a public opening reception on Friday, March 31st, 7 - 9 PM. Artwork will be on display through May 6th, 2023.

The artists have collaborated throughout Jungle Press’ history with Director and Master Printer, Andrew Mockler, to create new work utilizing their themes and mark making styles, transformed into print medium. This exhibition showcases the breadth of work created at Jungle Press Editions and the diverse and bold styles of printmaking by the artists.

“A major part of Highpoint’s founding mission is to increase the appreciation and understanding of the printmaking arts and to expand access to the many contemporary voices and perspectives it serves. Over the years, Highpoint has partnered with international printmaking studios from Japan, Cuba, Pakistan, South Africa, Northern Ireland, the Arctic Circle, among others to bring exhibitions to Highpoint’s galleries to share with Minnesota audiences. Highpoint has also been proud to feature quite a few printshops from Canada, Mexico, and the US whose work helps connect us with current artwork coming out of communities closer to home. These partnerships introduce new artists to Minnesota, elevate the artists’ work and help advance their perspectives - which is foundational to the notion of prints as vehicles for communicating images and ideas. This spring, we are thrilled to recognize the work being created at Jungle Press, and HP looks forward to presenting this exciting art in our galleries.”  – Highpoint Artistic Director and Master Printer, Cole Rogers

Exhibition Highlights:

In 2022, Jungle Press worked with printmaker Jennifer Mack-Watkins to create two new lithographs continuing her exploration of themes of racial identity and history, injustice, and societal conformity related to gender roles. Space Boy and Space Girl will be featured in the exhibition alongside her earlier works with Jungle Press. 

Painter Sam Messer's work from a 2020 collaboration with Jungle Press will also be included. These playful portraits of Olympia typewriters, an ongoing subject for Messer, using multiple techniques and handmade additions in these variable editioned works.

Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Tunji Adeniyi-Jones’s paintings emerge from a perspective of what the artist describes as ‘cultural addition, combination and collaboration’. Born and educated in the UK and now living and working in the USA, his practice is inspired by the ancient history of West Africa and its attendant mythology, and by his Yoruba heritage.

Artists Include:
Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Ellen Berkenblit, Elizabeth Cooper, Nicole Eisenman, Jane Fine, Jacqueline Humphries, Robert Kushner, Jennifer Mack-Watkins, Michael Mazur, Sam Messer, Andrew Mockler, Jill Moser, Katia Santibañez, Joan Snyder, Brian Wood

Andrew Mockler, Jungle Press Master Printer, visits Highpoint Center for Printmaking
Highpoint is dedicated to the mission of making printmaking accessible, creating educational opportunities, and continuing the practice of traditional printmaking techniques. Along with the exhibition, Highpoint has invited Jungle Press’ Master Printer, Andrew Mockler, to Minneapolis for the opening reception, and for a special members' event and printshop talk discussion between Cole Rogers, Highpoint Master Printer, and Andrew Mockler. An invitation will be sent to members by email and the recording of the discussion may be made available online. 

About Jungle Press Editions

Jungle Press Editions, founded in 1995, is a publisher of fine art prints and multiples by internationally renowned contemporary artists. Collaborating with master printer Andrew Mockler in his Gowanus, Brooklyn workshop, each artist is encouraged to develop an experimental approach. Working together in lithography, etching, monoprint, and relief printing, the printer and artist bring the artist's work out of the studio into the realm of printmaking.

Threshold Gallery

On view: July 12 - October 5, 2022

This ambitious exhibition (26 individual prints!) showcases both Nancy’s photographic eye and intaglio printmaking aptitude. The subject matter includes familial still lifes, architectural and natural compositions she’s discovered during her travels , and one very picturesque (and familiar) local interior.

Threshold Gallery

On view: April 15 - July 2, 2022

This exhibition features a series of ten black and white prints made by Benjamin Merritt that frame a stark black abstract image within a large white border. With scratchy markmaking and texture, white text overlays the black abstraction, and bleeds out onto the border of the paper. The text on the prints, together, reads:
“pain emerges at the door/ of my tired patience/ overstay my welcome/ hide from pain/ & make jokes/ at its expense/ close my eyes &/ feel right at home/ count the thumps/ til the lock can’t hold”

Exhibition ON VIEW: JANUARY 14 - FEBRUARY 12, 2021

Since February 2021, McKnight Printmaking Fellows Josh Winkler and Gaylord Schanilec have been busily translating ideas into prints for this exhibition. Despite never having met prior to this fellowship, their work is remarkably congruous. Each artist is an admirer and advocate of the natural world with a particular appreciation for trees. Not only do trees inform some of the content in their work, historically both artists have used wood as their printing matrix of choice; woodcut for Josh and wood engraving for Gaylord.

Originally from Indiana, Winkler is currently an Associate Professor of Printmaking at Minnesota State University Mankato. He primarily works from his home studio (SKS Press) in rural Nicollet County where he and his partner are rewilding a few acres. He offered the following thoughts about his artistic practice:

Direct experience and research feed the content and connections that are important to me as an artist. The environmental and cultural tragedies of the past must engage the high stakes of the present. Ecosystems are rapidly changing. So much has been lost, and there is much more to lose.

Recent research has taken me to the Grand Tetons and Crater Lake to study the plight of a dying keystone species, the whitebark pine. Camping in drought-stricken landscapes of northern California, I walked through burned forests and the dried-up arms of massive reservoirs. In Minnesota, I visited the last northern remnants of old-growth eastern white pine, and explored beaver habitat in southern Minnesota.  

These trips generated the experiences and imagery presented in this work. Half of the projects reflect on environmental conflict and destruction. The other half focus on positivity, and the potency of personal connection to the land. These parallel forces of hope and despair are emblematic of the present. We must look at Nature as a cultural force that can foster unity over division. 

* * *

In 1980, Gaylord Schanilec established his own press, Midnight Paper Sales. Since then he has published more than 25 books under his imprint, and has accepted numerous commissions including works for The Gregynog Press in Wales and the Grolier Club of New York. His work is represented in most major book arts collections in the United States and in the United Kingdom, and the archive of his working materials is held at the University of Minnesota.

Gaylord writes:

Consider the tree  turned upside down roots to the sky trunk to the ground.

Highpoint would like to thank the McKnight Foundation for their generous support of this program as well as this years panelists Tanekeya Word (artist, printmaker, scholar, and founder of Black Women of Print) and Lyndel King (Director Emeritus, Frederick R. Weisman Art Msuem). We would also like to express our gratitude to Dennis Michael Jon (Curator of Prints and Drawings at Mia) and Jerry Saltz (Author, Senior Art Critic at New York Magazine) for conducting studio visits with the fellows. Finally, thank you to Kim Todd for preparing questions and leading a discussion with the fellows during their exhibition.

Threshold Gallery

On view: January 5 - April 2, 2022

Opening reception: Friday December 10, 6:30-9pm

20% off all exhibited co-op member work:

Friday December 10; 6:30-9pm and Saturday December 11; 12-4pm

Please join us for Highpoint’s 39th cooperative exhibition. Print’s on Ice will showcase 68 prints and printed objects recently made by 26 members of our artists cooperative printshop. These semi-annual exhibitions are a showcase the diversity of scale, technique, and content possible within printmaking.

Join us for the opening reception on Friday, December 10 from 6:30-9pm. Guests will enjoy 20% off the sale price of all co-op prints during the reception as well as during gallery hours Saturday, December 11.

Threshold Gallery
On View: October 6, 2021 - January 3, 2022

This exhibition presents presents a suite of polymer photogravure prints made by Beth Dorsey that are based on photographs of venetian blinds and window frames. Features of the photographic images are isolated and used as abstract repetitive elements to create the work. These abstract prints have a graphic quality far removed from their origin.

Threshold Gallery
On View: July 6 - September 30

Nicole Soley utilizes contemporary and traditional printmaking processes to generate dynamic, multi-process prints. By creating cut out, printed, paper objects and inserting them into a printed background space, she synthesizes lived experience and research. Through layering many forms of printmaking and experimenting with paper colors, viewers interact directly with the artwork, interpreting both personal narrative as well as cultural critiques. Her most recent artwork, featured in this exhbition, emboldens the viewer to consider representations of consumption and change in generational values and ideals, while also exploring our impact on our communities and the land.

Nicole Soley is an artist residing in St. Paul, Minnesota. Soley has a Bachelors of Science in Art Education from Minnesota State University, Mankato and has been an Art Educator for four years. While teaching, she has also maintained an active cooperative membership at Highpoint Center for Printmaking. Her experiences in art making have illuminated printmaking as a space of empowerment. 

ON VIEW: JANUARY 15 - FEBRUARY 6, 2021

PUBLIC CONVERSATION: JANUARY 28, 2021 7-8:00pm

This exhibition fills Highpoint’s galleries with a quantity of original collographs, intaglio, and relief prints made by 2020 McKnight Printmaking Fellow Mike Marks. Much of the featured work is recent, however because this McKnight Printmaking Fellowships are for mid-career artists, some older gems will also be on view.

About the artist: Mike Marks holds a BFA in Drawing from the Cleveland Institute of Art, and an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Delaware. In 2016 he relocated to Minneapolis where he now lives and works. Mike’s prints are included in the permanent collections of institutions such as the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Museo do Douro (Douro, Portugal), Munakata Shiko Memorial Museum of Art (Aomori, Japan), Zuckerman Museum of Art (Kennesaw, GA), and the California College of Arts (Oakland, CA). Marks has been a resident artist at South Dakota State University, the University of Evansville, the Tides Institute and Museum of Art, Crooked Tree Arts Center/Good Hart Residency, Stone Trigger Press, and Acadia National Park. His work has exhibited both nationally and internationally. He recently received an Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, during which he produced his most recent solo exhibition, No Trace (2020).

Mike’s work focuses on critical habitat and landscapes under duress, using printmaking as an analogue for the mechanisms that reshape the environments around us. The prints often incorporate an act of deletion in their image-making process, representative of Mike’s ongoing interest in unmaking one object in order to create another.

Grace Sippy, Benjamin Merritt, Karmel Sabri

On View: September 14 - October 10

In August 2019, invited jurors Keisha Williams (Contemporary Art Department Curatorial Assistant and Artist Liaison, Minneapolis Institute of Art) and Bryan Ritchie (Professor of Art, University of Wisconsin-Stout) selected Karmel Sabri, Benjamin Merritt, and Grace Sippy as the 2019-2020 Jerome Emerging Printmakers. This was our offering the program funded by a generous grant from the Jerome Foundation. The residency is open to emerging Minnesota printmakers — defined here as artists who show significant potential, yet have not received a commensurate amount of professional accomplishment or recognition regardless of age or recognition in other fields.

The residency was running along smoothly until the middle of March when the pandemic abruptly forced Highpoint to close. The unexpected closure lasted until July and the Residency exhibition had to be postponed. The good news is that the Jerome Emerging Printmakers Exhibition will be Highpoint’s first public exhibition since we shut down in March. The exhibition will be on view beginning Monday, September 14 and will run through October 10.

Here’s what you can expect to see from the artists:

Benjamin has created a body of work that originates from a love of language and a need to communicate what living with a chronic illness entails. He uses the etching processes to reflect on the continually changing nature of chronic illness. Benjamin is able to scrape, manipulate, scar, and erase on the copper, leaving a collection of marks in the resulting printed image that reveal the history of the plate. He also implements monoprinting techniques in much of the work, creating a play between the stagnant, repeated etching and the fluid monoprint. 

More recently, through the COVID-19 pandemic, his thinking about the role of care in our society has manifested in his work. His personal relationship to care is that which he receives in treatment for a chronic illness, as well as his own employment in the care industry. Similarly to the work about chronic illness, he is interested in highlighting how complicated and multifaceted care can be, the importance and necessity of understanding the subtleties of healthcare that are often overlooked in America.

During this challenging and unstable year, Karmel pushed her aesthetic boundaries by playing with color and texture while channeling printmaking and embroidery into a therapeutic method of expressing the pain and frustration of intimate generational and personal traumas. The title of this body of work “The Question of Palestine” relates geopolitical relations between the US, Palestine, and Israel to personal experiences. Layering legal documents, personal stories, and found materials with bold colors and sharp, organic gestures, Karmel connects themes of resistance and resilience. 

Grace developed a large series of simultaneously delicate and weighty figurative studies that she turned into photolithographs and screenprints. The lightweight, translucent paper they are printed on further enhances their aura of fragility. Grace uses the figure to explore what cannot be said, or what she does not wish to say through words, and regularly visits themes of disintegration, doubles, the Grotesque, vulnerability, and conflict. Grace's creative methodology begins with photography; using herself or her husband as a model. She makes sketches from the photographs and then toner drawings (on mylar) based off the sketches. The toner drawings are used as films to make screens and photolithographic plates, from which prints are finally made. She will be exhibiting these finalized prints, and possibly some of the toner drawings they are made from.

In November Bryan Ritchie visited Highpoint and Dyani White Hawk was here at the beginning of January to conduct in-progress critiques with the residents. Tricia Heuring joined the residents for another critique at the end of February and in August, Keisha Williams met with the Residents to advise them on the layout of their exhibition.

Highpoint is thrilled to announce our 2020 McKnight Printmaking Fellows Drew Peterson and Mike Marks!

This year-long fellowship (February 2020-January 2021) grants the fellows extensive access to Highpoint’s cooperative printshop, technical advice and support, studio visits with nationally-renown arts professionals, career development support, a $25,000 unrestricted award, and many other benefits.

Funded with a generous grant from the McKnight Foundation, this fellowship is open to mid-career Minnesota artists who work in printmaking — defined here as artists who demonstrate a sustained level of accomplishment, commitment, and artistic excellence. The artists were selected on the basis of the artistic merit of their work, and their dedication, interest, and continued growth in printmaking.

Highpoint would like to thank our esteemed panelists Delita Martin (artist, Black Box Press Studio) and Michelle Grabner (Crown Family Professor, School of the Art Institute of Chicago), who reviewed application materials, conducted in-person studio visits with the finalists, and selected the 2020 fellows.

The panelists offered the following remarks about the selection process:

This was a rewarding, but also challenging task. The work presented by each artist was exceptional, we had some difficult decisions to make.

There are several elements and factors that I took into consideration. I began this process by first looking at the quality of each artists’ work; Did the work show craftsmanship, technical skill, presentation, and creativity? Did the artist push boundaries, take risks, or try something unique? I considered the professional accomplishments of each artist, reviewing the artists’ resume. I concluded my evaluation, posing the question, “What is the artists’ promise for continued growth and how will the fellowship impact this growth”? Following hours of deliberation, I selected artists whose work I believed would challenge the viewer and make them interact with the work. I selected artists who pushed printmaking beyond its boundaries of traditional process into new and innovative directions.

I would like to thank all the artists who submitted work for consideration. The jury process is a difficult one, but I hope that each will constructively use the feedback as a way to propel themselves further in their careers as artists. It is my hope that they will be encouraged to continue to submit works in pursuit of opportunities such as the McKnight Printmaking Fellowship.

-Delita Martin

This year’s recipients not only exemplified a rigorous engagement to artmaking but also demonstrated an ethical commitment to local communities and the natural environment. An imaginative range of varied print processes combined with experimental visual vocabularies, these two artists convey compelling interpretations of the complex social realities that we encounter in contemporary life. A love for the process of print media and its unique ability to foreground time and attention was also a vital and urgent component to both of the fellowship recipients.

-Michelle Grabner

More about each artist can be found below:

Mike Marks lives and works in Minneapolis. He holds a BFA in Drawing from the Cleveland Institute of Art, and an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Delaware. His prints are included in the permanent collections of institutions such as the Museo do Douro (Douro, Portugal), Munakata Shiko Memorial Museum of Art (Aomori, Japan), Zuckerman Museum of Art (Kennesaw, GA), and the California College of Arts (Oakland, CA). Marks has been an artist-in-residence at South Dakota State University, the University of Evansville, the Tides Institute and Museum of Art, Crooked Tree Arts Center/Good Hart Residency, Stone Trigger Press, and Acadia National Park, to name several. His work has exhibited both nationally and internationally. He recently received an Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, producing his latest solo exhibition, No Trace (2020).

In the coming year as a McKnight Fellow, Mike will be focused on using intaglio and relief processes to reflect the potential for environmental loss. This work will focus on critical habitat and landscapes under duress of change, using printmaking as an analogy for the mechanisms that reshape the environments around us. The prints will incorporate an act of deletion in their image-making process, part of an ongoing interest in unmaking one object in order to create another. 

Drew Peterson received his BFA from the University of Minnesota and attended the Yale Norfolk Summer School for Art before earning an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013. He is a lecturer in printmaking and drawing at the University of Minnesota and Lead Instructor in Contemporary Art at Juxtaposition Arts in North Minneapolis.

Peterson received Artist Initiative grants in 2011, 2018, and 2020 and an Arts Learning grant in 2017 from the Minnesota State Arts Board. He is currently completing a Next Step Grant through the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council and VAF grant from Midway Contemporary Art through the Andy Warhol Foundation.

His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at The Burnet Gallery, Public Functionary, Kiehle Gallery at St. Cloud State, Sabina Lee Gallery (Los Angeles), and Twist Gallery (Nashville). Recent group shows include Future Future at Hair and Nails (Minneapolis), Outstanding Affiliates at CC Gallery (University of Wyoming), and Octillo at Stella Elkins Gallery, Tyler School of Art.

In 2018, Peterson developed Entity Editions + EDU--a fine art printmaking resource committed to the publication, production, and education of print media through collaboration with emerging  artists, educational workshops, and consultation. Peterson’s south Minneapolis studio functions to serve his own practice, Entity Editions collaborative projects, and print exhibitions under the name Manager Gallery.

With the McKnight fellowship through Highpoint, Peterson looks to expand the technical and material aspects of his work by combining traditional and contemporary approaches to printmaking.