Left to right: Emma Ulen-Klees, Conor McGrann, Nancy Ariza
We are sending a warm welcome and congratulations to the 2024-2025 Jerome Early Career Printmakers Emma Ulen-Klees, Conor McGrann, and Nancy Ariza! These three artists were selected from a group of outstanding applicants by esteemed review panelists Bo Young An and Luis Fitch.
Beginning in September, Emma, Conor, and Nancy were granted access to the cooperative printshop at Highpoint to push their printmaking practice forward toward the exhibition that will take place in June 2025 (and beyond).
Beyond access to the studio and their 3-person culminating exhibition, the residents will also enjoy periodic studio visits with special invited guests along with learning and professional development opportunities. Read on to learn a bit more about each artist.
Emma Ulen-Klees offered this about her work: “multiscalar realities and consequences of environmental degradation, transformation, and fragmentation are central to my work. Through research, and the intensely personal process of archiving, extinct flora and cartographic text/imagery become material actors in ever evolving environmental narratives. The material reality of each subject is further reflected in my method of making and each projects’ form, allowing me to experiment with both the physical and conceptual capabilities of different mediums. The Jerome Fellowship will allow me to push my practice by continuing these ongoing projects, as well as providing support and foundation to experiment and grow new ideas! While I look forward to the advancement of a long term project archiving extinct plants through paper embossings, I am also excited to translate a series of ink paintings/drawings exploring the history of cartography and its symbols, into prints for the first time. I often process ideas through series, or sequential works, so the particular ways many print matrices hold a memory through transformation will be a great push for those ideas. I am especially interested in how lithography, and monotype will bring out different elements within this work. Beyond these particular projects I happily anticipate the unpredicted and unexpected paths my work may take over the course of the fellowship, whether by happy accident, or generative community feedback. It is this mutual exchange between subject and process (which feels particularly rich in printmaking) that I most look forward to learning from.”
Emma Ulen-Klees (b. 1992, Elysian, MN) is a multidisciplinary artist and writer whose work centers the fragmentation and transformation of landscape. Her individual but interconnected projects come together to mourn extinction and absence, magnify the accumulation of plastics, and interrogate the distortionary nature of western cartography, while still allowing for the beauty and awe vital to emotional relationships to place. Ulen-Klees earned a Printmaking BFA from California College of the Arts (2014), and MFA from Cornell University (2020). Past awards include the Ralls Scholarship in Painting, Yozo Hamaguchi Scholarship in Printmaking, as well as the Kala Art Institute Emerging Artist Residency. She has exhibited at the Missoula Art Museum (Missoula, MT), Zolla/ Lieberman Gallery (Chicago, IL), Jack Hanley Gallery (New York, NY), Safe Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Anglim Gilbert Gallery (San Francisco, CA) as well as in Oakland, Berkeley, CA, and Ithaca, NY. Internationally she has exhibited in Osaka, Japan and Hjalteyri, Iceland.
Conor McGrann said this about his practice: “I am the father to a two year old and I have found that my art practice has had to change quite significantly since she was born. I am so excited for this opportunity, as it will allow me to invest the time and resources I need to fully develop a new way of working as an active artist and parent. I really love intaglio printmaking in all its forms. I find it to be a perfect and at times frustrating collaboration between myself, the materials, and the process. Even after many years of work the act of making a plate always provides surprises. I hope to use this time at Highpoint Center for Printmaking to lean into the “how did that happen?” moments to make work that is fully in conversation with the process and material restrictions intaglio offers.”
Conor McGrann is an artist that makes things usually on paper, living and producing work in St. Paul, MN. He is the Digital Studio Arts Technician at Carleton College in Northfield, MN, where he maintains the printshop and photolab and facilitates the use of digital and analog interactions for faculty, staff, and students in the Art & Art History Department.
In his own work Conor has a particular interest in the translation errors and systemic breakdowns that occur when filtering work between digital and analog production methods. His work is focused on the relationship between political systems, geography, the built environment, sense of place, and culture. He received his MFA in May 2021 from the University of Tennessee Knoxville, and his BFA in printmaking from Syracuse University in 2009.
Nancy Ariza
The Jerome Early Career Printmaker’s Residency at Highpoint was developed with a steering committee to eliminate barriers to printmaking studio access for Minnesota artists from racial and ethnic communities that have been underrepresented within the cooperative printshop.
Find more information: highpointprintmaking.org/full-color-fellowship