Rico Gatson: Power Portraits

Rico Gatson, Nikki G, 2019, colored pencil and photo-collage on paper, 22" x 30". Courtesy of the artist and the Ronald Feldman Gallery

Highpoint Editions Artist Rico Gatson is featured at The Art Gallery at Delaware County Community College for their Spring semester contemporary exhibition. “Rico Gatson: Power Portraits features twelve collages from Gatson’s Icon series, as well as two paintings and the film Four Stations. Incorporating stylistic strategies from abstraction, Op Art, and the Bauhaus, Gatson’s wide-ranging art historical and cultural references combine to produce multilayered portraits of contemporary black heroes. “ - dccc.edu

On View: March 4–April 10

Find more information here….

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Tales from the Co-op: Matt Kunes

Colorado’s Lost Grizzly, screenprint

After studying graphic design at UW-Stout, I moved to Minneapolis and constructed a barebones screenprinting studio in a laundry room. The space was tiny, but it was everything an aspiring artist needed to create screenprinted shirts, posters, and art. I named this humble space Motelprint Studios. After fifteen years of screenprinting next to a washer and dryer, I felt it was time to leave the restricted space of the laundry studio and find a new studio to call home. Enthusiastically, I found the Highpoint community. 

My work often references animals and nature. I enjoy the varying abstract relationships I can create within the drawing using line, engaging color schemes, negative space, and scale. Although much of my design aesthetic was influenced at a young age obsessing over 1990’s cutting-edge skateboard designs, the experience that most shaped my current aesthetic was exploring graphic design and screen printing techniques during my time abroad in college. While in Germany, I discovered that my art relied on graphic design elements. By blending the two methods, I have achieved a visual connection to the subject matter. By arranging each element purposefully, I breathe new life into my subjects through vibrant, alluring color arrangements and charismatic contour lines. 

What I found at Highpoint is professional equipment and a staff that offers an extraordinary studio experience for printmakers. Also, it is wonderful to be surrounded by inspiring artists of all ages and backgrounds. These factors have contributed to a resurgence of productivity. I am looking forward to all the new enjoyable art arrangements and prints to come generated at Highpoint Center for Printmaking.

Tales from the Co-op: Anne Feicht

Friends, screenprint

I find what draws me to making prints are the many different stories they can tell. To me it is magical when pigment, shape, and line, placed according to a printmaker’s intentions, transform paper into a print. When making my own prints I try to keep the stories positive, while at the same time not losing site of the complicated times we live in. I absolutely feel the world needs positive thinking and positive doing. 

Most of my images are fictional, and the notions of connectedness, motion and circularity are important to me. I think of my images as pieces in a bigger picture, and enjoy mentally wandering in that “image place” while I am drawing and working. What place that is, relative to the everyday places we know, is a question I find appealing to consider as both a maker and a viewer of art.

Many print images I work on begin as three-dimensional ideas in my mind’s eye. In the distant past I primarily worked sculpturally with wood, willow, and other elements. While making sculpture, I enjoyed not only creating the object but also the process and challenge of building. I eventually switched to making wood block prints and left sculpture behind, but continue to mentally work between a sculptural and printmaker’s viewpoint. Similar to sculptural building, I enjoy the process of making prints and find following the orderly steps of printmaking both comfortable and rewarding. 

I took a long break from printmaking, but several years ago, I felt an urge to make new prints and return to unfinished stories. Becoming a member of Highpoint, has allowed me that opportunity, and the ability to work with printing methods with which I do not have as much experience. I am inspired by the different types of prints created at Highpoint, including those made in the classroom, by co-op members, in the pro shop, and by Highpoint staff. I honestly cannot think of a more interesting or supportive community to re-explore printmaking.

Tales from the Co-op: Cathy Spengler

holes, screenprint

I retired in 2016 after 30 years in graphic design, in large part because a hankering to make screenprints was starting to compete with my “real” work, which I otherwise loved. I found myself taking photos and playing with images for hours (even when client deadlines loomed!), imagining the prints they might become.

A class at Highpoint in 2006 had given me my first chance to try screenprinting. A decade later, I was lucky to find another screenprinting course offered at Normandale Community College, taught by Cindy Koopman. She welcomed a 60-year-old student into her class of 19 and 20 year-olds, and it was a perfect launch into the work I dreamed of doing.

And Highpoint, where I’ve been a member since 2017, has been a perfect home in which to start doing that work. I’m grateful for this wonderful resource—thoughtfully-run; generous with knowledge and equipment; and full of like-minded members and staff who are fun and inspiring and so helpful to work alongside.

About the work I’m doing: at heart, I just love to look at things. My process, from the beginning, has been more about noticing than creating. My eyes are consistently drawn to certain things—color, the play of light and shadow, patterns interestingly out of whack or with syncopated rhythm—and what I find so much fun is that beauty in these forms can pop up at any time, and in the most ordinary places. I love to play with images until I find what I recognize as a “sweet spot” for me: that edge where representation and abstraction meet. I hope to be playing for a long time to come!

Tales from the Co-op: Lynn Bollman

Food as Thought, relief with found objects

My thoughts result in my print ideas, and are directed by things I see, find, and experience, and are the subject of my work.  They don’t reflect on political, social, moral, or historical issues, but are a product of random – not precise, varied – not compartmentalized, original – not obvious, mind-work.  They are often inspired by the unexpected. 

Anyone who says you can’t see a thought,

simply doesn’t know art.

-Wynetka Ann Reynolds

I am a printmaker and I work almost entirely with relief methods.  I typically start with a traditional substrate, but am easily moved to experiment with unusual physically textured surfaces.  Any durable physically textured surface has the potential to become a worthy surface for a print idea…a thought. 

I work everything by hand and avoid using digital devices.  What some observers identify in my work as flaws, are simply a reflection of an honest attempt to reveal my intentions. 

No less than seventy-five percent of the time I spend on making a print is dedicated to thinking and planning.  It is not uncommon for me to lie awake for hours at night, searching to find a solution to further one of my ideas.  I can make good designs.  I spent most of my professional life encouraging my students to do just that.  What inspires me now is what makes a design meaningful.  What I make now has to stand above design, or a simple solution.  It has to be a product that reveals what I demand of my art…that it be of a deep and truly original thought.

Julie Buffalohead, Andrea Carlson, Dyani White Hawk named Artists of the Year 2019

Star Tribune | Illustrations by Robert Carter • Special to Star Tribune

Highpoint Editions Artists Julie Buffalohead, Andrea Carlson and Dyani White Hawk were three of the six artists named “Star Tribune's 2019 Artists of the Year.” The six honored artists were all part of the groundbreaking exhibition “Hearts of Our People” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and as the Tribune says were “at the height of their powers” in 2019, having released new work, participating in solo shows and receiving high profile honors.

Read the full article and learn about each artists’ work here…..

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