May 2023 Newsletter
/Cool off by heating things up in the studio!
Summer is here, the AC is blasting, and if you’re looking to print, the presses are ready and waiting! We want to see folks in here all summer making things.
We have plenty of availability for Assisted and Unassisted studio rentals — you pay for exactly what you need to do your project or try new things during our business hours, and our June Open Studio Sessions drop first thing this June on our Classes + Events page if you’re looking to come in on the weekends and evenings!
MEMBERS MARK YOUR CALENDARS: JUNE 23RD: Member Night from 6-9PM.
June’s Member Night is hosted by Ingrid, who will be chatting with folks about all the geeky print things they might want to pick her brain about. There will be drinks and snacks, and attendees are invited to spend their time making art. This event is free for all registered IS Projects Studio Members so sign up ASAP if you want in! If you’re already a member, we’d love it if you’d RSVP.
If you’ve got big goals and want to devote lots of time to the studio this summer, we have month long studio passes available for June and July. Each pass covers unlimited access to available equipment during our business hours and to our posted Open Studio Sessions at no additional cost, and a discounted rate on one-on-one instruction through Assisted Studio Rental ($45 an hour, usually $65!)
All of these forms of studio access are a part of our Studio Membership program, and there are many more benefits to membership. Check out or memberships at the link above to learn more, and if you have any questions, you can always shoot Brooke an email at brooke@isprojectsfl.com to learn more. It’ll be the highlight of her day.
And of course, if you’re already a member, get in touch ASAP about your print/book/paper dreams so we can make them come true.
Come sling some ink in our upcoming workshops
We’re still cooking up our next batch of courses, so we’ve only got a few things on the calendar right now, but they are not to be missed.
You don’t need any prior experience to succeed in the courses we’re offering right now, and by then end of each one, you’ll be ready to work independently whatever process you’ve learned. These courses offer you a serious deep dive into a new process with a very knowledgeable and experienced guide. We are particularly excited to spotlight Sammi McLean’s upcoming Collagraph workshop on Sunday, June 4th. Much of collagraph depends upon trial and error, and Sammi has done a lot of that experimentation herself to great effect. Learning from her will set you up in this super versatile process with a really great sense of what works, what doesn’t, and how to get the prints you want from all kinds of textures and materials. This course will offer a massive jump-start to beginners and certainly a huge amount of growth to everyone else.
We’ve got a few other really exciting courses coming up. Check them out here:
Print Club: Botanical Painting with Jenny Kiker of Living Pattern
Taught by special guest instructor Jenny K, this brief 2 hour Saturday morning demo will guide participants through making beautiful, intuitive black ink botanical paintings from life. This is an easy and fun opportunity to get familiar with some of the most essential concepts of composing images for printmaking methods like screenprinting and relief, though they’ll be useful to folks working in any media. This demo is followed by a special Open Studio Session that is only available to the demo participants. Don’t forget that all Print Club demo + open studio days are 50% off to Print Club members!
Screenprinting Intensive with Ingrid Schindall (4 weeks, once a week)
By the end of this screenprinting course, you’ll have been taught all of the essential steps required to produce an edition of multi-layered screenprints. Ingrid will be sharing lots of her most effective tips, strategies, and insights for getting exactly what you need out of this process and out of our facilities. All you need to bring is your enthusiasm and an idea you’re excited about! This course even comes with an invite to purchase seats in any Open Studio Sessions (usually exclusive to members) which occur between it’s first and last meeting date so you can get some extra practice in.
Key Holder Residents: Hellos and Goodbyes
An image of the work we’ve installed on the Project Wall for this summer. It features works by outgoing Key Holder residents Marco Caridad and Oskar Msellati, as well as former interns Tainá Rocha and Fola Akinde.
It’s not just the beginning of summer for us, its the beginning of a few exciting new relationships for the studio, too! We received some truly fantastic applications to the summer session of the IS Projects Key Holder residency and we are happy to announce that our summer residents will be in the studio with us starting in June. Once our summer session has started, you’re likely to find our two new residents — Haley Smith-Moncrieff and Katelyn Kopenhaver — as well as current resident Yuko Yamaguchi, who will continue her spring residency through the summer. If you see these artists out and about or here in the studio, be sure to congratulate them!
At the same time, our other spring residents will be exiting our Key Holder program. They’ve all got super interesting summer plans — there are new practices to explore, places to go, and projects to bring to life. A hearty thank you to Charlisa Montrope, Nat Sassine, Oskar Msellati, or Marco Caridad for spending so much time here with us, making great work here, and for the important parts they’ve played in all the things we do here. It’s been such a joy, and we are hoping they’ll stay in our orbit for a long time to come.
Artists’ Book Feature
For this month’s artists’ book feature, we wanted to put Devoted by Beth Sheehan in the spotlight.
Devoted was the second book we published through out Existent Books publishing project in the Spring of 2016. This whole book was printed on our Vandercook SP15 with hand-burned pressure plates and hand-set lead type, all pulled together in a drum leaf binding. The book pulls text from obituaries and reflects on the ways in which our memories — particularly, our memories of each other — are reshaped and distorted by time and context.
Beth’s interest in memory, which is a product of her own lack of episodic memory, is still a major focus in her work today. If, by chance, you find yourself in Birmingham, Alabama at some point this June, you can see how some of the central themes of Devoted have bloomed in her practice in the time since, as she will be one of four artists in an upcoming exhibition at Ground Floor Contemporary called Two Lies and a Truth, opening on June 3rd. Exploring the messy relationship between fact and fiction within and beyond the studio, the show is likely to be especially exciting to lovers of books and prints. Beth’s work will be accompanied by work from Kyle Holland (a wonderful artist with a book and print foundation who currently teaches at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa) as well as work by Ingrid Schindall and Brooke Frank (surely you know who they are, don’t you?)