Special Announcement Newsletter - September 2024
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What do you even say?
In 2014, I was 24 years old, living in Baltimore, selling blank journals at markets, and pining to have ink under my fingernails again. Flash forward 10 years, and I have found myself with a studio that has often been more of a home than home itself, full of ink, paper, and presses (most of which are older than me.) Most importantly, this studio has been full of collaboration and conversation. If you’ve heard the story before, you’ve heard me say things like “I never wanted to have a press to myself” and “the thing about printmaking that got me hooked is the community — printing alongside fellow artists, all fighting our own battles and celebrating each other’s victories.” While this journey has come with its fair share of sacrifice, I am happy to say that the relationships made along the way have made it all worth it.
In April 2022, we acquired the papermaking studio of Hernan Helfer, known as both Helfer Design Studio and Miami Paper Museum at different points throughout its history. While it was not the first studio to find its way to IS Projects, it sparked an idea that we are giddy to share with you next week. After 10 years of IS Projects, the studio will now be known as the Miami Paper & Printing Museum! This new project is part art project, part artist collaboration, part museum, and part community practice all combined to give Miami another important cultural landmark that folks can enjoy and be a part of for years to come. There is a lot more to the museum than what will fit in this newsletter today, but there will be plenty more to come. Just pay us a visit or keep an eye out for more digital updates until you can.
Thank you for supporting us and reading this far! Please check out all of the anniversary celebration plans, exciting events and workshops coming up at the Miami Paper & Printing Museum below.
Yours truly, Ingrid Schindall
COME SEE THE CHANGES FOR YOURSELF
(during really fun events that you’re invited to)
We’re going all out for this — it’s our ten year anniversary AND our debut! — so it will be a fun and busy weekend. You’ve got two opportunities to come check out the Museum and all its wonders at the end of the month:
Friday, September 27, 6-8PM: Opening Reception for Galaxias Kyklos, the inaugural exhibition in the Contemporary Wing
Come see and celebrate Carol Prusa’s intricate Galaxias Kyklos etching suite. These dense and detailed etchings will be on view during this Friday evening reception. This will be the very first public event hosted by the Miami Paper & Printing Museum and will also offer a sneak peak of the rest of the Museum.
Sunday, September 29, 12-4PM: Grand Opening of the Miami Paper & Printing Museum
This is the main event — the opening of the newly installed Permanent Collection, curated by Beth Sheehan, and all of the snacks, merriment, community, and live printing that anyone could wish for. Friends and family are very welcome, whether they’re paper geeks or not (maybe they are and they just don’t know it yet!) The opening will also be an excellent opportunity to check out the Museum Store, which will be one of the best spots in Miami to buy a range of excellent papers, professional book and printmaking supplies, and a variety of handcrafted good, artists’ books, and zines.
Are you coming? Learn more about the fair, or apply to reserve your table as an Exhibitor.
Speaking of heartfelt celebrations of all things print…
Small Press Fair is coming up quick, and there’s still plenty of time for you to get involved!
You can apply to be an exhibitor if you have work you’d like to share at SPF this year. Click here to reserve your spot — it’s only $20 to bring your own table to the Zine Dunes, or for $100 you can book a Beach Front spot (table and 2 chairs provided!)
Not feeling a table this year? Want to run around and make the demos, lectures, photos, and other dreams come true? Join our volunteer squad! Every year we assemble a bright and bubbly close-knit team with cool matching t-shirts to run the fair.
Wanna keep your SPF plans more flexible? Just come visit the fair! SPF is November 9th and 10th and entry to the fair is free. We’d love to see you there.
GET BUSY IN A WORKSHOP
We’re kicking off our next chapter with a LOT of learning. We have three 4-week courses planned for October and a few shorter classes in the busy months of November and December, plus of course, one Print Club demo every month.
Alternatively, class can start whenever you’re ready.
Set up a custom workshop that fits with your needs and your schedule. Built for 1-4 people, browse our selection of ready-to-go workshops, or if you want to learn something really specific, you can submit a custom inquiry here.
MEMBERSHIP
Member passes: 7-day and 30-day options
If all of this has you excited to get to making art, it might be time to book yourself a studio pass.
Passes include the following:
Admission to any Open Studio Sessions (RSVP encouraged but not required)
Unassisted Studio Time during our business hours (email Brooke to make sure the equipment you want is available before you come in, but if it is, it’s yours to use!)
Assisted Studio Time at a discounted rate of $45/hour
Not a member yet? These passes are for studio members only (we do need to know you a little bit before we set you loose in here.) Becoming a member is really easy, and memberships start at just $150 per year. If you want flexible studio access, membership is definitely the move, and it comes with enough perks, invitations, open calls, and discounts to keep you printing all year.
If you’ve got any questions, you can compare our different membership levels here, and if you still have questions, shoot Brooke an email at brooke@isprojectsfl.com and she’ll be happy to help you out.
Artists’ Book Feature: Reliquary by Beth Sheehan
Let’s rewind for a second — you may have caught earlier in this email that the Permanent Collection has been curated by Beth Sheehan. It was a very brief mention, but it really merits unpacking. Beth Sheehan is one of the longest-standing friends of the studio. She has been mixed up in artists’ books and printmaking for as long as any of us here at the studio, and is today one of the most technically capable, curious, and rigorous artists we know in this field. All of those strengths on top of the fact that Beth is a joy to work with have led her to work in some of the coolest print shops and binderies we have here in the US, so her deep and geeky knowledge includes much of the recent history of where these things have been made as well as how. All excellent qualifications for the curator who’s going to dive into your archives and pull out the right things to shine a light on the magic of paper and print.
Curating from an archive requires deep attention to not only the objects in front of you, but also to the stories they tell and don’t tell. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the sensitivity to story and memory that have made Beth into an excellent curator first appeared to us in her own artwork. Reliquary, a tunnel book Beth Sheehan produced in 2017 in an edition of 40 is exemplary of these core elements of Beth’s creative practice.
The tunnel book is a centuries-old book structure, and in Reliquary, Beth uses it to explore the gradual transformation of memory over the span of years and lives. The never-ending game of telephone which constitutes our social memory is held beautifully by the image of a gravestone, and embodied even more impactfully in the commitment of that image to paper. The screenprinted pages in this book are individually hand-cut, and consequently every books has it’s own minor unique variations. Every step of this book has Beth’s touch, from beginning to end, such that the book itself becomes as much a reliquary to the moment in the book arts that yielded her and her place in it as it is a vessel for her ideas about remembering and care.
To purchase your copy of Reliquary, you can visit our website. To learn more about Beth, you can visit her website, or come meet her at the Grand Opening of the Miami Paper & Printing Museum on Sunday, September 29th. She will be very excited to chat with you about all these things and more.
