Hello, Print Friend

In this episode Miranda speaks with Raj Bunnag a printmaker based in North Carolina whose work, dramatically and unflinchingly addresses the global war on drugs. Raj makes large and exceptionally detailed linocuts that skilfully borrow imagery from everything from the news media and his Thai roots to sixteenth-century etchings by the likes of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Francisco Goya. He speaks...

In this episode Miranda speaks with Omar Bin Musa. Omar is a Malaysian-Australian rapper, poet, published author, and self-taught printmaker from Queanbeyan, Australia. After discovering woodcut while on a writing retreat in Borneo he has been creating heartfelt and honest images which masterfully wed images to words. We talk about printmaking and activism, the art of story telling, quite a bit ab...

In this episode Miranda speaks with Martin Mazorra a well known and well loved printmaker based in Brooklyn but originally from West Virginia. Martin makes stunning woodcuts often paired with letterpress movable type to create his own codification systems for images which are as beautiful as they are darkly humorous. In this episode we talk about his growing up in West Virginia, how he came to fal...

In this episode Miranda speaks with Ericka Walker, an American born lithographer and muralist currently working as an Associate Professor of Art at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in Halifax. Drawing from twentieth-century propaganda and historical documents, she creates a visual mixtape of North America’s past glories and its hubris. She is an artist who thinks deeply about the w...

In this episode Miranda speaks with Kill Joy. Joy is a printmaker and muralist of Filipino heritage who lives and works throughout the world. This interview was recorded during the bushfire crisis in Australia in January of 2020, so there is talk about that particular time of chaos, but it is also incredibly applicable to our current COVID-19 pandemic. There are no small questions with Joy, so thi...

In this episode Miranda speaks with Jessica Marie Mercy a printmaker, visual artist and self-identified “femme, queer bitch” from Seattle, Washington, whose artistic practice revolves around preserving and celebrating queer spaces and queer community through documentation. She does so with beautifully rendered relief works and photo-based screen prints all produced in vibrant, unapologetic colours...

In this episode Miranda speaks with Joseph Velasquez, Assistant Professor of Art at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida and co-founder of Drive By Press. We talk about Joseph formative years growing up all over the Southwest and Texas, his early influences through Chicano art, the founding of Drive By Press, and touring the country for eight years with a Pelican etching press. This...

In this episode Miranda speaks with Australian artist Rona Green. Green’s practice is an exploration of identities: the ways we express them to the outside world and the sides of ourselves we want to keep hidden. Drawing her inspiration from comic books, Egyptian art, and fashion photography Green constructs her human/animals hybrids as unique individuals who can stand in for any viewer. In this e...

In this episode Miranda speaks with Robert Blanton the founder and master printer at Brand X Editions in New York City. For the past forty years Brand X has printed for some of the biggest names in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in American art: from Helen Frankenthaler to Jeff Koons. Known for their experimental approach to screen printing as well as the ability to take on exceptionally...

In this episode Miranda speaks with Dr. Tony Curran a lecturer at the Centre for Art History & Art Theory at Australian National University. Curran’s practice explores humans’ interaction with technology as well as human’s interaction with each other in our post-humanist age. Primarily an artist working in painting and drawing, Curran experiences printmaking through a collaborative lens of var...

In this episode Miranda speaks with Stephanie Alaniz an intersectional feminist, fat activist, and adjunct professor at Emporia State University. Alaniz uses social media to crowd source participants for a project in which she draws stunning portraits of her subjects with their self-reported physical insecurities portrayed in bold. Through painstakingly rendering her subjects with precise draftsma...

In this episode Miranda speaks with Bernard Derroitte a print dealer, advocate, and educator who has been running print-focused galleries in Chicago since 1998. We talk about his childhood growing up in Brussels and how family trips around Europe to see art profoundly impacted him. As well as, how the physical experience of seeing works in person, particularly works on paper, can be intimate and d...

In this episode Miranda speaks with Kathryn Polk. Polk grew up in a church-going Tennessee family during the 1950s before attending the Memphis Art Academy. She worked as an advertisement illustrator for a newspaper, went on to art direction and eventually worked her way up through the corporate ladder to be president of a company giving back-end data management solutions for fortune 500 companies...

In this episode season two is off to the races with Annalise Gratovich. We talk about how growing up in a family of professional musicians instilled in her the work ethic to become an artist, how she came to develop her distinctive aesthetic inspired by the matryoshka dolls of her childhood, and how her family’s displacement during World War II directly affect how she sees and fosters a sense of h...

In this episode Miranda speaks with Peter Lancaster. To mark the happy one year anniversary of PCL we take a vacation together to Lancaster’s newly founded printmaking residency in Fiji. We learn about his childhood on the island, moving to Australia to attend college, traveling to New Mexico to receive training at the Tamarind Institute, and his years spent collaborative printing in Melbourne. Th...

In this episode Miranda speaks with Reinaldo Gil Zambrano community builder, lecturer, printmaker, story teller, and printmaking advocate. We talk about his childhood growing up in Caracas, Venezuela; his leaving home at sixteen to study in Costa Rica; learning about illustration as visual communication; and finding a sense of home in a changing life through shared narratives. We also chat about m...

In this episode Miranda speaks with Jill Graham the technician and master printer at the NSCAD Lithography Workshop: Contemporary Editions. Graham shares her journey of starting out in Montreal, setting up a lithography workshop in a remote part of Ontario, traveling to South Africa to train a color blind master printer, waiting ten years to attend Tamarind, and surviving and thriving in the Toron...

In this episode Miranda speaks with Steve Campbell of Landfall Press in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has been working at the iconic press for thirty-one years as the director, marketer, and collaborative printer and he still speaks about printmaking with a romance as if they were on their first date. Campbell has printed with Judy Chicago, Christo, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, and Kara Walker, to name a...

In this episode Miranda speaks with Gregory Santos, Instagram lithographer extraordinaire. Santos builds and tends to an expansive online community based on being open about the trials and tribulations of printmaking’s most mercurial medium. We talk about the need for honesty in social media, and to move away from the shiny perfection on social media which is so often touted real life. As well as...

In this episode Miranda speaks with Elizabeth Jean Younce, lithographer, small business owner, and dog mom. Younce grew up in the wilds of New England and the natural world as well as the folklore we create from it is at the heart of her practice. Younce’s images are filled with the honestly and brutality of animals and she uses them to explore feelings of becoming overwhelmed by the chaos in whic...

In this episode Miranda speaks with Tanekeya Word a Milwaukee based visual artist, printmaker and educator, whose work centers around Black geographies: exploring Afrofuturism, Black aesthetics, Black hair, Black identity, and Black girl/womanhood. Word is also the founder of Black Women of Print a society where black female printmakers can share space, intergenerational knowledge, stories, and co...

In this episode Miranda speaks with Ben Muñoz about his series “The Endless Endeavor”. These six woodcuts, each 8 by 4 feet, chronicle his family’s journey from Mexico to America starting with the artist’s grandfather. Filled with rich iconography and complex symbolism, these pieces tell a multi-generational story of hard work and hope. Muñoz channels the grit and resolves shown by the generations...

In this episode Miranda speaks with Opal Ecker Deruvo a non-binary printmaker working in Norwalk, Connecticut. DeRuvo speaks about their early introduction to our craft at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking, developing their traditional draftsmanship skills in order to express the critical queer moments in their life with the reverence of a seventeenth-century portrait, taking advantage of th...

In this episode Miranda speaks with Jamaal Barber: printmaker, curator, collaborator, podcast host, grad student, husband, and father. Barber offers his insights into what it takes to become a successful artist, his own personal story of taking the leap from weekend art fairs to full time artist, and his print practice making work about all aspects of black life in America. He also gives us a look...

In this episode Miranda speaks with Marco Sánchez about growing up on the Juarez / El Paso border, moving from his home to a small town in Pennsylvania, taking advice and inspiration from his artist grandfather, and representing his cultural identity through drawing on the incredible history of post-revolution Mexican printmakers. Sánchez also talks about the changing politics of what it means to...