On Monday, April 22nd, Professors Steve Bowden and Mark Zurolo welcomed David Wolfe of Wolfe Editions and Peter Evonuk to the printshop to work with students printing grid type pieces. The one-day residency was sponsored by Counterproof Press. For more photos, visit our Facebook Page.
Breanne and Mary plan to research UConn’s Dodd Center Alternative Press archives. During the residency they will work with Counterproof Press to create letterpress prints, zines and other artifacts in response to the collection of Alternative Press ephemera.
Breanne Trammell is a multi-disciplinary artist with a background in printmaking. Her practice is fluid and project-specific as she pivots between installation, sculpture, publishing, performance, curatorial projects, and collaborative making. Her studio work is a playful constellation of diaristic sculptural objects and prints that explore the confluence of high and low brow, and shares commonplace experiences that are mined from the everyday and her personal history. Using humor and playful formalism, Breanne subverts traditional printmaking techniques to elevate low and ubiquitous objects, printed matter, and digital ephemera. Her publishing imprint Teachers Lounge loosely operates as a forum to explore subversive topics and reveal hidden histories related to education, activism, politics, sports, and visual culture. Breanne’s work has been widely exhibited and she has been an artist-in-residence at the Women’s Studio Workshop, Kala Institute, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Ox-Bow School of Art, Endless Editions, among others. Breanne received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and is an Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Cincinnati.
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Mary Banas develops conceptual and informed designs for brands, institutions, and social practices with her independent creative practice YES IS MORE which includes design, visual research, and teaching.
Mary has designed for and with organizations and companies including COLLINS, Designer Fund, Dolby Labs, Honor, Mode Analytics, Postmates, Segment, and WBUR Boston. In 2018 she designed Japanese-American singer-songwriter Mitski’s album Be The Cowboy which was nominated in the “Best Recording Package” category for the 61st annual Grammy Awards.
She was a resident for Design Inquiry, Maine in 2016 where she developed work investigating the possibilities and limitations of line, both as a form and concept, and in 2018 with a close-read of Sol LeWitt’s 1981 artist book Autobiography resulting in Alternative Texts: What Are You Reading? which launched at Limited Edition Gallery inside John McNeil Studio in Berkeley, CA.
Mary has taught graphic design since 2009, notably as Visiting Assistant Professor in Residence at the University of Connecticut, Rhode Island School of Design, the University of Bridgeport, as well as leading design workshops for the Center for Creative Solutions (Vermont), Dolby Labs (San Francisco), OTIS College of Art and Design (Los Angeles), and the Berkeley Art Museum + Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley). She has been a visiting critic at MICA and Pratt Institute.
BFA, University of Connecticut
MFA, Rhode Island School of Design
Counterproof Press once again teamed with the Wallace Stevens Poetry Program and the UConn Design Center to produce the 2019 broadside of Rankine’s poem, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. Student, Lynn Tran is seen printing the edition below. To view the final product, please visit Our Work section.
Claudia Rankine, a 2016 MacArthur Fellow, is the author of five collections of poetry including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (Graywolf 2008) and the bestselling Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf 2014), which uses poetry, essay, cultural criticism, and visual images, to explore what it means to be an American citizen in a “post-racial” society. A defining text for our time, Citizen was the winner of the 2015 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the NAACP Image Award, the PEN Open Book Award, and the LA Times Book Award for poetry.
In all her work, whether writing about intimacy or alienation, Rankine’s voice is typified by intensity and candor. Her poetry is both innovative and thoughtful, often crossing genres as it tracks startling yet precise leaps of the mind. As the Judges Citation for the Jackson Prize notes, “The moral vision of Claudia Rankine’s poetry is astounding. In a body of work that pushes the boundaries of the contemporary lyric, Rankine has managed to make space for meditation and vigorous debate upon some of the most relevant and troubling social themes of the 20th and 21st centuries…. These poems do the work of art of the highest order—teaching, chastening, changing, astounding, and humanizing the reader.” Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts.
Born in central Pennsylvania, Rebecca Morgan works in painting, drawing, and ceramics that subvert stereotypes of Appalachia. Imbued with folk tradition and a sly sense of humor, her work peels apart the simultaneous reverence and disgust for rural people. Stylistically, Morgan embraces the hyper-detailed naturalism of Dutch masters, as well as absurd, repulsive caricature suggestive of underground cartoonists like R. Crumb. Although they often contain modern clues, her characters and scenes evoke a romanticized, nostalgic America, nonexistent but wistfully recalled, much like Norman Rockwell’s illustrations. Morgan’s works question what such images were selling in their conception, and she gives her archetypal maids, hillbillies, and dandies the space to explore contemporary issues of women reclaiming their subjectivity, a pop-cultural false sense of romance, and ideas about masculinity, power, escapism, and hedonistic backwoods pleasure.
Rebecca Morgan received a BA from Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania and her MFA from Pratt Institute, NY. Press for her work includes The New York Times, Time Out New York, ARTnews, Whitehot Magazine, Beautiful Decay, Artslant, Juxtapoz Magazine, The Huffington Post, Paper Magazine, Hyperallergic, and Berlin’s Lodown Magazine. She is the recipient of residencies at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, The Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts Residency, a Vermont Studio Center full fellowship, and the George Rickey Residency at Yaddo, among others. Morgan has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad, with recent exhibitions at The Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada, The Hole, NY, MRS Gallery, NY, Marinaro Gallery, NY, Hashimoto Contemporary, CA, Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, NY, Fisher Parrish Gallery, NY, Woskob Family Gallery at Penn State, PA, Knoll Galerie, Austria, Richard Heller Gallery, CA, Children’s Museum of Art, NY, and SPRING/BREAK art fair, New York, NY.
https://rebeccamorganart.com/home.html
Rebecca Morgan’s visit was supported by GSS and Counterproof Press.
Counterproof Press is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition at the Benton Museum March 28 – July 31st. Counterproof Press: Collaborations samples the collaborative studio projects facilitated by the press, including broadsides from the Wallace Stevens Poetry Program, student-driven projects, and work by visiting artists. The exhibition will be showcased in the Benton upstairs gallery in conjunction with the Center Gallery’s main exhibit Game of Thrones: An Exhibition of Contemporary Art Furniture (Inspired by the 2019 UConn Reads selection).
After an unfortunate snow cancellation in the fall semester, we finally welcomed Terryville High School students to the printshop on Monday, January 28, 2019.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights Booklet project is a collaboration between the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center and Counterproof Press with Visiting Artist Professor Steve Bowden in the fall of 2018. The book was conceived and designed by UConn Graphic Design students in the UConn Art & Art History Department department and printed by UConn MFA in Studio Art candidate Chad Uehlein. Students: Caroline Amberg, Addicus Bagwell, Mitch Britton, Emilie Dufresne, Ed Ho, Maggie Hoynes, Emily Karam, Darrell Knighton, Deanna LaVoie, Katie Ouimette, Haley Stein, Connie Tao, Robert Varszegi, Sarah Woodward, Holly Zheng. UConn Art & Art History Department and graphic design students Cassidy DePaulo and Megan Cascella, and Adjunct Instructor Kelsey Miller helped to collate and bind the book.
Norwich Free Academy students visited the print shop on December 6th, 2018 and we had a great time working with them on a plastic plate intaglio project.
Students from West Hill High School in Stamford joined Counterproof Press in the fall of 2018 for a printmaking workshop in the studio. For more photos, please visit our Facebook page.
As part of a statewide commemoration of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ (UDHR) 70th anniversary, renowned visiting artist and activist Meredith Stern was invited by University of Connecticut Human Rights Institute to give a presentation on art collaboration with social justice movements. She also presented a stencil-printing poster and sign-making workshop in collaboration with Counterproof Press. Students from the School of Fine Arts, the Human Rights Program and others created signs to bring to the #StandUp4HumanRightsCT rally that took place the following day on the steps of the Hartford Capitol building. To view more photos, visit our Facebook page.
