A Time of Other Focus Points

Working on building out a new home (that's the backyard garage/soon-to-be-studio pictured above), after living in the same house for over eight years, has been consuming my time and creative energy throughout the winter. This won't wane soon, and posting about flooring installation doesn't really segue with the other work I update about here. It's been a country minute since I wrote an update - mostly I've just been uploading tangential imagery to Tumblr, which I'm still having fun with despite my sneaking suspicion that most people are only on Tumblr looking for porn. Anyhow, here's an update, some goings-on since January:

• The Howling Mob Society was featured in the  U.S. Pavilion at the 13th International Architecture Exhibition - la Biennale di Venezia, Italy last autumn. I don't have much information about the exhibit, or how it went down, but I do know that the focus was on creative infrastructure projects like signage, community gardens, and whatnot. The show is being exhibited in short-form in Chicago this spring, but I don't know if our project will be highlighted or not.
• Meantime, I'm in the idea stages of working on an exhibition design about the same Howling Mob project for an upcoming exhibition for the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Colombia College of Art in Chicago in June: Word on the Street: Image, Language, Signage.
• This March, I spent a week in Milwaukee working with fourteen Justseeds members and allies on a collaborative project at UMW's Union Gallery during the Southern Graphics Conference. Uprisings: Images of Labor was mostly an amazing experience, as we turned the gallery into a production facility for screenprinting large posters and did a parallel-to-the-SGCI series of our own free presentations and workshops. This whole project was geared to highlight our strengths, much different than the more experimental collaborations we've done in the past. Slideshow of images from that week is below...
• I released a couple of new prints on Justseeds - one a slight re-working of an older letterpress print, and one a digital print version of the Macho B billboard I painted for a Justseeds exhibit during the Pittsburgh Biennial (and re-worked for the Justseeds Migration Now! portfolio with Culture Str/ke).  I also just released the print I worked on from the Uprisings exhibition. I'm in the beginning stages of hashing out a Celebrate People's History poster about the Luddite uprisings in England (1811-13), more on that as it develops.
• Firebrands, the book I worked on with Bec Young and the rest of Justseeds, is still available in print, but we're looking to release an e-book version soon.
• I've begun outlining/researching a pamphlet/zine on the history of Indigenous peoples in the area surrounding what is now Pittsburgh. My basic intention is to create something of a primer for understanding the history of European colonization of this area, as any institutional presentation of Indigenous history here is typically relegated to whatever relationship there was between original peoples and either the French or British colonists during the Seven Year's War.
• I've been brainstorming how to restart the penny-smasher project, a perennial back-burner idea that I would love to bring to fruition sooner than later... meantime, one morning when I really should have been doing something productive, I instead made a running list of my own smashed penny collection. No photos of each yet, but coming soon. Funding ideas for realizing this project are always welcome!
• Mary Tremonte and I worked locally with the Shadbush Environmental Justice Collective on some anti-hydrofracking graphics for their newest newspaper project. Mary did a two-page centerfold splash, and I did a large full-page poster for the back of the paper. Both are meant to be hung in street-level windows, wheatpasted, waved around by angry people on the sidewalk... whatever works in the moment. You can read more about the project and get copies or bundles of the new paper from Shadbush here.