Mid America Print Council Conference

The MAPC Conference in Fargo, ND starts Wednesday, October 1 and continues through October 5.  I will be attending this conference along with Susan Moffett, Donna Stallard, Rob Woolley, and Jamie Klein.  The conference theme is Convergence (impressions of space we inhabit).  The conference literature explains that we "will explore how artists, educators, and creative people in general are influenced and marked by the spaces they inhabit.  The conference will also examine how the current world of printmaking is affected by vast quantities of available and developing methods and approaches, methods that seem connected to one another (historically, in terms of process, or by physical characteristics) while others seem quite unique.  The theme also questions limits and how they are determined or superseded, and how artists who use prints/printmaking are leaping into open space, or taking the risk to enter vast expanses.

That's a lot to think about.  There will be numerous panel discussions and demonstrations of printmaking techniques. An artist named Chris Flynn will be doing a demonstration of "digital print through press" which interests me a lot since my current work is about taking digital prints and doing traditional printing on top of them.  E.C. Cunningham will be doing photo-intaglio/collagraph monoprints, which seems particularly connected to the theme of the conference.  I hope to see that demonstration as well.  Art Werger will be doing color mezzotints, which I'm sure will be an interesting process.  He's a very meticulous printmaker.

The panel discussions are rich with provocative topics and I wish it were possible to attend them all, but I'll have to pick and choose.  Those of particular interest are: The Role of Classical Practices in the Digital Age, Teaching Critical Thinking in Print, and A sense of space. You can read descriptions of these panels by going to the link below:

http://www.mapc2008.com/presenters.html

See you in class on Monday.