Afternoon Artmaking at the Anderson Center with August Artists-in-Residence & S.R. Kissler Press

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Join artists-in-residence Benjamin Merritt, Khalif Thompson, S. Erin Batiste, and Raven Johnson, as well as Rosemary & Sarah of S.R. Kissler Press, for Afternoon Artmaking at the Anderson Center — a series of concurrent public art-making workshops and artist demonstrations — on Saturday, August 14 from 1 p.m. – 4 p.m. Taking place at the North Studios Courtyard and the Granary Printmaking Studio at the Anderson Center, attendees will have the opportunity to meet the artists, learn about their equipment and techniques, and participate in workshops around Paper-Making & Collage, Visual Erasure Poetry, Relief Printing, Screenwriting, and Letterpress Postcard Printing.

Schedule and complete details for each artist and their activities are below. Drop-in visitors are welcome, but advance registration is encouraged for some activities. This is a free event.

1  – 4 p.m. – Mobile Letterpress Demo with S.R. Kissler Press
1 – 2 p.m. – Relief Printing workshop with Benjamin Merritt
1 p.m & 2 p.m. – Visual Erasure Poetry making with S. Erin Batiste
2 – 4 p.m. – Paper-Making & Collage workshop with Khalif Thompson
2 – 4 p.m. – Print Shop open studio with Benjamin Merritt
3 p.m. – Screenwriting workshop with Raven Johnson

Mobile Letterpress Demonstration with S.R. Kissler Press

1 p.m. – 4 p.m. – Outside the Granary Printmaking Studio

Rosemary Middlebrook and Sara Budeski from S.R. Kissler Press in Bozeman, Montana have transformed the back of their Scion xD hatchback, affectionately nicknamed Jimi, into a one-of-a-kind mobile letterpress studio. They are taking their craft on the open road as part of a mission to test the limits of letterpress outside of a conventional studio and expose more people to letterpress printing along the way. Their demonstration outside the Granary at the Anderson Center from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. on August 14 is just one of many the print shops & pit stops Sarah and Rosemary are visiting across the country this summer. Utilizing a small but mighty 5×8 Kelsey Excelsior Tabletop Press, Sarah and Rosemary are printing postcards that document where they’ve been and what they’ve experienced. S.R. Kissler Press also reflects on our modern times as human-kind & a country are in a transitory period. Learn more about their Summer of Mobile, Moveable Type project here and follow their updates from the road here.

Relief Printing Workshop & Open Studio with Benjamin Merritt

Granary Printmaking Studio – 1 p.m. – 2 p.m. (Outdoor Workshop); 2 p.m. – 4 p.m. (Indoor Open Studio)

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Join Minneapolis printmaker Benjamin Merritt at 1 p.m. on August 14 for an hour-long relief printing workshop outside the Granary Printmaking Studio at the Anderson Center. Benjamin will lead participants in creating designs, carving them into linocut blocks, and printing them by hand. Advance registration is encouraged, but not required. All materials and carving tools are provided. Feel free to bring your own paper. In addition to teaching participants how to physically create a print, Benjamin will also lead a discussion around ideas connected to printmaking. What makes a print different from things like painting and drawing? How does the ability to make mutliples of the same image affect how we respond to it? Following the workshop, Benjamin will host an open studio showing recent print work, with open discussion about the ways we use language in our everyday life to describe health/ our relationship to our bodies.

As an artist and writer, Benjamin Merritt challenges the normative idea that the body is something individual, unchanging, and fully knowable by objective means. His prints and drawings combine imagery and text from his medical records and personal writings, exploring his own experience with chronic illness as well as how patients’ bodies are written about and recorded. His work asks us to rethink the medicalized constructs we apply to the body, and suggests alternatives that are more beneficial to and understanding of bodies that don’t fit these norms.

Visual Erasure Poetry making with S. Erin Batiste

1 p.m. & 2 p.m. – North Studios Courtyard

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Join New York poet & printmaker S. Erin Batiste for a fun, hands-on introduction to erasure poetry from 1 p.m. – 3 p.m. in the North Studios Courtyard on August 14. Attendees will explore examples of erasure poetry, learn about the uses of the form and several techniques, and have an opportunity to create their own poems with provided materials. No experience is necessary! The activity can last up to an hour. S. Erin will offer introductory instructions and begin the class at 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. Registration is encouraged, but not required — drop-in guests are welcome to participate at any time.

Erasure poetry, also known as blackout poetry, is a form of found poetry or literary sculpture where a poet takes an existing text and erases, blacks out, or otherwise obscures a large portion of the text, creating a wholly new poem from what remains. Some poets cut words or sentences out with a knife, most write over it with a sharpie. The text that is being altered or “erased” can be a newspaper article, page from a textbook, letter, manual, magazine, etc. Erasure poetry may be used as a means of collaboration, creating a new text from the original and starting a dialogue with the new poem, or as a means of confrontation, a challenge to the pre-existing text. The power of erasure poems lie in the text that the artist selects, and why, consider why you might want to redefine, reframe, or reclaim a particular text.

Paper-Making & Collage Workshop with Khalif Tahir Thompson

2 p.m. – 4 p.m. – North Studios Courtyard

New York visual artist Khalif Tahir Thompson is leading a drop-in Paper-Making & Collage Workshop activity in the North Studios Courtyard from 2 p.m. – 4 p.m. on August 14. Participants will use handmade paper and a variety of collaging material (magazines, newspapers, journal entries, etc.) to create expressive works of art that resonate. This workshop is for people with a wide range of experience and abilities and provides space for interaction and learning. This is a drop-in activity; No advance registration is necessary.

Through his practice, Khalif chronicles the lived and imagined experiences of and between human beings. Khalif believes painting can be a tool in considering the emotional, psychological complexity of an individual’s story and identity. Creating imagery that connects one to the realm of another, Khalif aims to alter perception and invoke empathy towards his subjects, depicting their reality across a visceral lens. Focusing on portraiture and figuration, Khalif’s subjects include family, friends, and cultural figures placed in constructed settings. He renders his subjects in oil paint, incorporating mixed media, collage, and handmade paper to build the abstracted environments in which they exist.

Screenwriting Workshop with Raven Johnson

3 p.m. – North Studios Courtyard

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Join Anderson Center artist-in-residence Raven Johnson for a screenwriting and playwriting workshop at 3 p.m. on August 14 in the North Studios Courtyard. Whether you have a finished script or are simply looking to expand your original idea, this workshop is designed to study the core essentials of effective storytelling and discuss everything from dramatic structure to character development, as well as writing realistic and authentic dialogue. Advance registration is encouraged, but not required.

Raven Johnson is an award-winning, Liberian-American filmmaker. Originally from Minnesota, she graduated with her MFA from NYU Tisch Graduate Film program and was also a resident of Cannes Film Festival’s Cinéfondation Residence in Paris in 2019. In 2017, Raven was named one of AT&T’s Emerging Filmmakers for her short film, TWEEN, which also won the Student Choice Award at the 41st Cleveland International Festival and had its international premiere in 2018’s BFI London Film Festival. Her latest short film, The Trucker, recently had its World Premiere at this year’s Palm Springs Shortfest. In partnership with the Anderson Center, Raven is currently developing her first feature film, Ruby: Portrait of a Black Teen in an American Suburb, during her four-week residency.

This activity is made possible a grant from the Jerome Foundation, and the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

Featured image at top: detail of work by (L to R): Khalif Thompson, S. Erin Batiste, Benjamin Merritt, S.R. Kissler Press, and Raven Johnson