Panels

Panel Organizer: Kristin Powers Nowlin

Contact information: kpnowlin@ksu.edu

This panel of 3-4 artists, selected via an Open Call, (plus the chair) will explore ways in which they have personally experienced censorship or self-censorship when exhibiting or creating their artwork. As stated on the ACLU website, “Censorship, the suppression of words, images, or ideas that are ‘offensive,’ happens whenever some people succeed in imposing their personal, political, or moral values on others. Censorship can be carried out by the government as well as private pressure groups. Censorship by the government is unconstitutional.” Self-censorship, according to the Cambridge Dictionary, is “control of what you say or do in order to avoid annoying or offending others, but without being told officially that such control is necessary.” 

Artists that have been impacted by a restriction on their free speech, whether that is through external forces or their own fear of such forces, will present briefly about their personal experiences and participate in a conversation about censorship and/or self-censorship. 

Questions that the artists on the panel might address include: Why and how was their work censored or self-censored? How did they deal with the censorship of their work? Did it affect future work they made? Did the venue of the exhibition matter? What lessons can be learned from the experience of censorship or self-censorship of their work?

This panel fits the conference theme as it explores issues that connect art and society as related to freedom of expression, which is, unfortunately, a timely issue. Further, it should reveal ways in which printmakers resist the silencing of their voices.

Panel Organizer: Kevin Haas

Contact Information: kevinhaas.contact@gmail.com

Google Form

As artificial intelligence reshapes how images are generated, decisions are automated, and labor is reconfigured, printmaking offers a human-centered model of intelligence grounded in material engagement, embodied knowledge, and accountable decision-making. While contemporary print practices may incorporate digital tools, printmaking ultimately depends on human hands, judgment, and presence to bring ideas into material form.

This panel, proposed for Printelligence, asks what keeps printmaking vital as definitions of “intelligence” continue to shift. Printmaking requires working within physical systems, anticipating consequences, learning through iteration, and accepting responsibility for outcomes that cannot be undone with a command or prompt. These experiences cultivate durable forms of intelligence, including material literacy, ethical authorship, critical image-making, systems thinking, and adaptive problem-solving.

As academic institutions navigate rapid technological change, tightening budgets, and evolving expectations for student outcomes, printmaking must be articulated not as a legacy practice, but as an educational framework that develops essential human capacities. This panel invites participants to identify the transferable skills embedded in print pedagogy and to build shared vocabulary that communicates those skills across artists, educators, administrators, and interdisciplinary audiences.

This panel seeks to explore questions such as:

What forms of intelligence does printmaking uniquely cultivate?
How does printmaking model human agency and responsibility?
How do print processes foster ethical, material, and critical thinking?
How can studio learning be translated beyond the arts?
How can we effectively advocate for printmaking’s continued relevance in higher education?

Panel organizer: Yoonmi Nam

Contact Information: yoonminam@gmail.com

Google Form

This panel explores the idea of material intelligence through the practice of mokuhanga, the water-based woodblock printing tradition rooted in Japan’s specific climate, ecology, and craft histories. Far beyond a means of producing imagery, mokuhanga is a deeply collaborative process—one that relies on the accumulated knowledge of papermakers, toolmakers, pigment producers, printers, and artists across generations. Through tactile and embodied engagement with materials such as washi, baren, carving tools, and pigments, practitioners develop an intuitive understanding of how these elements interact. This sensory intelligence offers a powerful counterpoint to contemporary tendencies toward digital mediation and declining manual dexterity among students.

Panelists will consider how mokuhanga reflects the environment from which it emerged, and how the process shifts as it is practiced in new cultural and ecological contexts. How does this historically grounded, material-based intelligence continue to evolve globally? And what might mokuhanga teach us about sustaining thoughtful, ethical, and embodied making in an increasingly dematerialized world?

Panel Organizer: Laura Crehuet Berman

Contact information: lberman@kcai.edu

Google Form 

Color is a topic full of paradoxes, and printmaking requires color to be utilized in both tangible and intangible ways. Printed color bridges an interdisciplinary path of knowledge, requiring awareness of materials, techniques, and practices that are both cultural and artistic. Artists working in printed color incorporate both hands-on and conceptual practices within systems, layers, and tone. This panel, chaired by the publisher of the online archive Reflections on Color and Printmaking, shares diverse viewpoints on the agility and capability in printed color through the work and research of contemporary artists working in print media. 

Panel Organizer: Arron Foster, Assistant Professor of Art, Kent State University at Stark.

Contact Information: Foster.arron@gmail.com

This proposed panel responds to the PRINTELLIGENCE call by convening artists, designers, researchers, and makers working in book arts and expanded print media to examine print as an intelligent, responsive system. Rather than treating print as a static or purely representational medium, the panel foregrounds how material processes, sequential structures, and embodied engagement allow print to think, feel, and respond to the world around us.

The panel emphasizes print’s capacity to register environmental, social, and emotional conditions through its matrices, surfaces, and modes of encounter. In contrast to the speed and dematerialization of digital media, contributors will explore how artists’ books and print-based practices operate as slow, durational forms of intelligence—requiring attention, negotiation, and physical presence. Collectively, the panel seeks to articulate how print functions as a site of sensing, cognition, and ethical engagement in a changing world.

Panel Organizers: Nicholas Waguespack

Contact information: nickjjwagg@gmail.com or instagram @njwaguespack

Thinking Queerly Through Print is a panel discussion that examines queerness in printmaking through the framework of PRINTELLIGENCE—understanding print as an intelligent, adaptive system shaped by bodies, materials, technologies, and social conditions. Rather than positioning print as a neutral or purely technical mode of reproduction, this panel foregrounds printmaking as a site of inquiry, experimentation, and decision-making  and how that is informed by queer ways of knowing. The discussion will consider how queer printmakers engage print as a thinking process. Panelists will address printmaking’s relationship to broader systems of knowledge, asking how queer practices challenge normative histories, interrogate technological systems, and reimagine archives and modes of transmission. The panel will also explore how queer printmakers respond to environmental and social urgencies through materially conscious, community-driven, and interdisciplinary approaches.  Some discussions could include: In what ways do printmaking processes—such as repetition, layering, and transfer—reflect queer ways of thinking, adapting, or surviving? How do queer print practices challenge dominant historical narratives or institutional frameworks within print culture? What responsibilities do queer printmakers have when working within systems that rely on reproduction, distribution, and visibility?

Panel Organizer: Sarah Smelser

Contact information: ssmelse@ilstu.edu

Walking is a way to get from point A to point B, a straightforward interaction with varied spaces, but it serves many other purposes: it is healthful and meditative. Walking can diffuse or neutralize - hence the command “take a walk!” - but moreover it can spark the imagination, generate knowledge, prompt self-discovery, and remind us of the state of our planet. 

Walking, thinking, and making have been connected by many creatives. Chicago artist Stan Shellabarger does performance ‘walks’ that take up to twelve hours, using his feet as a repetitive mark making tools and leaving a path that is simultaneously an artwork and a record of endurance, patience, and determination. In Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking, the author tackles many facets of putting one foot in front of the other: humankind’s evolution from four feet to two, spaces built for walking, walking for a purpose, and the cultural baggage and social mores of walking. She writes about others who have written about walking, and philosophers who did their best work on foot.

How does making footprints relate to making prints? How does a pedestrian practice affect a studio practice? How do interactions with nature direct or translate into interactions with ink and paper? Walking = Thinking = Making explores these questions through personal histories, material investigations, and interventions with the natural world.

Panel Organizer: Carla Fisher Schwartz, Assistant Professor, San José State University

Contact information: carla.fisherschwartz@sjsu.edu

Form for open call 

This panel will explore ways in which digital fabrication has expanded the contemporary print media toolkit within a broader understanding of print as the meeting of a matrix and a receiving surface. Technologies such as laser engravers, 3D printers, and plotters, now common within rapid prototyping and CAD workflows, are increasingly integrated into print media practices, whether alongside traditional processes or through hybrid approaches. Although these tools are no longer novel, their use continues to prompt critical questions about how digital fabrication reshapes what a print is, does, and signifies.

Printmaking cultivates a particular kind of logic grounded in ideas intrinsic to the medium, including iteration, translation, multiplicity, indexicality, and accessibility. When print media artists employ digital fabrication technologies, these frameworks shape how such tools are used, understood, and conceptualized. This panel asks how digital fabrication expands, transforms and/or renegotiates the way we think through print media, particularly in ways not yet fully articulated within the field. It also considers the inverse: how print media contexts shape the use and meaning of digital fabrication technologies. In what ways is digital fabrication changing how we think through print; and how does print, in turn, frame digital and new media practices? 

This panel welcomes a wide range of practices and critical perspectives engaging the intersection of print, digital and computational processes and fabrication methods, especially from artists and scholars working in between print and digital or new media. 

Panel Organizers: Etai Rogers-Fett and Mable Ni

Contact information: erogersf@vols.utk.edu

This panel will feature undergraduate and graduate students giving six-minute slide presentations on their current work. The talks will be followed by a guided Q&A in which the participants’ work will be put in conversation with one another. Engaging with the conference theme of the print’s role in generating accumulated knowledge, the panel will highlight student artists with a strong conceptual basis for their work who aim to educate or intervene in a cultural conversation or field of study. The Q&A discussion will ask panelists to share how and why they utilize print mediums as their means of communication, including how they envision the public interacting with their work in the present and an imagined future.  

Student Lightning Talks will platform the work and thoughts of student printmakers and provide the opportunity for further connections around shared topics of interest that emerge in the presentation and discussion.  

Panelists will be selected through an open call disseminated through printmaking listservs and social media. The panel will be co-chaired by myself and my fellow UTK printmaking colleague, Mable Ni.

Panel Organizers: Zoë Couvillion

Contact information: zoecouvillion@outlook.com

During a nationwide shift toward credit-driven learning, skill-building can feel transactional, as if students are expected to “bubble in” correct answers before advancing to the next lesson.

This panel brings together printmaking instructors from a range of educational contexts to share transformative approaches to teaching print.

Panelists will discuss how they move students beyond standardized inputs and point-based assessment: fostering learning through experimentation, critical thinking, and shared making.

Together, they will highlight hands-on, challenging, and community-driven experiences that reshape how students understand both printmaking and learning itself.

Panel Organizer: Kathryn Combs

Contact Email: kathryn.combs.art@gmail.com

Scholar Bernard McGinn defines mysticism as the "preparation for and consciousness of a presence" of the divine. Today, Artificial Intelligence is marketed as a precursor to a god-like machine intelligence, prompting users to seek answers and fulfill desires through carefully worded requests—a modern form of digital prayer. Yet, these technologies remain tethered to authoritarian structures that commodify our spiritual reach for the wealth and power of a small class of elites. This panel asks: How does the visceral physicality of printmaking—the pressure, the chemistry, and the ink—reconcile with the weightless ethereality of AI? If the printmaking matrix is a physical site of potential, what can it teach us about the algorithmic "matrix" harvested from human behavior? Can printmaking still offer space for resistance to larger systems of power? Artists on this panel will discuss matters of the soul, the nature of machine intelligence, and the role of print as a return to the physical in an increasingly phantom-driven world.

Panel Organizer: Paloma Barhaugh-Bordas

Contact Information: paloma.bordas@austin.utexas.edu

Google Form

This panel invites artists whose practices operate at the intersection of printmaking and textile-based work, examining how techniques, materials, and conceptual frameworks migrate between these historically distinct yet deeply connected fields. Panelists will discuss their movements between media—both in practice and in concept, innovations in hybrid media, and how their work in print and fiber advances contemporary printmaking discourse.

Through case studies drawn from their own work, participants will address questions of material translation and hybridity: What happens when the matrix becomes flexible, absorbent, or stitched? How do notions of invisible labor create conversational space for what is seen and unseen in a finished piece? We will also consider the historical and political dimensions of this crossover, including feminist craft lineages, collective making traditions, and the ecological concerns that come into high relief when working with print and fiber. 

This panel will frame a discussion around printmaking and textiles as mutually constitutive relationship—linked through shared concerns with pattern, pressure, touch, and time. By foregrounding both technical experimentation and critical reflection, this discussion offers insight into expanded definitions of printmaking and the growing relevance of hybrid-media methodologies within contemporary art.