Trade Portfolios
Open call
Organizer: Lars Roeder
Contact: Hello@larsroeder.com
Print Size: 11x14 inches
Portfolio Description: The multiplication and proliferation of images, their impact on society and culture, and the ephemerality and disposability of content characterizes printing technologies throughout history. In contemporary society, memes have a significant influence on language, communication, and visual culture, proliferating with virality, evolving, and almost as quickly, extinguishing. This portfolio invites participants to reflect on the memes of yesterday, question the dynamics of printing processes and digital content, and speculate of the future of images and their role in society. Print like you meme it!
Organizers: Brett Taylor & Brandie Dziegiel
Contact: jarflystudio@gmail.com
Donna Haraway, feminist science scholar and philosopher, describes our relationship with technology as being more than a tool but as systems that influence and inform our social realities, power structures, and values. “Technology is not neutral. We’re inside of what we make, and it’s inside us. We’re living in a world of connections and it matters which ones get made and unmade.” We are not separate from technology, but instead, we are entangled, intertwined, and enmeshed.
Building on this idea, printmaking as a technology reveals complex connections between our bodies, histories, and environments through processes like recombination, collage, layering, and hybridization. As a hands-on medium, printmaking allows us to explore how these elements shape identity and our relationship to the world. Participants are invited to create prints using multiple techniques that express themes such as transformation, interconnectedness, autonomy, and reconfiguration. These works aim to uncover new ways of understanding ourselves and our surroundings, using printmaking as a tool for research and discovery that expands embodied knowledge and deepens connection.
Organizer: Lise Drost
Contact: l.drost@miami.edu
Print Size: 20x15 inches
"Printing Smart" relates to the conference theme of exploring the future of printmaking.
This open call is looking for artists who make traditional prints with some digitally
printed elements that are included to accentuate the overall look of the traditional
techniques or to make the production of the prints more expedient. As an extremely
simplistic example, perhaps you want the work to appear as if printed on paper from
a legal pad: it would make sense to digitally print the yellow paper and the blue
and red lines rather than making plates or screens for them. I am hoping for much
more creative responses to this call, of works that include digital elements not as
the defining aesthetics of the final piece but as supporting layers that enhance the
look of the more traditional media. Applicants would submit previous examples of editioned
prints, a proposal, a c.v., as one reduced-size pdf to my email address. A fee would
cover the colophon, box, and return shipping. Thank you!
Organizers: Claire White and Margot Stroop
Contact Information: : claire.white.cw@gmail.com, margotstroop@gmail.com
Prints Size: 8x10 or 10x8 inches
“Those cars never seem to stop coming” and carwashes themselves seem to pop up everywhere these days.
“Printing at the Carwash” will ask “Why are there so many carwashes,” a question posed by Patrick Sisson in a 2024 piece for Bloomberg. Coincidentally, Margot asked me the same question in 2024 when we were working on a different print exchange, Dollar Tree, for the 2025 SGCI conference. We felt the idea could lend itself to another series of prints about consumerism.
Carwashes are easy to run. They do not require much labor and therefore do not create many jobs. They can have a negative environmental impact by creating runoff-not to mention the impact of cars themselves. They use space to create private equity for the owner without generating substantial benefit to the area, and, like most businesses today, are getting into AI with all the positive and negative ramifications that entails.
Our question, “Why are there so many car washes?” is a thematic and open-ended question. Prints for the exchange do not need to be literally about car washes, but we do encourage participants to visit a carwash and use it for washing screens, if they so choose. Rather, we invite participants to consider the United States’ auto-centric culture, pollution, logos and signage, subscription based retail, and private equity vs community resources. By leaving it open, we hope to use prints to share knowledge and thoughts about artists as consumers and how we can create ethically as unwilling participants in capitalism.
- Prints should be 8x10 or 10x8 inches.
- We are looking 23 total artists including the two of us.
- We would like 3 images from people applying.
- The fee will be $35 to pay for shipping, boxes, and the colophon.
Organizer: Mable Ni
Contact information: mableniart@gmail.com or dm @mableniart on Instagram
Print Size: 11x14 inches
Recipes act as tools for preserving culture, carrying knowledge across generations
through repetition and adaptation. Often passed down orally or through handwritten
notes, they record histories of place, migration, and resourcefulness. Each recipe
contributes to an accumulated body of knowledge, shaped by those who cook, modify,
and share it.
This portfolio explores the evolving relationship between visual and textual forms through the structure of recipes. Recipes exist at the intersection of image and language—measurements, instructions, and annotations often accompanied by diagrams, stains, or illustrations. Printmaking similarly blends text and image, using visual systems to communicate process, order, and meaning.
By combining recipes with printmaking, this work emphasizes how knowledge is preserved not through fixed outcomes, but through shared systems. Both prints and recipes rely on circulation, interpretation, and variation, reinforcing their role as accessible methods for transmitting culture, memory, and collective understanding.
Organizer: Natalie Deam
Contact: natalie.deam@gmail.com
Print Size: 11x14 inches
Other than human beings have their own valuable intelligences: unique sensory perspectives,
territorial knowledge, inter-generational practices, and ways of navigating a world
increasingly centered on humans and technoscientific data. This portfolio seeks prints
that explore other-than-human ways of knowing the world and celebrate expansive understandings
of ecological intelligence. Flora, fauna, and fungi beings offer uniquely embodied
experiences of the world. What knowledge of the world might they offer us? Printmaking
materials and processes offer valuable channels to explore these undervalued ways
of knowing and being. Together, this portfolio might explore more expansive perspectives—what
and how does a river know? How might a cloud imagine itself and its relations? Making
visible these more than human ways of knowing can help us value multispecies and ecological
intelligences too often ignored.
Organizer: Hailey Padilha
Contact: hcatp972@gmail.com
Print Size: 8x10 inches
"Print as Protest" invites artists to reflect on moments in history when printmaking served as a powerful tool for social change, resistance, and public discourse. From political posters, protest prints, and satirical cartoons to underground zines and revolutionary graphics, printmaking has long amplified voices, challenged power, and shaped collective consciousness. Artists are encouraged to pay homage to a specific historical moment, movement, or printmaker. Consider themes such as labor movements, civil rights, war and propaganda, feminism, decolonization, free press, or grassroots activism. Together, these prints will honor printmaking's legacy as a medium that documents history while actively shaping it.
This print exchange explores printmaking's impact by intersecting with art and driving social change. It aims to connect historical moments of activism with contemporary issues like climate, social justice, and technology. It celebrates print as a tool for discovery, empathy, and cross disciplinary dialogue.
Organizer: Jennifer Scheuer
Contact information: jscheue@purdue.edu
For this exchange artists will create a sculptural and/or unfolding print that can
fit in a 5” x 7” envelope. The finished contents in the envelopes should be no more
than 1/2 inch thick. The envelopes will be assembled into a book using the crown binding
technique where envelopes can be taken out of the binding and the artworks removed
for viewing. Artists will be tasked with experimental strategies to create a sculptural
work or folded work that fits within the dimensions and can use any type of printmaking
on paper or other archival surfaces to creatively respond to demonstrate their printelligence.
The project can take on any shape but should be light weight. https://www.frenchpaper.com/products/kraft-speckletone-envelope?variant=39951175876787
Participants: 8–10, if a large response, the project could be expanded to 2 or 3 groups of 8–10.
Please submit application to jscheue@purdue.edu with the headline “CROWN BINDING PORTFOLIO,” include in the email a biography or brief resume, three jpg images that are examples of your artwork, and a few sentences of your project idea.
Editioned size of project will 10–12, this is an open call for a curated project, but if receiving a large response of applicants, artists will be grouped in books of 8 or 10 artists. The envelopes will be glued with a support in groups of two to fit the binding. Portfolio fee: $40 includes the slipcase, cover/colophon, book binding, envelopes for each artist, and return shipping.
Your work should arrive to the organizer by August 1st, this allows for time that the finished dimensions of the project can be completed for editioning the slipcases and materials and be sent ahead of the conference for exhibition. Portfolios will be return shipped within one month following the conference.
Organizer: Brian Hill
Contact Information: hil21793@pennwest.edu
Print Size: 14x17 inches
Portfolio Description: This will be an exchange portfolio between participants, plus
two more prints—one for MAPC, and one for the exhibition. Using print media and social
realism, respond to feelings of darkness or oppression through a Southern Gothic lens.
The image should portray a narrative that stems from the artists anxiety about something.
Current issues such as inequality and increasing violence bring about a new version of topics that have been portrayed in Southern Gothic literature, such as despair, decay, abuse, tension between madness and reality, violence, and the supernatural.
This portfolio is a way to unleash our creative narratives. Using printmaking as a form of expression and commentary draws on our intelligence as artists and humans. This theme also connects us to place with the conference being held at Louisiana State University.
Organizers: Mia Isabel Pons and Ricki Denes
Contact: rickildenes@gmail.com , pons.mia97@gmail.com
Print Size: 11x15 inches
The portfolio FERAL seeks to spotlight artists who work in untamed, instinctual, and outright strange ways.
Where are you left when the “standard" doesn't work? When a mistake can’t be taken back? When you are tired of the same o’l thing? With no money or supplies? Do you become feral? Feral thinkers push innovation, they take risks, they play with the matrix and the multiple, they find new tools and create their own.
The FERAL portfolio gives artists a unbound opportunity to showcase their innovative thinking including the ability to highlight the use of nontraditional materials, variable printing, and the merger of technology and analog in print media, Working in a feral state does not disregard craftsmanship but rather encourages and respects the unique emotional and intellectual responses artist tap into in our ever changing environment.
Organizer: Laura Grossett
Contact Information: Grossett.Laura@gmail.com
Print Size: 11x14 inches
This proposal is for any intaglio process involving mordant. The emphasis is on the practice of etching as a technique rather than a prescribed visual theme. Artists may supplement with other processes but etching should be the primary focus.
Printelligence is the shared knowledge, decision-making, and problem-solving that happen through printmaking practice. This exchange focuses on the etched mark as the result of informed choices, testing, experimentation, and risk. How long a plate is bitten, how deeply a line is etched, and how the metal is scraped or manipulated all reflect a hands-on intelligence developed through experience and labor in the studio. The plate itself becomes a record of that thinking: what worked, what didn’t, and what was learned along the way.
The resulting collection will gather a wide range of contemporary approaches to etching and offer a sampling of our cumulative knowledge. Following the conference, the portfolio will continue to circulate in the studio and classroom as a practical teaching resource that connects the conference to ongoing learning. Although this exchange was imagined as a resource for educators, all printmakers can benefit from it and those outside academia are also encouraged to apply!
curated
Organizer: Teresa Cole
Participants: Laura Berman, MFA 00, Robert Lansden, MFA ‘03 Blake Sanders, MFA ‘07 Josh Kno`, MFA ‘12 Pippin Frisbie-Calder, MFA ‘17 Cassie White, MFA ‘18 Cora Lautze, MFA ‘19 Kelwin Colman, MFA ‘21, Emma Sarver, MFA '26, Kalleen Chilcote, BFA ‘03 Hannah March Sanders, BFA ‘07 Sylvia Huges-Gonzalas, BFA ‘09 Brian Hitselburger, BFA ‘07 Sam Foster, BFA ‘19 Sydney Astl, BFA ‘21 Meredith Stern, BFA ‘03 Teresa Cole
The English master printer Stanley William Hayter who founded the legendary Atelier
17 workshop in Paris referred to printmaking as the journalism of a line. The process
of printmaking treats mark-making as reporting, editorializing, or interrogating.
Bay Area artist Wayne Thiebaud declared printmaking not as something you know but
what you are surprised to learn. Maybe having its own intelligence. This portfolio
explores this translation of mark and surprising results with 30 years of past printmakers
from both the MFA and BFA programs of Newcomb Art Department, Tulane University, New
Orleans, LA.
Each of the artists listed have their own embedded history with a city that left its mark on them and their practice. It enabled them to understand regeneration and rebirth, rising above the waterline but still grounded in the Louisiana mud. This portfolio is intended to present each artist’s voice as they are now probing concepts, events and current situations.
Print size 22x15 inches
Organizer: Humberto Saenz & Kyle Chaput
This portfolio presents lithography as a material-driven mode of inquiry in which thinking occurs through physical interaction, chemical response, and iterative decision-making. Grounded in the medium’s inherent balance of control and contingency, the project uses lithography to examine contemporary social, environmental, and technological conditions through a process that values observation, accumulation, and material awareness.
Invited artists will produce hand-pulled lithographs addressing issues such as displacement, inequity, ecological pressure, and ethical questions surrounding emerging technologies. Through the integration of image, text, and surface, contributors will explore how visual information is constructed and how meaning shifts through repetition, variation, and material intervention.
Print Size: 15”x20”
Organizer: Vanessa Jo Bahr
Participants: Vanessa Jo Bahr, Michael Barnes, Christa Carleton, Daniel Chiaccio, Dylan Goldberger, Dennis McNett, Samantha Mendoza, Emmett Merrill, Johanna Mueller, Ryan O’Malley, Bobby Rosenstock, Michael Weigman, Cammy York
An exchange dedicated to honor the lore and legacy embodied by our steadfast, furry
beasts. Their inspiration - endless, their comic relief - unparalleled. The only creatures
who remain with us throughout all our successes and failures, matching our diligent
work ethic in the studio from sun up to sun down, days on end. From countless treats
and belly rub breaks, to tripped over toys and fierce security alerts, they keep up
safe and sane. Whether you want to render your personal canine companion or choose
to reference dogs, wolves or coyotes more broadly, take a moment to create a print
about them for once. Let this exchange serve as an ode to our fearless familiars,
our studio mates, our best friends. May their dog hair bless our prints and their
bark cast spells upon our paper.
Print Size: 11x14 inches
Organizers: Kristin Powers Nowlin, Jason Scuilla, Mervi Pakaste
Participants: Alan Larkin, Brian Jones, April Foster, Barb Madsen, Mark Ritchie, Karen Kunc, Karla Hackenmiller, Art Werger, Melissa Haviland, Kent Kapplinger, Jenny Schmid, Kristin Powers Nowlin, John Richardson, Taryn McMahon, J. Leigh Garcia, Jason Scuilla, Mervi Pakaste, Lauren Cardenas, Leslie Koptcho
Conferences are still the primary face-to-face means of sharing information, knowledge,
and “printelligence” amongst the Mid America Print Council community. Participants
in this portfolio represent decades of accumulated knowledge about the organization
as it has grown and developed since the first conference in South Bend, Indiana in
1994. These artists also embody the breadth of techniques, processes, and themes that
are characteristic to the field of printmaking and which we celebrate every two years.
As members gather once again for our sixteenth in-person conference, we aim to honor
past and present directors, organizers, and coordinators for their behind-the-scenes
contributions to the personal and professional connections that are formed between
fellow lovers of ink and paper during these biennial proceedings.
Print Size: 11x14 inches
Organizers: M. Robyn Wall & Nathan Pietrykowski
Participants: M. Robyn Wall, Nathan Pietrykowski, Grant Brownlow, Andrew Kosten, Heather Muise, Tate Folley, Chadwick Tolley, Joe D’uva, Annie Klein, Luke Ball, Melaine Yazzie, Mary Jones, Christina Kang, Brett Anderson, Stephanie Alaniz, David Wischer, Ron Linn, Matthew Egan, Andi Newberry, Chenxi Gao, Kaleena Stasiak, Dustin Brinkman & Joseph Lupo
Leave a Mark examines text and image in the contemporary print field. The goal of the portfolio is to foster slow reading of art, support public libraries as places of print and prompt connections between visual art and the written word. Artists in the portfolio are asked to create a print and bookmark that uses a combination of text and image to create their piece.
Print Size: 14x11 inches