Cyanotype Workshop

Join Artist Marissa Baez in creating cyanotypes using NMIH's historic blueprint machine. In this workshop, you will have the opportunity to print two of your photos or images using a Continuous Electric Printing Machine over 100 years old. It uses the light of an electric arc lamp to expose cyanotype paper, producing blue images. Historically utilized to create blueprint copies of land surveys, it can now be used to duplicate drawings, photographs, and virtually any artwork that can exist on paper. Marissa will print your images on transparent film before the workshop, then show you how she used the transparencies and the historic machine to create the cyanotypes in her recent exhibit titled Materia Medica at ArtsQuest. In addition to your machine exposed image, you can create an additional cyanotype using sunlight. In your additional cyanotype, feel free to bring materials of your choice (flowers, leaves, stones) or email another image ahead of time. Be sure not to wear loose jewelry or open-toed shoes. If you have long hair, please bring a hair tie. Make sure to email Marissa Baez your images at [email protected] by March 14, 2026. Your paper size will be around 9x12 or slightly larger.

About the Artist:

Baez is a Penn State Professor and multidisciplinary artist whose work is influenced by suppressed Mexican American history, death, ancestry, material, and decolonization. Conversations with Latinx and Indigenous academics and artists led Baez to expand their perspective on navigating a state of in-between. They address intergenerational trauma and the resilience of marginalized bodies through a combination of photography, performance, sculpture, and material-based installations. Baez weaves in family experiences and looks to their grandmother's use of Curanderismo to explore healing and indigeneity.

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Host or Publisher National Museum of Industrial History