Print Room Culture: Collaboration and Community

Join us for “Print Room Culture,” a series of panels at the Renee & Chaim Gross Foundation that explores the collaborative and experimental space of the print studio.

In the first panel, speakers Matthew Kuborn, Matt Pearce, Justin Sanz, and Kyung Eun You consider how collaboration continues to drive the printmaking community. Organized in coordination with our current exhibition , the program draws inspiration from prints by Jacob Lawrence, Karl Knaths, and Chaim Gross, who utilized misprints and working proofs, and co-created with their peers at the print studios.

The panel is made up of artists and program organizers at local shops, including Peace Manufacturing (formerly ESPO’s Art World), the Lower East Side Printshop, and the EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. The discussion will be moderated by NYU Public Humanities Fellow Corey Risinger.

Matthew Kuborn and Matt Pearce join us from Peace Manufacturing (Peace MFG), the Brooklyn-based shop formerly known as ESPOs Art World. After a decade of printing primarily for artist Steve Powers, Peace MFG opened its facilities to community use at the end of 2024. As Powers has explained it, live printing has long been important to his artistic practice and the mission of the printshop. Pearce and Kuborn, staff members and master printers at the shop, will speak to the shop’s recent efforts to engage the local community.

Justin Sanz is a Brooklyn-based artist/printmaker who exhibits locally and internationally. His work is in the collections of the Library of Congress, The New York Public Library, the Spencer Museum, the Davis Museum, and various private collections. He currently works as an educator, Master Printer, and Studio Director at EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Sanz has conducted and organized printmaking workshops with the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Plains Art Museum as well as various universities. As a Master Printer he has collaborated on prints with countless established and emerging artists including Chakaia Booker, Dindga McCannon, Maren Hassinger, and Kenny Rivero, among others.

Kyung Eun You is the Programs Director at Lower East Side Printshop (LESP). You started at LESP as a studio intern in the fall of 2016, and has since then taken on various roles in the organization. She completed a certificate program in Printmaking at National Academy School in 2017, and assisted classes at both the Art Students League of New York and Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. You keeps her own art practices when not working at LESP. She has been a recipient of Book Artist Residency at Center for Book Arts (2023), Artwork Fellowship at Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning (2022), and NYSCA /NYFAFellowship in Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts from New York Foundation for the Arts (2020).

Corey Risinger is a doctoral candidate in New York University’s Department of English. Her dissertation traces how women of the long-nineteenth century recorded their everyday and then strategically re-engaged with their archival collections. In her time as an NYU Public Humanities Fellow, she has developed a series of public programs that draw on the archives of Renee and Chaim Gross.

Save the date for the next program in this series:

Tuesday, April 29 at 6 pm EDT

Print Room Culture is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Image: Unknown photographer, Chaim Gross and Raphael Soyer in the studio, c.1940. From the archives of the Renee & Chaim Gross Foundation.

Host or Publisher The Renee & Chaim Gross Foundation