New Members and Financial Contributions

Part of the mission at PaperWorkers Local is to provide community and studio space for Birmingham artists. If you are an artist interested in learning more about printmaking, need access to equipment, or looking to make contact with like minded people you should join PaperWorkers Local.

Even of you're not an artist but want to learn more or support the arts in our city your financial contribution is needed and appreciated. It helps a great deal in maintaining our shop and supporting our ability to bring high quality art exhibitions to Birmingham. Contributions help us stock the shop, purchase equipment and expand the number of processes we're able to offer. You help us remain a Birmingham resource for the arts.

Because we are a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization all membership dues and donations are tax deductible.

Click this sentence to go to our memberships and donations page.

We thank you in advance for your support.

Wednesday Night is Studio Night

Every Wednesday evening at 5:30 Paperworkers Local hosts an Open Studio for making art, discussing art, group projects, and generally building community. Occasionally we might even take a field trip. 

It is open to any Artists or members of our community who would like to attend. And please let us know if you have something in mind for artsy fun on a Wednesday night.

Workshop: Book Arts with Doug Baulos

This workshop is suitable for beginners. Students will explore modern hard cover reinventions of worked long stitch binding with artist Doug Baulos. Bring your original prints, drawing, or paintings/collages etc (3-4 8x10”) and we will work with a variety of spine constructions and expose the creative potential of the book/journal as an artistic object. In this workshop participants will make a codex with rigid covers and drummed signatures with multiple variations of spine treatments. Participants will learn various expressive techniques towards making an exciting and archival book/journal.

Doug will provide book signatures, binders board, some decorative papers, needles, thread etc - students are encourage to bring their own paper, collage objects, etc.

Doug Balous is Assistant Professor of Drawing and Bookmaking at University of Alabama at Birmingham. He received his MFA from the University of New Orleans and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the UAB.

Balous regularly teaches workshops and lectures on his research in book arts, drawing and mixed media. In 2009 he won the President's Award For Excellence in Teaching at UAB.

Workshop is limited to 8 spots, $75 per person.
To register email Mimi Boston at PaperWorkersLocal@gmail.com.

William Dooley: Drawing on Clairmont Avenue

PaperWorkers Local is honored to present "Drawing on Clairmont Avenue," William T. Dooley's first solo exhibition with the co-op. Vibrant layers of dry media and oil paint create subtle, yet enticing shifts between spatial planes in his multi-media drawings and paintings. Outlines of organic and geometric objects are frequently overlaid with linear bands of color, creating an engaging tension between what is perceived as background and foreground. This tension is consistent throughout Dooley's work and raises questions about how we distinguish between that which lies in the forefront and periphery of our experience with the world around us.

Memory of Singlewide in the Sun

Since 1988, Mr. Dooley has served as an Associate Professor of Art and Director of the Sarah Moody Gallery of Art. Dooley teaches drawing as well as seminars devoted to graduate studio research. He offers an advanced undergraduate course on art museum practices. He earned an M.F.A. form the Univeristy of South Carolina in 1980 and his work has been included in over 50 regional and national exhibitions. His dedication to community outreach includes his contribution of expertise for exhibits management for the Rural Studio, an architectural design/build program affiliated with Auburn University, and active in the Blackbelt region of Alabama.

Dooley's exhibition will be on view from June 20 through August 8. 2014.

Regular Gallery Hours listed below:
Monday 6-8
Wednesday 1-5
Thursday 5-8
Friday 12-5
** AND by appointment paperworkerslocal@gmail.com or 205-601-6980

PaperWorkers Local and Forest Park's local businesses are open late on the Third Friday of every month. See what else is going on here:

https://www.facebook.com/events/1481139072101128/?ref_dashboard_filter=upcoming

Please come out for Third Friday in June and July to enjoy these new works by William T. Dooley.

New Works by Mike Marks

On view from April 18 through May 16, 2014. 

Mike Marks will be exhibiting a group of woodcuts, etchings, and collages that have been made during the previous two months spent at Stone Trigger Press in Abiquiu, New Mexico. His painting, printmaking, and sound-installation pieces convey stories of landscapes in transition between solitude and desolation. This exhibition's main themes will deal specifically with estrangement in the landscape and the disassembling/reassembling of place. Some of these prints are much larger than usual, up to seven feet across.

Mike was born in 1984 in Morgantown, West Virginia. He holds a BFA in drawing from the Cleveland Institute of Art, and received his MFA in Printmaking from the University of Delaware in 2013. He recently completed a residency at Stone Trigger Press in Abiquiu, New Mexico and then drove in a circle through the lower forty-eight to find the greatest trout streams imaginable. He's currently a member of the Maine printmaking collective Pickwick Independent Press, and is represented by Susan Maasch Fine Art in Portland. 

You can find more of Mike's work at his website' http://www.mikemarksfinearts.com/

Mike will also be doing a couple of workshops while he's in Birmingham. You can find out about them here: http://paperworkerslocal.blogspot.com/p/soap-white-ground-etching-with-mike.html

PaperWorkers Local and Forest Park's local businesses are open late on the Third Friday of every month. See what else is going on here:

https://www.facebook.com/events/210358135774924/?ref_dashboard_filter=upcoming

Please come out for Third Friday and these awesome new works by Mike Marks.

10 Years of Printmaking at the University of Alabama

Opening:
Friday March 21, 2014  - 5:30 to 9:00 pm.
3815 Clairmont Avenue, Birmingham, Al 35243

The work in this exhibition comes from an archive that documents ten years of printmaking classes at the University of Alabama.  "What is printmaking?" you may ask, and a multiplicity of answers exists.  Printmaking is a history of graphic processes that is inexorably linked to the history of information exchange.  Printmaking is a history of graphic processes that is inexorably linked to the history of information exchange.  Printmaking is an imaging process that has ties to both the fine art and commercial worlds.  Printmaking is etching, engraving, woodcut, silkscreen, lithography, and a host of techniques in between.  Printmaking is a vibrant voice in contemporary art.

Four elements define the essence of "print": a matrix, a transfer medium, a receiving surface, and the potential for repeatability.  An imprint is the manifestation of a physical object; the surface of the print matrix, which holds the image, directly touches the surface onto which the image is printed.  The two are separated only by a thin layer of transfer medium, which records the moment of contact. Leaving an imprint is the basis of printmaking, whether the matrix is a carved block of linoleum transferring ink to handmade paper, or a carved automobile tire transferring mud to the pavement as the car is driven.  Each print in this show is part of an edition a group of multiple originals, as alike as the artist's hand could make them.  Time and attention are spent on developing the image of the matrix, and on the process of creating the transferred impressions.

From the fifteenth century until the invention of photography in the nineteenth century, print was the primary vehicle for circulating both images and text.  The idea of printmaking belongs with ideas about how people communicate with one another, and the concept of the multiple is essentially populist and democratic.  Students work side by side in the print studio, sharing equipment and materials.  The collaborative, social nature of the the shop offers many unique opportunities.  For this reason I have chosen to highlight the efforts of the students as a group rather than focus on individual authorship.  Some of the impressions in this show are signed and dated while some are anonymous.  Each represents a moment in the larger narrative of a collective experience.

More important than the complex of tools, terms, and processes that attend each print medium is the unique visual vocabulary emanating from those processes.  Examine the prints and consider how they are alike, and unlike, one another.  Decide for yourself what that might mean.  Art students are learning to express ideas in the form of images and objects.  Often, the questions that drive this studio  practice come from different academic disciplines and other areas of their lives.  Do you see the fundamental human experiences reflected in the images on these walls?  Pause for a moment and reflect; making, looking at, and talking about art are powerful ways of examining the narratives that structure our understanding of the world.

Sarah Marshall
Associate Professor of Art, Printmaking, The University of Alabama

Become a Member of PaperWorkers Local

We are looking for contemporary curators and visual artists who want to help run an independent exhibition program and artists co-operative.

At the moment we are a fledgling organization. It looks a lot like we're a printmaker's co-op as we have built our organization around a print shop. However, the mission of PaperWorkers Local is to enable and nurture the making, exhibition, and appreciation of original fine art prints and all types of works of art on or of paper.

We are a pro-active resource dedicated to enriching the Birmingham Arts Community through exhibitions, workshops and classes and by providing affordable studio space, access to process-oriented equipment, and professional development opportunities for artist members.

Our members form an invigorating community of fellow artists to work with and initiate collaborative projects.  Each is free to initiate and lead workshops, exhibitions and special projects with publicity through our group email list, Facebook, and announcements in magazines, newspapers, internet calendars and Birmingham related websites.

Sign up here: http://paperworkerslocal.blogspot.com/p/membership-terms-artist-members.html

Call for Art Work:The Odd Salon

Please forward this to your artist friends.

Somewhat in keeping with the spirit of the season, the Exhibition at PaperWorkers Local for October's Third Friday will be "The Odd Salon." Rather than things Halloween-ish, we're looking for a wider range of odd, strange, unsettling, creepy, surreal and so on. You may not think of your work in this way, but keep in mind that being put in context with odder things can sometimes pull more straight laced work in another direction.


At the title suggests, this is going to be a salon style show. So, we'd like to have a good number of works up.


If you'd like to contribute work on or of paper give us a idea of what you have in mind in an email to paperworkerslocal@gmail.com. Include "Odd Salon" in the subject line.


Work should be dropped at the shop on Monday Oct 14 after 1:00 pm. We'll hang the show on Monday - Wednesday and the opening will be on Friday the 18th.


We ask that in the event of a sale the artist make a donation of 20% to PaperWorkers Local.

PaperWorkers Local
http://paperworkerslocal.blogspot.com
Visit us every Third Friday at:
3815 Clairmont Avenue
Birmingham, Forest Park, Al 35205

Green Pea Press at PaperWorkers Local

We are currently exhibiting work from members of Huntsville's Green Pea Printmakers Collective to exhibit in our space for September's Third Friday in Forest Park. 

We are very excited to be able to work with the members of Green Pea who have been promoting printmaking and other forms of paper based art work for the past three years. 

Located on the first floor of historic Lowe Mill in Huntsville, Green Pea is a low-toxicity studio that provides resident and local artists access to equipment in a variety of fine art print media, including wood/linocut, etching, letterpress, screenprint and bookmaking.

The participating artists are:

Rachel Lackey
Sarah Conklin
Matt Bender
L Blaksley
Brian Walker
Logan Tanner
Katie Calvert
Jaeme Case 

Sarah Wiseman at PaperWorkers Local

Please join us for an exhibition of Sarah Wiseman's work during Forest Park's Third Friday.

8/16/2013 from 6:00 to 9:00 pm.

3815 Clairmont Avenue
Forest Park, Birmingham, Al 35205

Embedded Ocher

2012

thread, paint and watercolor pencil on paper

66'' x 43''

"Focusing on how one creates visual thoughts, I examine the intersection that occurs between the objects and spaces we have encountered. The inherent fragmentation of our thoughts is intriguing because it is not always consciously understandable. I want to capture the spaces in-between a moment that feels real and a moment when those emotions have dissipated. I am attempting to create an archetypal image out of objects that resonate with me personally such as internal structure of a building and a net form. I use these objects as a trigger to explore my own relationship to people, places, and things. The transformation of the intangible thought into a concrete material such as a thread line or mark made on the surface is the result of my investigation."
Sarah Wiseman - Artist's statement.

Sarah has earned a BFA at Central Michigan University and an MFA at the University of Alabama.  She has an extensive national exhibition record and is currently Head of the Art Department and Upper School Art Faculty at the Louise McGehee School in New Orleans, LA.  Sarah has lectured, lead workshops and instructed courses at many locations throughout North America.  And Sarah has done a wonderful job leading the first workshop series at PaperWorkers Local.

You can see more samples of her work at sarah-wiseman.com

Forest Park is open late on the Third Friday of every month.  See what else is going on here:
https://www.facebook.com/events/210358135774924/