CONFLUENCE 2018, Sapling Press, and more…

Friday April 13th marked the closing reception for the annual “CONFLUENCE 2018” WVU MFA exhibition at Artists Image Resource in Pittsburgh.

This has been such a wonderful event for our program and our students. Thank you so much to everyone at AIR for being so supportive of the special relationship we have forged with them. It was a really great show!

I’ve also been using this day to travel with students around Pittsburgh, and we did that again this year.

Our first stop was Sapling Press…a small letterpess shop in Lawrenceville.

We were warmly welcomed by owner/operator Lisa Krowinski, who told us about the press and how she got to this point…it is always enlightening to hear these kinds of stories and see the business side of things…

Sapling had two small Heidelberg “windmill” presses,

Lots of type!

They also have two Chandler Price presses as well…

Inventory! Sapling runs a ton of cards, and the upstairs is filled with their inventory…

After Sapling, we headed to the Susquehanna Radiant Hall studio…Radiant Hall has three locations for artist studios, and we visited the Homewood location inside this gigantic warehouse complex…

3rd Year Print MFA Allison Blair has a studio here, and was gracious enough to let us visit…

After Radiant Hall we went to lunch, and was presented with a real treat! Chicago Style hotdogs at D’s Six Pax and Dogz in Regent Square….

After lunch we headed to Wilkinsburg to go to the Center For Creative Reuse and Construction Junction…

The Pittsburgh Center For Creative Reuse is like a big thrift store for artists…all kinds of bins and drawers filled with all kinds of used materials for new projects…

Construction Junction is a big thrift store for contractors and DYI home improvement types…both of these organizations are doing their part to keep materials out of the landfills…

Time to take a quick breather before heading to AIR for the reception…

This was our fifth MFA exhibition at Artists Image Resource, and it looked great!

Reception in full swing, good crowd!

New work by 2nd year MFA Print graduate student Stephanie Alaniz…

MFA Ceramics graduate student Erin McCarty…

1st year MFA print grad Feliks Pyron…

Attached to the MFA exhibition is the WVU/AIR intern exhibition…this show has been happening since 2011. The previous semester’s WVU/AIR interns exhibit their work at AIR. This year’s interns were Kyle Irvin, Christina Kang, and Lindsay Toney…