I was recently asked to be a visiting artist atNorthern Illinois Universityin Dekalb. This was a really exciting opportunity because NIU’s printmaking program has such a great reputation and printmaker Michael Barnes is definitely a living legend in our field. During my visit, we printed an edition of a new CMYK silkscreen print, had critiques with undergraduate and graduate students, and gave a public lecture. A really huge thank you to Michael Barnes for asking me to come to campus.
It definitely felt like winter in Illinois this week…
Art building on campus…
Poster for my lecture designed by current NIU printmaking graduate student (and former WVU printmaker) Christina Kang…
Once I got to campus, we quickly started exposing screens…
Graduate students running the first layer…
This is the first in what might become a new series of prints for me…the top image is the original image from an old copyright free French comic and the bottom image is an English anagram of that original text…I am hoping that through proximity, I can imply the English anagram to be a translation of the French text…in this print, I am using the anagram as a way to talk about how we interpret language, how we trust apps like “Google Translate”, our trust in the “authoritarian voice”, and my continued interest in how we create meaning when presented with information…
A rare sighting of Michael Barnes pulling a screen!
I always love making test prints…
I presented a redesigned lecture for this visit…more information about my influences peppered throughout images of my work…
Its funny how a box of DOTS and seltzer water have become a part of my visits…
Michael’s amazing dog Enzo visited a little…
And no visiting artist trip is complete without a visit to the local comic shop…this was a GREAT shop!
For me, a mark of a good comic shop is either an extensive back issue collection or a lot of locally made comics…this shop had a ton of affordable back issues…
Michael has been inviting artists to the NIU printshop for so long, it is really an honor to be included along side some of these names…Sue Coe, Randy Bolton, Wayne Kimball, Tony Fitzpatrick, Jenny Schmid, Enrique Chagoya…the list goes on…
The printshop was also COVERED in amazing signs, posters, and stickers…these are just a sampling of everything there was to look at…
Joseph Lupo 
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