Westword’s Mo’Print Essentials for 2022: Week One

The region’s biennial Month of Printmaking 2022, more reliably known as Mo’Print, has been sprouting exhibitions large and small around town since January. But the celebration turns official in March, beginning this weekend with a bevy of First Friday openings and events, including these Westword Mo’print picks.

Here’s the first installment of our Mo’Print Best Bets for 2022:

Black Ink Mo’Print Fundraiser
TRVE Brewing Company, 227 Broadway
Through March 30
Opening Reception: Friday, March 4, 6 p.m. to midnight
Mo’Print has a reputation for bargain art buys, but the Black Ink Fundraiser event is the mother of them all. Aside from serving as an official Month of Printmaking party, it’s a gateway to both art collecting and to those wanting to see the rest of the Mo’Print footprint that’s spreading throughout the metro area. Raise a brew and browse dozens of 8-by-6-inch black-and-white linocuts printed on 13-by-10- inch sheets. The price tag is $10 per print and, being First Friday, the night is young for art explorers.

Raymundo Muñoz: Folding Space
Alto Gallery, RiNo Art Park, 1900 35th Street, Suite B
Through March 26
Opening Reception: Friday, March 4, 6 to 10 p.m.
A familiar face at the Birdseed Collective’s Alto Gallery, Raymundo Muñoz is a printmaker with training in science, and here he leaves behind the idea of simple relief printing on a flat surface. Instead, Muñoz adds dimensionality to his images by folding surfaces into sculptural shapes, compiling them in zines and introducing views one might see through a microscope. It’s only fitting that Folding Space is on view at his home gallery.

Peter Miles Bergman: PaCT
Dateline Gallery, 3004 Larimer Street
Through March 31
Opening Reception: Friday, March 4, 6 to 10 p.m.
Artist Tales: Wednesday, March 30, 7 p.m.
Peter Miles Bergman’s IS Press introduces a whole new dimension of the print medium as it relates to publishing, on a constellation encompassing both the simplicity of a handmade zine or flier and the craftsmanship of a fine-tuned print publication. PaCT is the result of a story that goes back a couple decades, to a time when Bergman and Dylan Kuhn, a friend from his youth in Wyoming, were inspired to tackle the grueling 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail after college, when they were 23. But two-thirds of the way through the adventure, the pair quit the trail in Oregon, their bodies depleted and wasted. And that’s where the idea of a pact comes into play.

They agreed to finish what they’d started 23 years later, meeting in Oregon for the last lap to the Canadian border. From the start, one of their goals was to photograph their daily progress, and those images, snapped by Kuhn, are the basis of Bergman’s memoir package: PaCT: A Journey Beyond the Horizon, a limited-edition book, and the 36-page, saddle-stitched zine A Journey Through the In Between. Both with letterpress-printed covers, as well as the ingenious photo-animated flip book, PaCT: A Journey Across Time, which flips through daily images of Bergman – in an act of performance art – tossing a graduation cap and changing into a suit. The opposite pages show where each image was taken, on a black-and-white map.

Each piece is sold separately or together as a set; Be among the first to reserve one or all three at the First Friday book-release exhibition at Dateline.

ASLD Print Fair
Art Students League of Denver, 200 Grant Street
Through March 27
Opening Reception: Friday, March 4, 5:30 to 8:30 p.m.
Pop-Up Portfolio Show: Saturday, March 5, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
The Art Students League of Denver, another of the region’s busy printmaking hives, hosts a show covering the gamut of printmaking techniques taught at the continuing-art education center as produced by member students and instructors. Not only will you get an inside look at what’s possible in the ASLD’s well-equipped studios, but it might inspire you to sign up for a class. The one-day portfolio show, on the other hand, offers a chance to buy art directly from the makers.

Cone Cuts From the Kwiatkowski Press
Pablo’s Coffee, 630 East Sixth Avenue
Through April 30
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 5, 2 to 4 p.m.
It wouldn’t be Mo’Print without a show by Frank Kwiatkowski, a pedicab driver who in 1999 began carving up traffic cones to print poster imagery depicting street people, autobiographical stories inspired by his fight with diabetes and pedicab adventures. Usually, you can only buy his work on his website – or during a pedicab ride through downtown streets. Kwiatkowski will be in the house at the opening, giving demonstrations.

Mo’Print Dual Exhibitions
People’s Building, 9995A East Colfax Avenue, Aurora
Sunday, March 6, through March 27
Opening Reception: Sunday, March 6, 2 to 5 p.m.
The People’s Building in Aurora is hosting two citywide exhibitions: one for artists participating in Mo’Print’s Open Portfolio Day on Saturday, March 12, and the other for artists opening studio doors for the Studio and Print Tour on March 26 and 27. Members of Red Delicious Press, a printmaking studio in the downtown Aurora neighborhood, are lending a hand in organizing the shows.

And here’s a bonus: Wonderful printmaker and educator Javier Flores mounts a solo exhibition, Símbolos Vulgares, at the People’s Building after those above clear out, beginning April 1 and running through April 17. Attend the opening reception on April 1 from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m.

Hilary Lorenz, Cross-Pollination: The Moth Migration Project
The Indelible Garden: Prints by Taiko Chandler
Organic Tarot: Works by Tya Alisa Anthony
Freyer-Newman Center, Denver Botanic Gardens, 1007 York Street
All shows, through April 3
The Denver Botanic Gardens has been hiding three excellent solo printmaking exhibitions in the Freyer-Newman Center galleries since January, but with Mo’Print now fully in the picture, this is the time to catch all three if you haven’t already.

Hilary Lorenz has plastered her room with more than 16,000 printed paper moths, some self-created and others collected via social media from participants around the world. The moths do double service by celebrating the power of pollination in both the plant world and the art world, where ideas are exchanged.

Taiko Chandler, well known for her sculptural printed Tyvek wall pieces and impeccable abstract prints drawn in looping, colorful, plantlike organic shapes, gives a tour through her oeuvre in The Indelible Garden, and Tya Alisa Anthony presents Organic Tarot, a project that binds the artist’s fascination with the tarot to a reimagining of Black history, providing a more human view of how her ancestors might have lived and loved.