This week, Art and Soul is about the Visual Arts in our area. 89.1 WEMU’s Lisa Barry is joined by stateand localarts leader Omari Rush and from the Ann Arbor District Librarytalking about a new event they have coming up.
The Wayzgoose Printing Festival will take place on Saturday, August 25 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Downtown Ann Arbor District Library.
The festival is celebrating all forms of printmaking from letterpress, screenprinting, block printing, and bookbinding.
It will feature workshops, demonstrations, and a vendor fair with more than 30 artists—mostly from the midwest, but a few from the east coast and one all the way from England who happens to be in Ohio at the time. The vendor fair will feature a mix of art and printing equipment. like newly made wood type, lead type. and maybe some small printing presses.
In the days before electricity, a wayzgoose was a celebration hosted by a master printer for their workers to mark the traditional end of summer and the printing season moving indoors, where the workers would work by candlelight. A feature of the celebration was a goose, which the workers would partake in along with the festivities.
Things kick off with a pop-up art exhibit at the Ann Arbor Art Center on Friday, August 24, from 6-8 p.m. featuring the works of Tribune Showprint and Starshaped Press.
The event itself features old time printmaking technology that people can experience hands-on. There'll be presentations about wood engraving, screen printing, casting type by hand in wax, and making wood type the old way by hand. There'll be a kids’ printing corner where kids can use rubber stamps and print designs to make their own books, and stations set up in the Secret Lab downtown where people can use cylinder proof presses, spiral bind their own books, and try relief printing, and also screen print a canvas bag.
There will also be vendors offering everything from custom music posters, patches, chapbooks, linocuts, screen-printed shirts and bags, and letterpress equipment such as wood type, wood ornaments, drawers of lead type, and possibly some small printing presses.
Omari and Lisa aslo talk about the upcoming DIYpsi Indie Art Fair happening August 18 and 19 at the ABC Microbrewery in Ypsilanti.
Non-commercial, fact based reporting is made possible by your financial support. Make your donation to WEMU todayto keep your community NPR station thriving.
Like 89.1 WEMU on Facebook and follow us on Twitter
— Lisa Barry is the host of All Things Considered on WEMU. You can contact Lisa at 734.487.3363, on Twitter @LisaWEMU, or email her at lbarryma@emich.edu
