Confluence 2027 includes a range of programs organized by artists, educators, and curators. Below you will find the current open calls for participation in selected conference programs, including opportunities to join portfolio exchanges, panels, events, exhibitions, and other organized projects. Each opportunity has its own theme, format, requirements, and organizer, so applicants should review the details carefully before submitting.

Members may participate in a maximum of one conference event plus one Themed Portfolio Exchange per conference. Members may apply to multiple events, but if selected for more than one, they must choose which event they will participate in. This policy is intended to make participation opportunities available to the greatest number of members possible.

Review + Notification

Applications are due October 31. Program and event organizers will review submissions after the deadline, with notifications sent by November 15. Accepted participants should communicate directly with organizers about timelines, materials, and next steps. Fees associated with Themed Portfolio Exchanges are only for accepted participants and are made to Portfolio organizers.

How to Apply

Browse the open calls below, review the details for each opportunity, and follow the application instructions listed in the Information + Apply dropdown menu. Each call includes additional information and a link to a Google Form for that specific conference opportunity.

Applicants should submit separately for each program, exchange, exhibition, or event they wish to be considered for. After forms are submitted, organizers will review applications and follow up with applicants according to the notification timeline listed above.

For calls that require image submissions, applicants should create a multi-page PDF and upload it through the application form. If a CV is required, applicants should upload it separately in the designated CV section.

Questions about a specific opportunity should be directed to the organizer listed in that call.

SGCI 2027 Juried Members’ Printmaking Exhibition

organizer: SGCI

Southern Graphics Council International (SGCI) is pleased to announce the call for entries for its SGCI 2027 Juried Members’ Printmaking Exhibition. This exhibition will recognize and celebrate the artistic achievements of our outstanding membership of printmakers from around the world. SGCI encourages submissions from emerging and established printmakers who use traditional and innovative printmaking techniques.

The exhibition will take place in the College of Fine Arts Building at Carnegie Mellon University during the conference. This gorgeous, Gilded Age space will provide a wonderful frame for the exhibition artwork, however, space will be limited. The Juried Members’ show will share the building with themed portfolios, panels and demonstrations, and the Boston Printmakers’ 80th Anniversary Exhibition. Following the conference, the exhibition will also be published in Graphic Impressions, the SGCI journal.

The juror for the exhibition is Ann Shafer, creator and host of the Platemark podcast and independent curator. Ann is the organizer of the Brooklyn Fine Art Print Fair and a former curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Ann will choose a Juror’s Prize from among the selections.

Screenprint Biennial

organizer: Nathan Meltz

The 2027 Screenprint Biennial seeks to showcase a range of screenprint-based art applications, from framed editioned prints to installation, sculpture, video, ephemera, and posters. This exhibition will in no way seek to act as a survey or “who’s-who” of screenprinting, but will assemble an exhibition that is consistent in highlighting artists who utilize adventurous, relevant, and passionate takes on the screenprinted medium. The Screenprint Biennial is announcing its open call for submissions. Submissions involving video, performance, sculpture, social practice, alternative substrates and processes, and collaboration are encouraged. This special SB exhibit is scheduled to premiere at the SGCI 2027 conference in Pittsburgh, PA. Applicants must be members of SGCI to apply to the open call. Submissions will be juried by Screenprint Biennial founder Nathan Meltz and independent curator and Hello Print Friend founder Miranda Metcalf.

Confluence International Print Exhibition (SGCI x Wales)

organizer: Hannah Fray

This collaborative project pairs 40 Wales-based printmakers with 40 current SGCI members to spark international knowledge exchange, share skills, and build a global creative community. The exchange includes two physical exhibitions, a permanent archive, and an interactive digital showcase.

Crossing the River: An Examination of Borders and Bridges

organizers: Jenn Manzella + Ted Mosher

The title of this portfolio exchange refers to geographical components that can define our lived environments. Divided by rivers, connected by bridges – this applies to Pittsburgh, of course, but is also the current state of national and international affairs. These features have strong symbolic and metaphorical possibilities and can enable a wide range of interpretations beyond any one specific geographic location. For example, a bridge can be about overcoming an obstacle or bridging a gap between ideas; ways that people can come together across the borders between different identities or points of view.

This portfolio is an invitation to other artists/printmakers to consider the conceptual nature of borders and bridges in a way that expresses personal narrative, metaphor, or political/national designations. The relevance of addressing these concepts is that we live in a time when one’s identity, country of origin and political affiliations are subject to threat and oversight of an unprecedented nature. As artists, the visual representation of our relationships to place, identity and connection create conduits for understanding.

The format of this portfolio exchange is meant to reflect the theme. For each print in the portfolio, we are asking participants to create a diptych using two matrices on a single sheet of paper. The outside dimensions of the work must be 11” x 14” (including both portions of the diptych). Artists are encouraged to engage with the possibilities presented by diptych form and how it relates to the theme of this portfolio, and to consider how the diptych represents two elements that meet (a border) but are connected in some way (a bridge). The orientation (horizontal or vertical) can be determined by the artist.

Interested artists should submit a brief description of how they plan to approach the diptych requirement for the portfolio. There is no expectation that the two parts of the diptych will be equivalent or rectilinear; the matrices can take any form within the 11” x 14” outside paper dimensions.

The Embodied Artifact

organizer: Stephanie Hunder

This portfolio explores the entanglement of objecthood and personhood. Identity is woven around connection to place and community. The inherited objects, materials, and textures of a home place become elements in the design of a person’s unique individuality. These impressions of location and community go beyond visual sensations; they are embodied in the objects of routine. The printed image is formed through touch between matrix and support, thus the print creates a unique way to honor the objects that touch a person’s life. Participant artists will integrate found elements into their creative process, incorporating tactile engagement with place into their printing practice. Examples may include using collagraph printing or softground impressions of found textures and objects, photo-exposure of artifacts onto light sensitive matrices, or integrating found materials into the printed support.

Eremocene: Wonder as an Ethical Force

organizers: Ashley Fuchs + Sarah J. Budeski

The Eremocene, known as the Age of Loneliness, coined by E. O. Wilson, defines our current trajectory as the mass extinction of nonhuman life and the human isolation that follows. It is estimated that human lifestyles and industrial activity cause 200 species to vanish every day. Although it is easy to be consumed by feelings of dread and inevitability, this themed portfolio attempts to reframe grief as an invitation to acknowledge. Rather than contemplating loss, participants will locate and document connections to the natural world that persist in poetic and humbling ways—imagine the quiet companionship of tree branches waving to you in the wind. Drawing on Robert Moor’s idea of wonder as an ethical force, participants will treat nature’s awe not as sentiment but as a discipline that pays attention and recognizes the need for diversity in all its forms. This themed portfolio asks: how can we be mindful of the presence in landscapes closest to us, and why do we need this kind of natural companionship? All artists will print on shared handmade paper and complete at least one element using letterpressed wood forms, unifying the portfolio through a common material dependence on nature.

Form is the Shape of My Discontent

organizers: Sophie Isaak + Kristina Paabus

Form is the Shape of My Discontent, a title borrowed from Amy Sillman’s essay “Shit Happens: Notes on Awkwardness,” brings together artists who use abstraction not simply as an aesthetic end, but as a conceptual method for investigating how meaning emerges through structure. Across a range of printmaking practices, participants employ repetition, accumulation, material exploration, graphic language, symbols, mark-making, modular forms, and iterative processes to examine systems of knowledge, perception, labor, ecology, memory, and our surroundings. Rather than representing these subjects directly, the works construct visual frameworks that invite viewers to consider how process, medium, and form can shape meaning and communicate ideas. As contemporary printmaking increasingly intersects with research, interdisciplinary practice, and expanded approaches to making, this portfolio highlights abstraction as a critical mode of inquiry rather than a purely formal tradition. Abstraction allows artists to approach their work through alternate systems of imagery, using visual language to question how we see and understand the world around us. Collectively, this portfolio demonstrates how printmaking can use abstraction not only for its visual qualities, but also as a way to reflect on and engage with larger ideas.

Hello, Neighbor

organizer: Blake Sanders

“Hello, Neighbor” will ask artists to address what it means to be a good neighbor, on a personal/local and global scale. Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood existed on a sound stage in Pittsburgh, but his practice of empathy and patience permeated beyond his Neighborhood of Make-Believe. What did he teach that can help us get along as a community in a system that seems built to divide and isolate us? Do good fences really make good neighbors, or are kindness and reciprocity vital to a healthy neighborhood? How does printmaking, an inherently democratic and collaborative medium, teach us to play well with others and prepare us to handle folks who leave messes? 

This portfolio aims to feature letterpress artists as SGCI leadership works to welcome our letterpress and book arts neighbors into a more united print neighborhood. Letterpress will not be required, though work that features some text may be favored. This is consistent with a theme that explores, among other things, how to talk to our neighbors.

Inside the Artist

organizers: Heather Steckler + Rebecca Oehler

Inside the artist is a collaborative exchange portfolio exploring artists’ relationships to their bodies, as well as the internal systems and unseen experiences that happen within them. Participants are invited to create prints that explore various forms of body imaging using medical scans, pathology slides, maps, diagrams, and other objective or subjective methods of visualizing the body’s hidden structures and functions.

The exchange welcomes work addressing topics such as invisible disability, chronic illness, mental illness, neurodivergence, injury, pleasure, pain, perseverance, healing, or any other aspects related to the experience of living and making work in a physical body. By making these unseen experiences visible through print, this portfolio hopes to highlight the diverse ways artists inhabit and utilize their bodies. The completed portfolio will serve as a collective record of embodied experiences, exploring how our physical vessels enable, challenge, or transform our lives and creative practices.

Interested artists should submit a short artist statement/bio (max 200 words), 3 examples of related work, and a brief proposal (100-150 words) describing their intended contribution. Completed prints must include at least one form of traditional printmaking and may not use generative AI in their creation.

Margins: The Importance of Human Labor

organizer: Hailey Padilha

“Margins” invites artists to consider the labor that holds communities together and the people whose work too often goes unseen. In a time marked by attacks on public education, the cuts of worker protections, the growing influence of automation and AI, and the increasing instability of those who care for, teach, build, preserve, and organize, this exchange asks what kinds of labor deserve to be remembered. Participants are encouraged to reflect on work as both action and inheritance (whether physical, emotional, cultural, or creative) and on the places where that labor shapes collective memory. Together, these prints will explore the work of sustaining communities and the histories carried forward through human hands.

Material Thinking: Printmaking as Environmental Praxis

organizer: Arron Foster

Material Thinking: Printmaking as Environmental Praxis invites artists to investigate how the materials and processes of printmaking function as acts of environmental, cultural, and ethical inquiry. Rather than approaching sustainability as a subject to be illustrated, this portfolio asks participants to consider how meaning emerges through process, material choice, and embodied engagement. Printmaking has always been a medium of transformation—from matrix to impression, repetition to variation, and material to image. Today these transformations also carry ecological implications. Every paper fiber, pigment, substrate, solvent, digital process, botanical dye, reclaimed object, or discarded material reflects broader systems of extraction, production, consumption, and renewal. Material decisions are conceptual decisions. This portfolio welcomes traditional, experimental, and interdisciplinary print practices that examine relationships between environmental memory, industrial landscapes, climate change, ecological restoration, sustainable studio practices, and place-based knowledge. Artists are encouraged to explore how printmaking’s tactile and temporal qualities offer alternatives to the accelerated circulation of contemporary digital imagery. Rather than prescribing a specific aesthetic, Material Thinking invites diverse interpretations of environmental praxis through expanded printmaking. Collectively, the portfolio will demonstrate how contemporary print practice fosters sustained attention, critical reflection, and new conversations about our relationships to place, material resources, and the environments we inhabit.

Print Deities

organizer: Lisa Wicka

There are a variety of superstitions around the successes and failures that happen in the printmaking studio. The “print gods”, “print devils”, the “hellbox” are just a few terms that are embedded in the lexicon of a printmaker. At more tense or laborious parts of the print process, it is common to be careful not to “anger the print gods” when things are going well, and try to appease them when things are taking a negative turn. This is a way to cope with the unexpected, to keep focus, and to celebrate the magic of the print. The moment a print happens it is not able to be seen by our eyes, but instead it is the aftermath of that action, a recording of the event. (Jennifer L. Roberts, Contact: Art and the Pull of Print) This mystery of the unknown seeps into the print practice as a whole, making the reveal of a successful print feel like a miracle, the steps followed just right like a spell, and the print that just won’t work, like a curse. Considering the long history of spiritual imagery in print, the ritual/repetition needed to create the work, and the surprise of the reveal, the print studio has become a place of devotion to process, image, history, and very often faith. This exchange invites participants to share their own experience with the mysteries and magic of printmaking. How do we handle what we cannot see, cope with failure, accept change, and celebrate success?

The Practice of Looking

organizer: Anthony TungNing Huang

The Practice of Looking brings together printmakers whose work begins with an act of attention. The portfolio asks how looking can shape our understanding of where we are, what we remember, and how we relate to the world around us. The project draws partly from You Guan (遊觀), a Daoist approach to moving through the world by wandering and observing. It also considers looking as a way of creating distance from an immediate experience. Focusing on something easily overlooked—a crack in the ground, a shift in light, or the movement of water—can change how a place or situation is understood. Artists may respond through nature, memory, identity, migration, daily life, surveillance, or their immediate surroundings. Together, the prints will explore how attention is shaped by different lives and places, allowing individual ways of looking to meet within a shared portfolio.

Share and Preserve: Healing Traditions

organizer: Juanita Wyatt

This print exchange investigates forms of cultural memory and healing methods. The exchange invites attendees to explore, preserve, and visually interpret family healing traditions through the shared language of print. Across generations, families pass down home remedies, prayers, cherished objects, songs, and stories that help connect one generation to the next. Within many families, healing practices are shared through oral history and lived experiences. Participants are encouraged to conduct personal research into healing traditions connected to their family, culture, and/or community. The print exchange will be a collective visual record that honors inherited healing traditions. The objective of this project is to examine healing practices as forms of cultural knowledge, while utilizing printmaking as an artistic and archival practice.

with Lenore

organizers: Lucy Eickelberg + Sean P. Morrissey

In remembrance of Lenore Thomas, ‘with Lenore’ is a themed portfolio exchange celebrating her impact as an artist, educator, mentor, colleague, and friend. At the University of Pittsburgh and beyond, Lenore’s teaching and mentorship shaped generations of students, colleagues, and artists through her generosity, humor, and deep belief in creative community. Her influence reached far beyond the classroom, continuing in the lives and practices of those who learned from her, worked alongside her, and were inspired by her work.

This portfolio invites contributions from those who knew, loved, learned from, worked alongside, or were inspired by Lenore. Participants are encouraged to respond through memory, anecdote, gratitude, grief, artistic inheritance, or the ways mentorship continues to surface in their own practice. It is impossible to summarize a person as vibrant and unique as Lenore Thomas, but the connections she built and the lessons she shared continue to leave an imprint. Through the shared practice of printmaking, ‘with Lenore’ gathers these impressions into a collective act of remembrance.

Abstraction as Method: Material Agency and Concept-Driven Research in Printmaking

organizer: Anita Jung

Rather than understanding the artwork as a container for an idea that exists prior to making, this panel proposes that the print is a site where ideas emerge through negotiation with materials, processes, and conditions of production. Abstraction, within this framework, is not a stylistic category or a retreat from meaning, it is a method, one generated by the specific conditions of the medium itself.

Printmaking’s processes, matrices, pressure, transfer, layering, registration, and repetition — produce instability, variation, and outcomes that exceed predetermined intention. These are the conditions from which abstraction arises. This panel asks how artists negotiate between control and material agency, and how print processes function as forms of research, generating knowledge through making.

The panel brings together artists whose practices explore abstraction through distinct material and conceptual approaches, drawing on contemporary discussions of material agency, embodied perception, and artistic research. Together, participants will consider how printmaking produces meaning not only through imagery, but through the behaviors of materials, tools, and procedures.

Attendees will leave with an expanded critical vocabulary for discussing abstraction in printmaking and new frameworks for understanding material uncertainty as a generative condition in studio practice and pedagogy.

Creating New Strategies in Time of Chaos for Social Change

organizer: Maritza Davila

Recent and ongoing political and social issues have impacted people at every level, directly and indirectly. Printmakers have historically gathered in times of upheaval to create powerful messaging intended to reach significant populations.
This panel would discuss changes in printmaking collectives that have long served as vehicles for social advancement, change and political awareness.

Many printmakers are doing that now, and we want to explore how the current state of printmaking techniques can fit in with social and political expressions and how artists can be most effectively empowered to reach as many people as possible in relevant communities.

Our exploration would include connecting how we can take the best of older strategies and blend with the creation of new ones.

Questions to be addressed include:
– How we can support ourselves emotionally, creatively, and economically within the art community to avoid burnout and survive what is often delayed gratification.
– What are we doing to help us grow individually and bring along artists who use other media?
– Which communities are they working toward reaching and why?

The Cyborg Printmaker

organizer: Nate Gilchrist

Printmaking has always been shaped by technology. From Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press to digital fabrication tools, the discipline has continually evolved through an ongoing collaboration between the hand and the tool. Rather than existing in opposition, traditional techniques and emerging technologies work together to expand the possibilities of contemporary printmaking.

This panel examines how artists are adopting digital fabrication methods, including laser engraving, CNC machining, 3D printing, and computational workflows, as collaborators within their studio practices. Engaging with Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg, the discussion considers printmaking as a discipline that has long blurred the boundaries between artist, machine, and technology. From this perspective, digital fabrication becomes the latest chapter in a history of innovation rather than a departure from tradition.

Three panelists will be selected to present their approaches to integrating digital fabrication technologies into printmaking, discussing both the technical and conceptual implications of their work. The presentations will explore how these collaborative relationships are reshaping ideas of authorship, materiality, pedagogy, and the practice of printmaking. By bringing together artists working across diverse digital methodologies, the panel invites attendees to consider how emerging technologies continue to redefine the possibilities of contemporary printmaking. To encourage emerging voices within the discipline, one panel position will be reserved for a graduate student or advanced undergraduate student with a faculty sponsor.

Other Paths: Life as a Working Artist, Outside of Academia

organizers: Elizabeth Jean Younce + Fío Avocado

Have you built a career outside of academia, performing anything Printmaking or Print Media related other than being a professor? Are you interested in sharing your unique story, path, and expertise with students, emerging artists, and anyone curious to make a change in their lives?

We aspire to gather master printers, contract printers, gallery artists, small business owners, residency-hoppers, grant-seekers, publishers, workshop teachers, technicians, podcast hosts, online sellers, craft fair sellers, or anyone who makes a living as a working artist, with an emphasis on Printmaking, other than being a Professor.

As the higher education world feels like it’s crumbling around us, and with the conference often feeling very academically driven, we seek to address a gap in SGCI’s typical programming. There are so many different paths one can take as a working artist; let’s break them down!

*Folks who are queer, trans, non-binary, Black, Indigenous, people of color, disabled, parents, are/have been system-impacted, are immigrants, and anyone who has experienced systemic oppression and/or gender-based violence are encouraged to apply.*

Printmaking and Public Art

organizer: Doug Eberhardt

Printmaking is traditionally thought of as a small-scale, two-dimensional artmaking medium, but the repeatable nature of the print makes it an ideal medium to use both indoors and outdoors to cover walls and three-dimensional objects, creating immersive printmade environments. This panel will discuss the intersection of printmaking and public artwork. Panelists will show diverse examples of public murals, sculptures, and installations they created leveraging traditional printmaking methods such as relief printing and screen printing. They will explain their printing and installation process as well as the logistical hurdles, like funding and timelines, needed to create their complex projects. Attendees will leave with an expanded understanding of the potential of printmaking and an idea of how they can bring their print work to new heights in their own communities. This panel is open to all printmakers with experience using traditional printmaking methods to create public art, including murals, sculptures, and indoor/outdoor installations. The panel will involve sharing images of the work created, discussing the process involved in creating it, as well as logistics, funding, and challenges. If you’re interested in contributing, submit one PDF containing images of relevant work along with short descriptions of the work. Submit a website link and social media information as well, if available.

Teaching Through Uncertainty: Art Education, Censorship, and Critical Thought

organizer: Hailey Padilha

Across the country, art educators are teaching in a climate where conversations about history, identity, and civic life have become increasingly complicated. Restrictions on books, curriculum, and classroom discussions have created uncertainty for many educators working to provide students with opportunities to engage with diverse perspectives and difficult histories. This panel invites printmakers from K-12 schools, universities, and community studios to share how they continue to teach meaningful, socially engaged work within these changing educational landscapes. Together, we will discuss practical approaches for addressing challenging subjects, supporting student voices, and using printmaking’s long history as a tool for communication, resistance, and collective action. By bringing together educators working across different communities and institutions, this conversation will consider how printmaking can create spaces for curiosity, critical thinking, and connection at a time when access to knowledge and creative expression is increasingly being debated.

Who Gets Valued? What Every Printmaker Should Know About How the Art Market Really Works

organizer: Dr. Cedric A. Martin

Who benefits when the art market grows — and who gets left behind? This panel brings the first large-scale intersectional analysis of art auction pricing directly to the printmaking community. Social movements narrowed some gaps, but intersectional identities do not consistently receive the combined benefit. Join the panel chair in translating these academic findings into practical knowledge for students entering the field, professors shaping curricula, and working artists navigating the market.

Cybernetics and AI

organizer: Kellie Hames

This group exhibition will focus on the overlapping histories and influences of cybernetics and AI. Cybernetics- a term coined in the 1940s by American mathematician Norbert Wiener- first raised many of the questions that would later become central to artificial intelligence: What is intelligence? How do living organisms and machines learn? And how is human knowledge – intangible, conditional, and often subjective – represented and transformed?

Participants are open to any interpretation of this subject matter: How have machines changed how we think, or how we make art? What does intelligence look like in a representation form? What does the future of print look like when influenced by machines and machine learning?

This pop-up group exhibition would be in response to (and hung adjacent to) an exhibition installed at the Posner Center on CMU campus exploring the same theme. The Posner Center show draws on the personal scientific libraries of AI pioneer Allen Newell (1927-1992) and cybernetician Heinz von Foerster (1911-2002) and examines the entangled histories of their respective fields. Rather than presenting cybernetics as a simple precursor to artificial intelligence, it traces the parallel and sometimes convergent paths taken by cyberneticians and early researchers in AI. By placing books, manuscripts, images, and working papers into dialogue, the Posner Center exhibition brings renewed attention to a set of traditions that continue to shape contemporary debates about intelligence, machines, and their place in the formation of human culture.

Participants are welcome to submit work that has already been created or create new work based on the prompt. Work should be unframed.

All work must be received before September 1st, 2027 and will be on exhibit mid-September through the end of October 2027.

Experimental Comix Reading

organizer: Mary Climes

The Experimental Comix Reading will explore how printmaker comic artists can transform a usually solitary reading experience into a time-based performative event. The event will utilize projections, sound, GIFs, foley, and printed mini-comics to share in the reading of the narrative work. The readings seek to transform the sequential art into an ephemeral program where audience participation and sound are the critical components to engage with political and personal narratives.

Pass the Print: Relay Race

organizer: BYO Printmaking Collaborative

BYO Printmaking Collaborative presents Pass the Print: Relay Race. At the confluence of a group exhibition, exchange portfolio, and a contest, Pass the Print is a challenge to artist collectives and community printshops (Teams) to create collaborative editions between their members and exhibit the resulting print at Confluence: SGCI 2027 Biennial Conference. Inspired by the surrealist game of exquisite corpse, the editions should be multi-layered prints made by passing the edition from one artist to the next. Whichever team has the greatest number of layers, wins! During the exhibition, conference attendees can cast votes for People’s Choice, Most Ambitious Matrices, It Really Ties the Room Together, and more.

Interested Teams should submit their collective/printshop/team name, and a statement of interest that includes a point person, and at least three printmakers in the team. Images can include previous collaborative works, or one image from each participant. Full rules of the Relay Race will be provided to applicants via email.

Pass the Print is an icebreaker project that BYO Print has played in the past to spark collaboration, inspiring new members to get their feet wet (hands inky) working in a new-to-them space, and relieves imposter syndrome. The project creates a level playing field and emboldens artists to respond to their peers’ images to move the composition forward. Affectionately nicknamed the printmaker’s exquisite corpse in our printshop, the project is inspired by that parlor game invented by Surrealists in the 1920’s to spark conversation during their gatherings. “The exquisite corpse … reimagined the children’s game of “head, body, legs,” in which each participant adds to a drawing without seeing the preceding contributions, which are hidden by folding the paper. The results are strange, sometimes violent, combinations of images.” (https://www.artic.edu/artworks/119116/exquisite-corpse, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Prints & Drawings) Removing the component of covering your predecessor’s image and instead asking the artist to add to a visible composition creates a new sort of cacophony, with the hope that by the time everyone has added to the piece, some semblance of order has emerged. Typically the artist with the final layer has the greatest challenge – figure out how to resolve the image while acknowledging what came before.

BYO Printmaking Collaborative is a nonprofit community printshop in Philadelphia, PA. Established as an artist collective in 2010, BYO Print centers Studio Artists’ practices and fosters collaboration between artists and printmakers through its programming. BYO Print has overseen several member-driven exchange portfolios and special projects, including Blanket Fort! (2014), Solastalgia: Redefining Home in Precarious Times (2022), Members Exchange Portfolios (2025, 2013), Joyous Disruption: Exquisite Corpse (2022), and ALMANAC: valuable information for *these times* (2026).

Ways of Knowing Plants: Conversations in Print

organizer: Lisa Matthias

This unique and timely project brings together the printmaking community and Pittsburgh’s Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation in a collaborative, multi-site program creating exchange across time, place, and ways of understanding the living world. The project connects contemporary printmaking practice with botanical documentation, ecological inquiry, and the historical relationship between print and the production and circulation of knowledge.

Developed through conversations with the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation at Carnegie Mellon University, the project creates a unique opportunity for exchange between contemporary printmakers and one of the world’s significant collections of botanical art, visual documentation, and related literature.

The program will pair two complementary printmaking exhibitions located within close proximity during the conference: a pop-up exhibition of contemporary print works curated by mid-career Canadian printmaker and interdisciplinary artist Lisa Matthias, and a concurrent exhibition drawn from the Hunt Institute’s botanical printmaking collections, curated by Hunt Institute scholars Carrie Roy and Lydia Rosenberg.

The SGCI exhibition will feature member artists whose relationships with plants emerge from many different kinds of knowledge and experience. Artists may engage with botany, ecology and conservation, cultural knowledge, memory and personal experience, gardening or agriculture, place, embodied experience, and other forms of understanding.

Together, the two exhibitions create a dialogue between historical botanical print-based documentation and contemporary botanical and ecological print practice, across time and geography. This project considers printmaking’s time-honoured role in disseminating knowledge, and asks how definitions of botanical printmaking continue to evolve: How do documentation and interpretation intersect? What happens when plants are considered not as isolated subjects, but as components of larger ecological systems? How can printmaking function as both a record of the natural world and a way of thinking through environmental change?

This SGCI exhibition is one part of a larger program of conversations, collection visits, and exchange. Artists selected for the exhibition will participate alongside Hunt curators in conversations at both exhibition sites, creating reciprocal dialogue between the two exhibitions. The Hunt Institute also welcomes SGCI participants through organized visits to its collections of botanical artwork, books, manuscripts, and related materials, recognizing the importance of archives and collections as sources of research, inspiration, teaching, and creative dialogue for the printmaking community. The Hunt Institute is located within Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University, also an SGCI conference venue site. This confluence creates a timely and fortuitous opportunity for dialogue between botanical and science-adjacent printmaking collections and contemporary print practice; between art and science; between interpretation and documentation; and between historical and contemporary ways of understanding plants and the living world.

Flexible and site-responsive, the event emphasizes collaboration and interdisciplinary practice, framing printmaking as a space where observation, creation, documentation, and collection traverse the boundaries between art, environmental conservation, and ethics in an era of ecological crisis.

The WATER Pulls

organizer: Malgorzata Oakes

The WATER Pulls is a collective exhibition that investigates the multifaceted significance of water as an endangered vital resource and its role as a cultural foundation. Featuring artists deeply connected to their local habitats, the exhibition initiates a global discourse on water sovereignty, traditional ecological knowledge, and environmental resilience. This international project encourages storytelling related to water conservation and environmental stewardship. Water unites us, but it is experienced differently depending on our lands, our ancestry, and our ecosystems. The WATER Pulls emphasizes that water is both a cultural heartbeat and a threatened resource. By curating a roster of artists deeply tethered to their local habitats, the exhibition offers a global dialogue on climate resilience, traditional ecological knowledge, and water sovereignty. The ability to exhibit this collaborative project in Pittsburgh will allow for celebration and reflection on the region’s dynamic landscape, where cultural history and geographical beauty are inextricably linked to the waterways. This narrative is anchored by “The Point” in downtown Pittsburgh—the historic confluence where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers blend into the Ohio River.