Friends of Transit Print Invitational

Marnie Galloway of Monkey-Rope Press

What a show! Last night was the opening reception of Transit Residency's Print Invitational at the I Am Logan Square gallery as part of Chicago Artists Month.  I was proud to contribute three prints from the CTA Announcements series and the first of the bicycle subculture pugilists prints. This sneak-peak picture was shared by Transit before the opening...

...but the gallery was so packed last night, I couldn't get a photograph of the work myself!

The crowd spilled out onto the sidewalk in front of the gallery, amiable and full of delicious treats from Paper Moon Bakery and locally brewed craft beer by Revolution Brewing.

Congratulations again to Transit Residency for organizing such a wonderful show!

New Prints in the Shop

Four new prints in the shop! We've got a deep sea, shiny metalic "bioluminescent" jellyfish; its warm-water cousin; a cicada-killer wasp chasing a cicada; and, our personal favorite, a tea-time Jolly Roger flag. 

**3 cheers to Evanston Print and Paper for studio time, coffee delivery and light-hearted camaraderie.

Summer Round-Up

It has finally happened: the high temperatures later this week will dip in to the upper 50s, pumpkin-flavored everythings are available with irritating regularity at coffee shops and bakeries city wide, and citizens everywhere are discovering orphaned gloves and single cough losenges in newly aired-out jackets. Summer is over and fall is settling in!

We here at Monkey-Rope Press are settling back into a long-overdue work flow after a heartily enjoyed summer hiaitus, but that's not to say that we've been without news:

• Earlier this month, Chicagoist and Gapers Block picked up on our CTA Announcement print series. Any and all publicity that hilariously modulated voice acting can get, the happier we are! 
• The first chapter of Monkey-Rope Press's first graphic novel, In the Sounds and Seas, is now available at both Quimby's here in Chicago and at Comix Revolution in Evanston. If those are too local for you, the book is also available on our etsy store.
• Last but by no means least, we printed wedding invitations for beloved pals, fellow nerds and sociology PhD candidates this summer. I offered to print their invitation before I knew what they wanted, and couldn't have been more tickled or excited by their idea. Who needs cherry blossoms and cursive script when you can have gigantic robots destroying the Las Vegas strip?

This brown, cream and metalic-bronze linoleum block print was printed on Cream Cordtone Speckletone French Paper on a Vandercook 4 proof press at Evanston Print and Paper Shop. Unfortunately, Las Vegas was not damaged in the production of this print.

Looking forward into the coming layering seasons, we look forward to adding new prints to our shop page, publishing small experimental comics and settling into Chapter 2 of In the Sounds and Seas. Now it's time to put on a kettle for tea and settle in to business. Happy autumn, one and all!

Found: Letterpress Ephemera

Monkey-Rope Press is back in business after a 10-day-long holiday travel hiatus. Before heading south to Austin, Texas to spend time with family, I stopped in St Louis for a long weekend to visit more family and friends. A highlight of the trip was an evening spent at the City Museum, a 10-story former shoe factory in down town St Louis that was converted in 1997 into a surreal spectacle of a playground. It is not a museum where one walks through with silent reverence: the space is built of the city, pieced together from architectural salvage and abandoned ephemera, and the purpose of the space is play instead of contemplation. Used rebar is repurposed into climbing tubes, deep-fry pans pave the bathroom like bricks, and the walls of the cafe next to a coat check room are lined with old magnesium letterpress plates.

A sample detail of the wall

 Found wood type at the coat check/letterpress room's entrance 

Now that I have returned from out-of-town holiday adventures and have proven myself a true glutton in the face of home-made cookies, I am pleased to be back in the studio facing my work. The Queer History print series is taking a back seat for a few weeks so that I can focus more intently on the book project, in hopes of getting demonstrable progress made in time for an early-March grant deadline. Today I order paper to build my first draft mock-up, and continue to research and sketch sample pages. Off to work!

Block finished!

The Christine Jorgensen block is complete! Check in early next week for the first finished print of the history series collaboration with writeyourprincipal.com.