We will be offering a smaller roster of classes in the month of October due to the pending move in the Mercantile Block Building right next door. To sign up, just click on the name of the class below.

Intro to Letterpress: 3 Weeks
Wednesdays, October 6th, 13th and 20th, 5pm-9pm
This course provides a quick, basic introduction to letterpress. Participants learn to ink the press, adjust pressure, adjust roller height, register and feed a sheet of paper, make an impression and then clean the press. Creating and using plastic plates in combination with metal movable type to create your own vision in letterpressed embossment

Intro to Silkscreen: 2 weeks
Thursdays, October 7th and 14th : 5-9pm
This course provides a two week introduction to silkscreen. Participants will learn the basics of the photo-emulsion process, a variety of making ways to make positives, in addition to ink mixing, how to troubleshoot the process, registration and printing methods. Please bring all supplies listed below to the first class. If preferred, bring some drawings, or computer generated designs to the first class.

Check back for November classes soon.

Maker Faire came to Rhode Island this saturday, and filled downtown providence with all sorts of creative makers and hackers. Maker Faire is a family friendly festival to celebrate makers, creators, engineers, artists, science, technology, and all things related. The festival featured hands on building workshops, beer brewing, creative innovations, robots, and lots of maker bots.

I was there on behalf of the AS220 labs, accompanied by AS220 Cottage Industries Coordinator, Krystal Grow, and celebrity hacker, Jimmie Rodgers. Our station featured soldering workshops, where people came to assemble various electronics kits. TV-B-Gone, Mintyboost, Open Heart, Atari Punk Console, and Drawdio were among some of the kits available to the public.

There were quite a few makerbots hanging out on saturday. The one below is a makerbot that maker, Forest Crossman, assembled.

John Sarik displayed his Nixie Sudoku, which used 81 retro Nixie Tubes to create a electronic sudoku game that people can use and solve. Really cool!

Check out a complete list of all the makers that attended - here.

A huge thanks to Kipp Bradford and Brain Jepson, and all the Maker Faire crew that helped put of the festivities. It was a very exciting and interesting day.

No, not the last days of summer, we have at least 26 official days of summer left, but only FOUR more day of our current exhibitions at AS220. Currently on view at the AS220 Main Gallery is Brooke Goldstein's brilliant "Coloring Book" series of drawings and prints, "Traveling Asia" photographs by Scott Baker, and new paintings by Joshua Harriman.

Peter Lutz's exhibition, "Staring at the Sun" is at the AS220 Project Space. Peter is giving an artist talk on Friday, August 27 at 5:30 pm followed by a closing reception. The AS220 Project Space is located at 93 Mathewson St. Talk and reception are free.

&

UPCOMING!

In September...AS220 Printapolloza!!!! All manner of print wonders from around the world! September 3-25, 2010, opening reception Sunday, September 12, 4-7pm. PRINTLOTTERY on Saturday September 25, 7-10pm!

In the Main Gallery
AS220's Community PrintShop's 2nd Biennial Print Lottery!!!

Youth Gallery

Prints & T-shirts from the AS220 Youth Studios!

AS220 Project Space (93 Mathewson St.)

Welcome Back to the Twentieth Century! New Prints by Dan Wood

and in the reading room;

DWRI + TS = Three years of collaborative prints by Dan Wood and Tiny Showcase

Dan Wood will give an artist talk on Thursday September 16th at 6pm with Shea'la Finch of Tiny Showcase and artist Alec Thibodeau. Dan will talk about his current work and his collaborative projects with Tiny Showcase and with Alec, and the magical wonders of Providence Printmaking!

Speaking of magical printmaking,The AS220 Community Printshop is proud to announce the newest print from the Editions Project, Hex Drawing by Providence artist Pippi Zornoza. To celebrate the occasion and chat about her latest work Pippi and Guggenheim Curator Lauren Hinkson, will have a public conversation on Friday September 17th, at the AS220 Performance Space from 5:30 pm- 6:30 pm, free!

"Inauguration" by Dan Wood, 2010, 4 color letterpress

In September, AS220's gallery will showcase prints and works on paper by 200 artists from all over the world. We're asking you to show your support for the shop with a $100 donation. In thanks, you recieve a ticket redeemable for artwork on display during the 2nd Biennial Print Lottery on September 25th, 2010. In keeping with AS220's mission of accessibility and equality, and for the purpose of having fun, all artwork in the show is won by a blind lottery system.

Our Goal: to put together an exciting survey of contemporary prints / works on paper, cultivate appreciation for the art of multiples with an array of presentations, introduce print processes to the public with free workshops, foster a sense of involvement and ownership in the AS220 Community Print Shop, and raise $25,000 to help support all of our shop's operations.

If you are unfamiliar with the shop, read all about us and what we do; in short, we provide affordable, quality printmaking classes to a broad creative community, as well as open, unjuried access to an incredible array of facilities for members to practice printmaking.

Join us this September as we celebrate an incredible three years. In this time we've learned plenty, made a mistake (or two) and continue to try new things. We're proud of where we are today, and even more excited about where we're moving. If you haven't yet explored the AS220 Print Shop, this is a brilliant chance to get involved. Already a member, client, or fan of the AS220 Community Print Shop? Your involvement helps build the vibrant community art space we strive to provide. Please join us this September for our 2nd Biennial Print Lottery.

Interested in purchasing a ticket? You can do that here!

Interested in learning more about the events we've scheduled? You can do that here!

If you have any other questions, or might be interested in partnering with us as a sponsor, please contact the Printshop Manager, Morgan Calderini at 401.831.9327 or email her at morgan@as220.org.

General Contractor Pezzuco Construction and their subs Cumplido Painting and Renovations and Control Hardwood Floors are putting the finishing touches on two floors of new maple flooring for the 22 residential studios at AS220's latest development: the Mercantile Block.

Located in the heart of historic downtown Providence, the century-old Mercantile boasts numerous architectural features with historical significance that are being restored to a high quality, including original cast iron columns that can be found in many of the building's residential studios on floors 3 and 4.

Studios range in size from 690 to 880 square feet, and are priced from $640 to $1,125 per month! Rent includes internet access, gas, water and sewer. Building offers laundry room, elevator, bicycle storage.

Come see for yourself!
AS220 at the Mercantile Block Open Houses
Every Tuesday evening now through September 15th
5:30-7PM
Enter at 131 Washington Street

A lot of info is up on the Foo Fest Website, which hopefully you have had time to check out already. Tons of cool stuff is going on this Friday as well as this Saturday. If you aren't yet 100% in the know, then get on over there and take a look!

The Foo Fest 2010 Program book just arrived from the printers today! We have 2,000 free copies to give away to Foo goers. You can also download a PDF (a medium-sized 9.4MB file) of the booklet right now and learn more about this year's artists and bands BEFORE you even get downtown. You never know, Its possible that we'll run out.....

Foo-2010-Program-Book.pdf

The Fabratory was invited to participate in this year's Maker Faire by our friends at the Big Picture Company. Held in Detroit, Michigan, the faire proved to be a great place where creative minds could work together and make an idea come to life. At the faire we met fellow thinkers and makers and saw incredibly strange and unique inventions from people all around the country, including a machinist who fabricated his own 3d "cupcake" printers, a farmer who built a combined lumber mill/laser cutter/shop bot/3d printer (that was portable!), and a community group that made multiple seated bikes for more than one person enjoy. What really interested us about all of the different inventions was the mix of things both useful and totally useless. The faire proved to be a place for these off-beat people to explore their ideas with style, such as a guy who converted a Volvo into a robotic choir using animatronic fish, crabs, lobsters, and sharks, or a team that built a life-size mouse trap game, or even a metal singing skeleton.  These inventions have no place in a household, but the fact that the ideas are so different and the makers thought outside the box is what makes these things even more special.

The Fabratory wasn't in Detroit to just enjoy this gathering of inventors. We were also lucky enough to participate in an education symposium put on by the Big Picture Company. People from around the world came to think about a high school for people who learn with their hands and discuss what a school of makers would look like. We showed the group our own personal projects that we are working on in the Fabratory and spoke to them about how we learn using the tools in a Fab Lab. We were really excited to be able to help them out. Take a look at some of the photos that we took both at the Maker Faire and at the symposium.

-Brian Melo

Oh dear lord. Its T-minus Foo O'clock, readers, and you know what that means: pinatas in the office, party-metal on the mega-mix, hand-stand contests by the water cooler, and girl-talk style "which member of ESG am I" fortune cookie origami games preceding every show. My life is a Cathy meets Dilbert meets Metalocalypse cartoon. Thank god this is going to culminate into its apex soon- the madness has to end sometime. OR DOES IT?!

Saddle up tonight for an ever-festive B Sharp situation: MOGA will be celebrating their cd release, and we're rolling out the red carpet. Sunday night gets metalcore, but ain't too cool to dance, with Divets, No One and The Somebodies, Turbosleaze, and Private Public. What does that even mean?!?! Daniel Chase is going to cool things out mellow groove style on Tuesday alongside The Tower & The Fool and The Rachels. I'll be real, readers. If the tsunami-like spiral out of madness has already begun, Wednesday night is giving me cause for concern: Ceremony is coming though town, and I heard a rumor about mesh tops being involved. Is that punk? Soul Control, Vaccine, and a little outfit called Wet Friend have personally assured me that this will be one of the most disgusting nights of my life. (You've obviously forgotten Freedom Winter 99!) Ok, and here's where it really gets wild: Friday evening we are basking in the warm glow of Shepard Fairey, who will be here at 5 screening his short-but-not-too-short Andre The Giant Has A Posse, as well as sitting on a panel for a very special Action Speaks alongside Bert Crenca, pioneer of free culture activism and scholarship Lawrence Lessig, and our very own resident super genius/wizard of computer engineering/conceiver and fabricator of magic/all around cool guy Brandon Edens. It's free of charge, and might actually change your life. Who loves open source software? This guy!

Okok. Enough about me. I'm off to get my rain slicker dry cleaned for the 11th. For a full rundown of our happs, get thee to our calendar. Until the rock show, away!

This week in Kennedy Plaza, the public got a glimpse of the talent here at the AS220 Youth Studio! We set up a station selling screen printed tees, laser cut wooden postcards, etched tumblers, pins, jewelry and more - all designed and crafted by our youth.

Come check out our booth next month!

Featuring: AK Press, Lucy Parsons Center, Wooden Shoe, PM Press, North East Federation of Anarchist Communists, Anarchist Black Cross, Just Seeds, Farmacy Herbs and much more!

Natasha Maria Brooks-Sperduti has built a Wheel of Fortune for this year's Foo Fest & is looking for YOUR art work to divine the future! Details here!

AS220 supports the YOUTH! Zukrewe, the youth studio performance group, represented at the 11th annual 3rd eye open hip hop festival in New Bedford. The festival's rich hip hop culture involved such things as dunking contests, graffiti art, break dancing battles, and much more. The 45 minute drive to Buttonwood Park was worth the wait for Zukrewe. Our street band's Dynamic 7 brought the HYPE with their unique and beat busting remakes of songs such as Nuh Linga, Calabria, and Danny Song. The weather was nice but some of the emcees could have been nicer. I left feeling as if some emcees didn't put their all into their performances. But when 3rd Eye's group took the stage the mood was put back on, with their mission reflected in their youth's live performers. Followed by Providence's own, Travis, from Who Dem. The main acts were all female MCs and they stood up for the year of the woman!! Everyone appeared very passionate and enthusiastic, which gave the audience watching them a cheerful vibe.

The breakers were one of the highlights of my 3rd Eye experience. Can you say SKILLS?! Basketball is also a major element of the 3rd Eye Open. Many teams come from all over New England to participate, so competition is steep! The talent was amazing, the players all seemed like they had something to prove, and they all went hard. Overall it was a really nice experience and I can't wait to go back next year.

-Angella Daluz

Brook Goldstein, "Heart in a bottle in Joy" from the series Coloring Book currently on view at the AS220 Main Gallery.

Josh Harriman, " Horse with a Ghost" on exhibit in the Open Window at Empire St.

Peter Lutz, "Cleave" from the current show Staring at the Sun at the AS220 Project Space.

Scott Baker, "Floating Market Place" from current exhibit Traveling Asia on view in the AS220 Main Gallery.

This is the last Letterpress class before our big move, and if you've been thinking about signing up, consider that this class will not be offered again until Late October / November, once we've settled into our new shop next door.

If you've got words or images, cards or announcements, bookmarks, stationary, gifts, poems, or anything else you'd like to make analogue multiples of in a serious (or ebullient, or just hand-crafted) way, Sign up Today! Make an impression on someone with something wonderful at a very human scale.

Click here to head to our sign up page.

Workers for Pezzuco Construction spent this week plastering the top two floors of AS220's new Mercantile building, which house 22 stunning residential studios currently available for rent.

The century-old AS220 @ the Mercantile offers numerous architectural features with historical significance that are being restored to a very high quality, including original plaster columns that can be found in several of the building's residential studios on floors 3 and 4.

Studios range in size from 690 to 880 square feet, and are priced from $640 to $1,125 per month! Rent includes internet access, gas, water and sewer. Building offers laundry room, elevator, bicycle storage. Rehearsal studios for musicians/bands in the basement.

Come see for yourself! AS220 @ the Mercantile Block Open Houses: Every Tuesday evening now through September 5:30-7PM 131 Washington Street

Tonight brings the noise with Academia, The Royalty, Tens of Thousands, and The Universe. It's indie! It's glam! It's garage! Saturday's show has been moved to the stratosphere: The Concord Ballet Orchestra Players, Goliath, Something like Banter & the Cybernetic Inevitable All-Stars, and The Invisible Hours promise to live up to their reputation as Theremin wielding, fuzz echoing, fire-starting ambient psychedelia. This Sunday is the first of the month. If you thought payday was good, wait till you catch the Empire Review. Wednesday at 5:30, for absolutely zero dollars, hackers unite at DC401. Stick around into the night for Sideshow, (R)octopus, This Is A Movement, and the Enthusiastics. Now listen close, readers: Thursday at high noon The Rhode Island Council for the Humanities will be hosting a grants information workshop. Bring a lunch or grab some in our restaurant, and get the down low on what grants are available, as well as secrets for wowing grant-makers. Did you know they're going to be our new office buddies in the Mercantile building? True story. Meet me for high-fiving by the water cooler in 15! Speaking of the Mercantile: we're hosting open houses of our fabulous new live/work studio situations every Tuesday evening from 5:30-7 through September. Cruise by to see their magnanimousness with your very own eyes!

That's all for the mo, readers. I'm off to catch the tail end of Godzilla v Mechagodzilla. For a full list of the happs, get thee to our calendar. Until the rock show, away!

The last few classes for Intro to 3D have been great!

We are working on making a city, where each block is modeled in 3D by a student. Then we collectively combine the blocks to feature in a game. Later we'll take what we made to experiment with Augmented Reality.

To draw inspiration, we have been touring downtown Providence to collect photographs of interesting historical architecture and saving them for reference.

Check out the progress that we've made!

This past monday, the Fabratory welcomed guest speaker Tiffany Jon. A recent RISD grad ('09) from the Industrial Design department, she is currently a designer for Apple in Cupertino, CA.

Tiffany showed us samples from her portfolio, focusing on projects related to the work we've been doing this summer. She spoke about her experiences, learning the design process and real world applications for design beyond school.

Tiffany's presentation helped to give perspective on the projects we've been busy with and showed us the opportunities that are available using the valuable skills we've been developing here!

We've heard the age-old adage, "a picture is worth a thousand words." This week in the lab, we're exploring possibilities of conveying meaning with design!

Now in our fourth week of the summer work program, the Fabratory is creating an informative word wall - a visual dictionary of design terms to help us with our own design practice and to equip us for conversation and critique.

AS220 has recently received a one-thousand condom donation from Planned Parenthood. The task was pretty simple. I Google searched for condoms for the parenting class at the studio. I typed 'condom donations' in and the first link that appeared was the 'Condom Hut', but they wanted us to pay for the condoms. Then I clicked on the second link which was 'Planned Parenthood' and I wrote down the number to call, I told them who I was and what we needed the donation for and we ended up getting the donation- but I wasn't expecting one-thousand! I felt a real sense of accomplishment obtaining condoms for the studio in order to advertise safe sex for teens. The "PROPER ATTIRE" design helps ensure that now you can feel completely comfortable buying condoms and carrying them with you. It also helps to kind of bring out the humor of using a condom and makes people feel more comfortable and use them all the time.

-Maurice Harrison

1. August Classes are filling. Click here to sign up for a class today! acquire some printmaking skills and create printed matter that matters. We offer great classes across diverse print disciplines, and the class sizes are small - which means participants get plenty of hands on experience and personal instruction! We're proud of our classes, presses, and teachers - just read this snippet from our last batch of class evaluations:

   "Overall Experience was spectacular. Instructor extremely knowledgeable and patient. Was able to cover a lot of info in a small amount of time. The only improvement would be more time... maybe by adding a fourth day."
   -From June Letterpress Class

Our classes cover a lot of ground! Register to make something analogue and beautiful!

We've recently received some incredible prints by Stefan Gunn, Keyholder Henry Brown, Lois Harada, and more. The Sneak Peek Below is a small glimpse of a dense and incredibly articulate c-print by Piotr Kaczmarek.

1. Tamara Waite-Santibanez is the July A.I.R. for a few more days. The Print Shop is psyched to have her around and printing. Pictures below feature work she's printed here at the AS220 Print Shop.

1. Look at the Youth Studio Screen Printers in Action!

August 1-28, 2010

opening reception 

Sunday, August 1, 4-7pm

AS220 Main Gallery

Travelling Asia by Scott Baker & 

Coloring Book by Brooke Goldstein

Open Window

New Work By Joshua Harriman 

AS220 Project Space (93 Mathewson St.)

New Work by Peter Lutz

artist talk August 19, 6-8pm  at the Project Space

in the reading room: 

Recent Acquisitions 

Youth Gallery

PhotoCollages from the R.I.T.S.

August in the AS220 Galleries brings us to Asia with the travel photography of Scott Baker, Brooke Goldsteins uses symbols and colors to tell vivd narrative stories and Joshus Harriman's paintings invoke dream-like sequnces of the natural world inspired by the work of the German Expressionists. Peter Lutz works acorss a variety of media creating works that appear to be simple, but are painstakingly constructed, and highly nuanced. In the Youth Gallery are photo-collages from the RI Training School that are contemporary spin on the classic works of Hannah Hoch. In the reading room we have new books by local artists and poets such as Irene Lawrence

Ann Shaw, and recent zines fro Amigo Press. Good art work + Good reads= Good times. Come on in enjoy the work and a/c. 

AS220 @ the Mercantile Block

Open House - Tuesday, July 27

5:30-7pm

131 Washington Street

Workers for Pezzuco Construction spent this week plastering, painting and finishing much of the final work on the top two floors of AS220's new Mercantile building, which house 22 stunning residential studios currently available for rent.

The century-old AS220 @ the Mercantile offers numerous architectural features with historical significance that are being restored to a very high quality, including original columns that can be found in several of the building's residential studios on floors 3 and 4.

AS220 is also replicating the building's original tin ceiling throughout the building, including inside every one of the residential studios. We have also installed new, hardwood maple flooring in all 22 residential studios. All the windows in the building - including those of the residential units, which face onto Washington or Martha streets - are historically accurate 2-over-2s.

The residential studios range in size from 690 to 880 square feet, and priced from $640 to $1,125 per month! Rent includes internet access, gas, water and sewer. Building offers laundry room, elevator, bicycle storage. Rehearsal studios for musicians/bands in the basement.

Each apartment has its own bathroom with a tub and shower, and a kitchen equipped with a refrigerator and electric stove. Each unit also contains its own heating and air conditioning, and a ceiling fan.

Come see for yourself! AS220 @ the Mercantile Block Open Houses: Every Tuesday evening now through September 5:30-7:00PM 131 Washington Street

AS220 House Manager, Large-scale Linocut Phenom and Just Seeds Member Meredith Stern dropped off a work of her own, sneak peak below:

We're really impressed thus far with the quality submissions we've received for our 2nd Biennial Print Lottery. Come September, supporters of the Print Shop will have the opportunity to take home some fantastic prints and works on paper.

Click here to learn more about the 2nd Biennial AS220 Print Lottery, purchase a ticket, or see our roster of print-related events! Print Matters!

On to the next one. August P-Shop classes are coming up! These are our last classes before the Mercantile-Block move, so if you were hoping to pick up a skill or two this summer, sign up today! Click here to visit our online store, where you can see and sign up for our complete roster of classes

Click below to see the complete panorama from our most recent Third Thursday Screenprinting Session - where screen-printers with a bit of experience can come coat, shoot, and print a screen for only 5$ We have monitors around to help trouble-shoot and ensure success! The Third Thursday sessions are not a substitute for a class, but great for folks who've done this before!

Apologies, readers. Far be it from me to sound a false alarm, but it's getting so warm in here I was starting to get concerned. Lord knows, if the sizzling sensuality of this week's events so much as fevered any of our beloved patrons, I would never be able to forgive myself. Entrusted with the fervent knowledge of our upcoming happenings, it would be flippant and careless of me to bear this load alone, all the while knowing I could have done something to prevent a mishap. It's the cross I bear, readers, being weighted down with all this information. I can't take it anymore. Put on a breathable fabric; we're going in.

It's only a couple of hours until the madness begins to unfold. Tailor your pants, lovers: Makeupbreakup, The Press, The Brother Kite, and Cellar Doves take the stage in t-minus. Shake it! Saturday night is riddled with your Auntie Reba's all time favorite genre: Canadian! Suuns and Parlovr trek down south to grace us with their presence. Don't you mock me with your bacon! Minky Starshine will jack us up with some jams that I understand to be somewhere between ELO and the Kinks, and it looks like I'll finally get to see Ming Toro. If it's cool by Pelletier, it's cool by me. Sunday night is going to get disgusting, as Rampant Decay, Brain Shivers, Suzi Trash, and Immaculate: Grotesque show us what their band names are all about. I can't resist an Arkansan. Tuesday marks an always torrid extravaganza courtesy of Tor Johnson starring White Problems from Milwaukee, but the fun doesn't end there! Wednesday night is gonna get wild, team. Real wild... Grass Widow is coming in all the way from San Frisco, and I couldn't be more psyched. Remember what happened last time they were in town? Ok, its a little fuzzy, but this time we're hell-bent on making some memories. "My new favorites" and AS2000 all-stars Blood Huff are starting the night, and have committed to ensuring that something horrifying and uncomfortable happens before 9:45. I've got my eye on you, Zacchhiillii! It all culminates in me getting canned for having some sort of inappropriate celebrity meltdown, cause this night is headed up by The Avengers. "Not the unwed teen mothers of punk rock!?" you may be screaming aloud in your own mind. Yes, the very same. Sorry guys. If your favorite events emails come to an abrupt halt after this show, you know why. After that is the sickest Armageddon show yet to date, but you'll have to wait until next week for details. Ha! Or, check the calendar. I never was good at secrets.

There's the happs, readers. Now remember what we talked about re: sunscreen and oven mitts. You know the drill. For a full rundown of the sitch, get thee to our calendar. Until the rock show, away!