Renegade Craft Fair

Next weekend I'm coming to Chicago to the Renegade Craft Fair! I'm exited to be part of it and have the chance to meet all those creative people and to get to see all of the goods that have to sell. I always get back home inspired and motivated and ready to start on new projects.
For now until then, I'm cranking the press every day, I'm almost ready!

If you are in Chicago on that weekend, please come and visit me.
Red Hydrant Press is at booth #13 on Division St. between Winchester and Damen.

Dead End Prints Call for Submissions

This is officially the third year we celebrate El Dia de los Muertos with an exhibition of small prints. And just as in previous years we are once more asking for submissions:

Theme: OIL
Print dimensions: Image must fit within a MAXIMUM paper size of 5.5x7.5 inches.
Eligible media: Hand pulled prints only: woodcut, collagraph, monotype, intaglio, lithography, etching, silkscreen, etc. No ink jet, laser, photocopy or any mechanical or photographic reproductions please.

For more information, please download the submission form at google docs, or go to my website

Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments: alynnguerra@me.com

Old Birthday Notes

Back in April I celebrated my birthday by having a party and asking people to write notes in exchange for a print. What was different this year was that the note had to be about my favorite color, which wasn't that difficult to guess; and the author of my favorite story would get one of my prints framed.
I got stories sent by email, or posted on my face book and real hand written ones. I read and I enjoyed all of them. But two in particular got my attention, one was a poem and the other a very creative sci-fi story. The poem was written by a 12 year old girl, and the sci-fi story by her mother; so I decided to give the artwork to both of them, they are the two blue cards in the center of the picture.
I gad a great time which keeps coming back every time I open a drawer and find that stack of colorful cards in it. I'm very grateful to all my friends who gave me those wonderful stories on my birthday.

Open Studio Hours

Now it is official: I'm opening my studio to the public on Mondays and Fridays from Noon to 6 PM.
I kept telling people about this, but posting it on my website is going to make it look more credible.

All of my prints and printed stuff are available for purchase, the other good news is that I can now take credit card payments.

For more information please follow the link to my website.

Their Daily Bread

It was probably more than 2 years ago when Margie, Mandy and I had this idea of using a house for a site specific art installation regarding women and home. We couldn't do it last year, but we did it this year at last.

I was frustrated to know that the chosen house was "historical" meaning we could basically do nothing on the walls, no sticking, nailing, hanging, painting, etc. So, what was I supposed to do, lay things on the furniture, or on the floor? Well, that's exactly what I ended up doing after weeks of not knowing if I was able to figure something out.

I decided to talk about something that concerned women in Grand Rapids around the time when the house was built. What a nice surprise to find out around that that the women suffrage movement was about to be successful.

I had to find some bed sheet donations, which was not a problem compared to what followed next.

I decided to do reproductions of articles from the local newspapers from 1911 to 1920; I obviously had no idea what I was getting myself into. Most articles regarding suffrage, women, important women, etc. were very small and hard to find in the newspaper microfilms, but not surprising there were lots of sexist ads aimed at women, I guess that was very common. So I spent long long days at the local history department looking for those hidden articles. And, although they were small, and not very frequent, I gathered a big pile of them!

I printed all of those articles on the bedsheets and covered the furniture with them.

Here is my artist statement:

For the exhibit, we are using this historic home to focus on facets of history that took place when it was young, specifically from 1912 through 1920, the years during which the women’s suffrage movement succeeded in granting women the right to vote. The house belonged to the grandfather of Dorothy Leonard. Leonard was active in the fight for women’s suffrage; she joined the League of Women Voters in 1920.

My installation represents this history through the medium of dust, dust as a remainder and reminder of things past. The dust used is a combination of flour, as a tribute to the women servants who spent their hours hard at work in this home’s kitchen baking bread, and ashes, as a reminder of those in the movement now dead.

For the first part of my installation, I researched newspapers of the era and printed reproductions of relevant stories on bed-sheets. The sheets cover various pieces of furniture in the home as a way of drawing attention to the accumulation of history throughout the years. The history that settled around these pieces of furniture is the unseen history that settles like dust around us today.

The other part of my installation uses stencils of news stories that made big news around the dates that were relevant for women’s suffrage. Instead of paint, I used flour, again to represent the dust that history leaves behind, the dust of movements that never settles, but waits to be stirred up again by women seeking justice.


The exhibit took place at the Leonard at Logan B&B in Grand Rapids Michigan from March 26-28. The artists involved were Mandy Burrow, Margie Erlandson, Anna Campbell, and myself.
There are more pictures and information on my website.

New year and other projects.

I had the best time organizing the Dead End exhibit, we received 54 prints from 28 artists from 8 states, I met a lot of really nice printmakers and print buyers as well.
At the end I was unable to create a website but I put together a webpage with all the prints from the exhibit.

Two weeks after that we had yet an other event; the Tanglefoot 19 open studio Holiday sale, where all the artist studios in the three and four stories Tanglefoot building open their doors to the public.



In the middle of the Holiday exitement and had to print about 200 paper bombs for the UICA's exhibit "(S)Edition Prints as Activism". This exhibit features the work of 54 artists and will be up until March 5th.





And since it's so hard for me to say no even when I'm swamped, I ended up participating in a fundrising project for a local organization that provides meals to homeless people in the city. I painted/printed a bowl which will be auctioned during the event. I really wished I had known a little bit more about printing on a bisque bowl. Now, I'm just hoping it turns out good enough to be auctioned for at least a decent price.

The design is based on one of the Tree of Life and Death designs I did for the Dead End exhibit, only this one doesn't have any skulls in it, I thought it wouldn't be appropiate to have death references on a food container. Instead I used one statement form the book "Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed", wich says: Food is a human right.

Since I don't post as often as I should, I always try to say as much as I can with as little words as possible as to not overwhelm who ever stumbles into my blog, so if there are things that don't make much sense, there is always a website to visit for reference: www.redhydrantpress.com