One of the remaining print books from the Mid-America Print Council conference. This was part of the All Along Press project’s “We Belong to this Band.” I saw the booklets posted at the MAPC venues like MCAD or the Highpoint on wooden stakes allowing people to tear off a print for keeps. This packet was discovered some distance from the Highpoint.
From All Along Press‘s webpage:
“We Belong to This Band is a collection of homages or portraits of artists and printmakers who have gone before us. This activity will take place just before and during the MAPC Conference, ‘New World/Old World,’ hosted by the University of Minnesota Regis Center for The Arts in Minneapolis, October13 -16, 2010.
The project is a collection of homages or portraits of artists and printmakers who have gone before us. It is meant to be an ephemeral monument that celebrates the lives of our artistic heroes and fellow mortals, propagating their memory through the printed image.
Participants contribute images of their heroes that are printed under the direction of Lisa Bulawsky at All Along Press then bound into tear-off pads, attached to garden stakes, and planted throughout the city of Minneapolis, to be taken by passers-by.“
With the conference over, the remaining prints just lingered around until the eventual decomposition from the weather. There were some leftover packets over at MCAD that the rain was dissolving the glue binding and fading the ink. I decided to relocate those packets to dryer locations so people can still take prints at their discretion. I know that the project was meant to be ephemeral, but I couldn’t help but lengthen its shelf life.
I didn’t participate in very many MAPC events, but I did help out at the Highpoint’s Free Ink Day and visited many of the gallery exhibitions. For more coverage, Printeresting has a nice summary of the conference.