For the past year, Thayer Bray has been building a new community deep in the basement of the Hobbs Building, in the historic West Bottoms.
The director of Greenhouse Print Space says he’s trying to regain something he experienced as a graduate student at the University of Kansas, where he was surrounded by creative people.
To do that, he’s invited artists into a 5,000-square-foot studio filled with hundreds of years of printing technology and drawers full of old-school type. The antique machinery has a way of bringing people together, he says.
“You have one person drawing, you have one person on the light table tracing, you have one person setting type in a corner,” Bray says. “We could not be even talking to each other, but there is a communion of labor.”
For almost two decades, calligrapher Calvert Guthrie kept this collection of more than 20 printing presses running, under the banner of the Kansas City Center for the Ink & Paper Arts. Guthrie handed the keys over to Bray last year.
To reinvigorate the space, Bray has been hosting a semi-regular print club, where anyone can visit and try their hand. Now, the space is inspiring a new generation of artists to discover the art of printmaking.
At a club meetup last fall that was themed “Chronically Online,” Bray assembled individual pieces of raised, 1800s-era characters known as movable type to spell the phrase "go touch grass," an internet meme popularized in 2021 that urges people to reengage with the real world. With the letters in place and covered by a thin layer of ink, Bray warms up a vintage Vandercook letterpress machine to start churning out prints.
“This is actually wooden type,” Bray explains to the club, “so if anybody’s heard of Guttenberg, he’s the first person in the West to invent it.”
German craftsman Johannes Guttenberg designed the movable-type printing press more than 500 years ago, and the invention transformed the way information spread across Europe.
“There's a sharing of ideas and a sharing of experience and a sharing of knowledge,” Bray says.
‘It’s like a treasure’
The space is outfitted with all the tools and equipment central to printmaking. It’s a maze of platen presses, proof presses, etching presses and printer’s drawers bursting with moveable type.
“This shop has screenprinting, letterpress, etching, lithography, also a vast collection of type, which is so wonderful to have,” says artist Regan Chrisman-Boman, who teaches at the print space, “It’s like a treasure.”
In a class last fall, Chrisman-Boman taught students about monoprints, which create a one-of-a-kind image. The artform is often described as “printed paintings.”
To create them, ink is applied in a thin, even layer with a handheld roller onto a flat plate — a piece of plexiglass in this case — before it’s pressed onto paper. Unlike other printing methods that can be repeated, the result is often unpredictable, and even thrilling.
“Instead of just sitting in front of my computer, this is totally different,” says printmaking student Alicia Houston, who spent a month creating pictures of a cityscape, a desert scene, and a plate of ham and eggs.
Houston is a librarian who helps companies organize their data, but she says printing a picture of what she had for breakfast is a nice change of pace.
“It's nice to be able to have something with a little more tactile experience at the end of the day to unwind,” Houston says.
Internet memes meet the real world
In another part of the basement, Trinity Pote demonstrates screen printing to a group of visitors.
For this method, ink is pressed through a stencil to create an image on a surface, most often a T-shirt or piece of fabric. Andy Warhol popularized the artform in the 1960s with vividly-colored portrayals of celebrities and Campbell's Soup cans.
Pote, who graduated from Kansas City Art Institute’s printmaking department last year, is working on her own tangible tribute to social media.
“For the theme of ‘Chronically Online,’ a classic one from 2016, the ‘Deep Fried E!’” she says, referring to a meme variation of Lord Farquaad from the movie “Shrek.”
“If you're around 23 or younger, you probably know that one off the bat,” she says. Another print shows “a silly horse drinking some wine, to think about, like, the chaotic, crazy culture online.”
For Pote, nights like this are about stepping away from the computer and getting her hands dirty.
“Even in this scenario where we are reflecting on the online world, it's super fun to remember that, like, being human is writing notes and talking to people and laughing,” Pote says. “Even if you mess up the first time, that’s the joy of it.”
Looking to expand their horizons and intrigued by the online theme, Austin Pierce stopped by the Print Club to watch the printmakers demonstrate their craft.
“It's a great way of getting people away from their screens, and not getting so bottled up and bottlenecked into things that are fake life and imagined life,” Pierce said. “This is stuff we can interact with physically or give to our friends, give to ourselves or just create.”
And while Pierce says creating art is outside of their comfort level, they’ll definitely be back.
“I've never done printing stuff, so that was my first adventure into this whole thing,” Pierce says. “I just thought this would be a really cool thing to do, and it turns out it was.”
Print Club will meet from 6-9 p.m., Tuesday, March 17 at the Greenhouse Print Space, 1427 W. 9th St., Kansas City, Missouri 64101. For more information, visit the Greenhouse Print Space Instagram page.
