Please join Highpoint in welcoming the 2024 McKnight Printmaking Fellows Grace Sippy and Fidencio Fifield-Perez! Panelists Mike Cloud and Rachel Skokowski were tasked with reviewing a record number of applications (nearly double our previous high). Their initial evaluation was followed by in-person studio visits with the finalists after which they ultimate determined to award the fellowship to Fidencio and Grace.

When asked what excites them about the fellowship and what they think they might accomplish, Grace offered this: “I am excited and grateful to have the resources and mentality to be able to pursue my practice to an extent I have not had before. It feels validatin I am excited and grateful to have the resources and mentality to be able to pursue my practice to an extent I have not had before. It feels vaildatiing.”

“I have had a completely new and separate vein of work spark up in the last year or so, and I still need to decide if I will pursue its creation for the fellowship, or if I will continue to push and evolve what I have been working on for many years.”

And Fidencio said this: “I'm excited about printing in a studio that draws community members and printers from all over the area. Based on my experiences teaching and exhibiting with Highpoint, I knew I wanted to be a part of this community. It's unlike any other print shop I've been in. I'm most excited about printing and taking classes taught by other printmakers in the upcoming year. 

Undoubtedly, this fellowship will enable me to print new work as well as components that will be incorporated into other collaged works. The prize, facilities, and working alongside others during workshops will spur new directions, techniques, and processes. My studio practice is one driven by material curiosity and learning new processes.”

For updates on the progress of the artists and other fellowship happenings, stay tuned to Highpoint’s website and social media.

Highpoint would like to thank the panelists Mike Cloud and Rachel Skkowski for the thoughtful review and consideration of all the applicants.

About the panelists:

Mike Cloud is a painter, writer, and educator.  His work and research in the field of painting is anchored in the contemporary life of reproduction, symbolism and description. Cloud’s paintings “aestheticize their subjects and function on social and political terms that go beyond the stakes of authentic expression.”

Cloud earned his M.F.A. from Yale University School of Art and his B.F.A. from the University of Illinois-Chicago with a concentration in art education. Cloud has lectured extensively on his work and contemporary theoretical art issues at the Jewish Museum, Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Yale University, the Cooper Union, Bard College, New York Studio School, Kansas City Art Institute and the University of New Orleans.

Mike is associate Professor of Art, Theory, Practice at Northwestern University in Chicago.

Dr. Rachel Skokowski is the Curator of the Janet Turner Print Museum at California State University, Chico. She has worked with museum print collections in the US and abroad, including at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the University of Sydney, and the Ashmolean Museum. She received her PhD from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and holds a Masters from Oxford and a BA from Princeton University. Her research interests include 19th century French print culture, text and image studies, and women printmakers.

The McKnight Printmaking Fellowships are open Minnesota artist/printmakers who are at a career stage that is “beyond emerging” — defined here as artists who demonstrate a sustained level of accomplishment, commitment, and artistic excellence. Fellows are selected on the basis of the artistic merit of their work, and their dedication, interest, and contributions to Minnesota’s arts ecosystem.

Exhibition on view: March 7 - April 19, 2025

Opening Reception: Friday, March 7; 6:30 - 9pm

Public gallery conversation with the artists and guest moderator Teréz Iacovino : Saturday, March 15; 5 - 6pm (recording available below)

Highpoint is pleased to present the 2024 McKnight Printmaking Fellowship Exhibition. The exhibition features work created throughout their fellowship year, including an incredible collection of mixed media print-based work that incorporates lithography, collagraphy, collage, letterpress, embroidery, bookmaking, and more. Although the body of work each artist presents differs, both collections are filled with highly detailed, delicate, subtle, and personal imagery, documenting themes of loss, memory, home, and meditation.

About the artists:
Grace Sippy earned her BFA in Printmaking with Honors at the University of Iowa and her MFA in Printmaking at the University of Alberta. She has taught at the University of Alberta, the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, and Highpoint Center for Printmaking. Grace’s work explores dualities, often between mind and body, and combines traditional and contemporary, hand-based and digital printmaking methods. She has exhibited nationally and internationally across Europe and Asia, earning much recognition in her field. 

During the fellowship year, Sippy dove deep into exploration through a series of collagraph prints transforming garments once worn by her two young children. Sippy says, “The transformation of the garment to a printing matrix is a paradox, destroying the garment in the process but creating something new, a remnant of what was there. My fellowship work presents a reflection of loss and grief: of hopes of having a child, of a child since grown, and the loss of a child.” 

Fidencio Fifield-Perez was born in Oaxaca, Mexico, but raised in the U.S. after his family migrated. His current work examines borders, edges, and the people who must traverse them. In his work, Fifield-Perez’s interdisciplinary practice centers on the materiality of paper ephemera, everyday self-documents discarded after fulfilling their purpose. Fidencio Fifield-Perez received his BFA from Memphis College of Art and an MA & MFA from The University of Iowa. He has completed artist residencies at The Studios at MASS MoCA, Ox-Bow, ACRE, Crosstown Arts, and the Galveston Artist Residency, among others. 

Over the last year, Fifield-Perez has begun to reintroduce the figure into his work. This began with a beautifully rendered stone lithograph depicting his chosen family. He said that previous works, “relied on protection through abstraction. Important documents were shrouded and obscured by the depictions of indoor plants. But in new works, the bodies are present, while often furtive, cut, and embossed.”

We are also excited to welcome Teréz Iacovino to moderate a conversation between 2024 McKnight Printmaking Fellows Grace Sippy and Fidencio Fifield-Perez on their practice, work, and other related topics. The audience will also have the opportunity to ask questions of the artists and Iacovino during the conversation. 
About Teréz Iacovino: Teréz Iacovino is the Assistant curator of the Katherine E. Nash Gallery, operated by the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota. Her curatorial practice is continually shaped by the artists she works with, the students she mentors, and her experience as a Latina and first-generation graduate working in academia. Iacovino is the recipient of a Curatorial Research Fellowship Grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and is a 2024 National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Leadership Institute Fellow. Recent publications include “Unpacking the Portmanteau: Locating Diasporican Art” as part of Nuyorican & Diasporican Visual Art: A Critical Anthology (Duke University Press).

Highpoint would like to express our gratitude to the McKnight Foundation for their generous support of this program and Minnesota artists. thank Mike Cloud (visual artist and Associate Professor, Director of Graduate Studies at Northwestern University) and Rachel Skokowski (Director of Galleries and Turner Curator at California State University Chico) for providing their expert insight in reviewing the applications for the 2023 fellowship. We’d also like to thank Miguel Aragon (visual artist and Associate Professor in Printmaking at CUNY College of Staten Island), Emma Nishimura (visual artist and Assistant Professor at OCAD University in Toronto), and Xuxa Rodríguez (Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Curator of Contemporary Art at Duke University) for taking time out of their busy schedules to travel to Minnesota to conduct studio visits with Grace and Fidencio.

The McKnight Printmaking Fellowships are open Minnesota artist/printmakers who are at a career stage that is “beyond emerging” — defined here as artists who demonstrate a sustained level of accomplishment, commitment, and artistic excellence. Fellows are selected on the basis of the artistic merit of their work, and their dedication, interest, and contributions to Minnesota’s arts ecosystem.

Threshold Gallery

On view: January 3 - March 30, 2025

OPening Reception Friday: January 17; 6:30-9pm

Featured in the Threshold gallery is a body of recent prints by Gabi Estrada collectively titled portales. About this work, Gabi offered this:

As my work and I evolve, I am beginning to confront what a portrait can be without the depiction of faces. How can I represent my family in less literal ways that still hold their memory? In response to this, I am thinking about hands as extensions of my people’s identities. Beyond literally holding objects, hands are vessels to hold memories, love, and pain. They are a significant tool in everyone’s life, more intensely used by some than others. The wrinkles, scars, and calluses that comprise a hand make up the portrait of a person, more than the face may ever be able to tell. In a way, portraits of hands can feel more intimate than a person’s face; they are not often paid much attention to by passersby, only those lucky enough to be cared for, prayed for, and given affection by the hands.

I am thinking of these prints as portals. For a variety of reasons, we cannot always physically be with our loved ones and hold their hands. Recording anecdotes allows me to channel their memory and metaphorically hold their hand, along with their memories and histories. 

As you view these prints, I invite you to call back on your own recollections. How do you like to use your hands? What relationship do you have with them? What anecdotes do you have connected to the hands of others?

About the artist: Gabi Estrada is a Mexican-American printmaker, muralist, and arts educator based in Minneapolis, MN. Gabi’s personal artistic practice is rooted in identity and storytelling, celebrating the memory and honoring the existence of their ancestors and elders. They believe in the power that art has to facilitate healing and community building, which they prioritize in their artistic work and pedagogy. Beyond work, they enjoy cooking food for people they love, biking among the trees, and cuddling their cat, Tajín. You can find Gabi on Instagram to see what they’re working on or teaching: @grabadogabi