Prints on Ice
Highpoint’s semiannual co-op exhibition

Exhibition on view: December 12, 2025 - January 24, 2026

Opening Reception: December 12; 6:30 - 9pm

SPECIAL OPENING WEEKEND SALE - Friday and Saturday, December 12 and 13

20% discount on all co-op member work!

Please join us for Prints on Ice 2025, an exhibition celebrating the work of 35 talented printmakers from Highpoint’s artist cooperative printshop. Prints on Ice 2025 is our 47th co-op member exhibition(!) and will feature prints and objects that incorporate all your favorites; lithography, screenprinting, relief, intaglio, monotype, and more! Whether you (or the person your shopping for) have tastes that tend toward realism or abstraction, color or grayscale; you’l find something in this exhibition to satisfy those preferences. In addition to the 67 works on the wall, there will be many more than that available in our shrink-wrap bins- packaged and ready to go!

Join us at the opening reception where you’ll be able to mingle with the artists and snag some original artwork to deck your halls at a great price (20% off). The opening weekend sale extends through our gallery hours Saturday (12-4pm) as well.

Hot Off the Press
Highpoint’s semiannual co-op exhibition

Exhibition on view: August 8 - September 27

Opening Reception: August 8; 6:30 - 9pm

SPECIAL OPENING WEEKEND SALE - 20% discount on all co-op member work!

Friday and Saturday, August 8 and 9

Hot Off the Press 2025 is Highpoint’s largest ever co-op member exhibition with 43 artists participating! This means even more of the EVERYTHING that a co-op show already includes. Visitors can expect to see a vast array of techniques and imagery. Stylized landscapes, faithfully-rendered figurations, Gestural abstraction and so much more will be included in this exhibition.

Exhibition on view: June 13 - August 2, 2025

Opening Reception: Friday, June 13, 6:30 - 9pm

remarks will begin at approximately 7pm

Highpoint is pleased to announce the 2024-25 Jerome Early Career Printmakers Residency Exhibition. The exhibition features work created by this years’ residents—Nancy Ariza, Conor McGrann, and Emma Ulen-Klees—over the last nine months. The three artists have been hard at work since September, pushing boundaries and exploring innovative approaches to printmaking. The culminating exhibition will showcase their creative growth and offer a glimpse into the vibrant future of contemporary printmaking.

It was a very fruitful year for Emma Ulen-Klees, Conor McGrann, and Nancy Ariza. A shared trait of these three artists is the abundance of their practice. Each of them is generative, prolific, and possessed of a work ethic which motivates them toward exhaustive exploration of their ideas and themes. Another shared trait would be their technical prowess, the exhibited work demonstrates remarkable skill

Visually though the similarities are few, it’s unlikely that any gallery visitors mistook the authorship of any of the works. The monochromatic treatment of Emma Ulen-Klees de-bossments showcase the painstaking nature of her craft (stencils cut by hand) while honoring the delicate detail of the subjects she records (aged plant specimens). This series beautifully blends the artists’ hand with majesty of nature.

She says, "These past few months the studio has become crowded with the silhouettes of an incredible array of leaves, stems, tangled roots, and feathery blossoms.  Part of my series archiving rare or extinct plants through blind de-bossings, I look forward to giving each of these specimens space to breathe during the upcoming Jerome Exhibition. As shadows of absent species, this work denies easy reproduction, so I am grateful for the opportunity to share it in person with the Highpoint community.”

Conor McGrann is relatively new to the Twin Cities. His change of environment and new role as a father have been informing his work, albeit in a more analytical manner. Conor’s terrestrial studies juxtapose the organic footprint of actual watersheds with the mechanized lines of a plotter machine. The viewer is rewarded when they get in close to the work, what read from a distance as largely natural in design is uniformly rectilinear. 

Conor says: “In my time as a Jerome Resident I have been utilizing publicly available geographic datasets of Minnesota wetlands. Through the use of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) software, I have coded, filtered, and manipulated the data, dropping unwanted information and obscuring it from its original didactic intent. I then exported the data as a vector file and once again filtered, manipulated, and cleaned the data so that I could output it through a plotting machine. This took the form of vinyl intaglio grounds to etch plates, direct cutting to create collagraph plates, and building my own custom instrument holder in order to hold pens to make drawings, and using etching needles to plot directly onto intaglio plates. I have researched and implemented all these techniques to make a body of work that speaks towards climate/parental anxiety, distrust in systems and technology, and my distaste with our culture’s comfort with the status quo.”

The geometric patterns that inspired Nancy Ariza’s prints come from piteado, a traditional Mexican embroidery technique used to decorate leather goods. Nancy, a descendant of a piteado artisan, honors and continues her family's cultural legacy through this body of work. Nancy utilized certain traditional pigments (such as cochineal) as colorants along with embroidery, another time-affirmed technique. At the same time Nancy’s work has roots in traditional techniques and materials, her execution of the images was novel and contemporary. 

Nancy offered this about her process: “Over the past few months, I have continued exploring the intersection of woodcut, screenprinting, alternative printmaking processes, and natural pigments, primarily cochineal and quebracho. New elements such as embroidery, hole punching, and chine collé have also become part of this series, deepening my personal understanding and connection to material and process. These various processes take life as investigations of geometric patterns rooted in my Mexican heritage, and engage broader themes of migration, language, gender, and craft. 

The Jerome Residency has been instrumental in helping me solidify my artistic voice, embrace risk-taking in the studio, and build confidence in my expansive printmaking toolkit. I am deeply grateful for the experience and support.”

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Emma Ulen-Klees is a multidisciplinary artist and writer whose work centers the fragmentation and transformation of landscape. Her individual but interconnected projects come ogether to mourn extinction and absence, magnify the accumulation of plastics, and interrogate the distortionary nature of western cartography, while still allowing for the beauty and awe vital to emotional relationships to place. Ulen-Klees earned a Printmaking BFA from California College of the Arts (2014), and MFA from Cornell University (2020). Past awards include the Ralls Scholarship in Painting, Yozo Hamaguchi Scholarship in Printmaking, as well as the Kala Art Institute Emerging Artist Residency. She has exhibited at the Missoula Art Museum (Missoula, MT), Zolla/ Lieberman Gallery (Chicago, IL), Jack Hanley Gallery New York, NY), Safe Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Anglim Gilbert Gallery (San Francisco, CA) as well as in Oakland, Berkeley, CA, and Ithaca, NY. Internationally she has exhibited in Osaka, Japan and Hjalteyri, Iceland.

Nancy Ariza is a Mexican American printmaker, educator, and arts administrator. In her studio practice, Ariza explores intergenerational relationships, storytelling, and memory as a way to understand and honor her Mexican heritage. Often working in woodcut and screenprinting, her artwork combines traditional and experimental printmaking techniques. Ariza has exhibited across the United States in group shows at Blanc Gallery in Chicago, IL; Janet Turner Print Museum at California State University in Chico, CA; Klemm Gallery at Siena Heights University in Adrian, MI; among others. She is also the founder of Amilado Press, a collaborative print studio in Minnesota.

Conor McGrann is an artist that makes things usually on paper, living and producing work in St. Paul, MN. He is the Digital Studio Arts Technician at Carleton College in Northfield, MN, where he maintains the printshop and photolab and facilitates the use of digital and analog interactions for faculty, staff, and students in the Art & Art History Department.

In his own work Conor has a particular interest in the translation errors and systemic breakdowns that occur when filtering work between digital and analog production methods. His work is focused on the relationship between political systems, geography, the built environment, sense of place, and culture. He received his MFA in May 2021 from the University of Tennessee Knoxville, and his BFA in printmaking from Syracuse University in 2009.

Special thanks to the panelists for the 2024-2025 Jerome Early career Printmakers Residency Luis Fitch and Bo Young An! Luis and Bo took on the exceedingly difficult task of selecting three artists from an outstanding pool of applicants. Thanks are also due to Alex Beaumont, Jim Clark (visit forthcoming) and once again, Luis and Bo, for conducting critiques with the residents at various times during the residency year.

Finally, thank you to the Jerome Foundation for their continued support of this important program for early career artists!