This week Miranda speaks with Christie Tirado, a first-generation Mexican American artist, educator, and third-year MFA candidate at UW–Madison.

They talk about leaving a stable teaching career to go back to grad school, building community wherever you land, and how labor, in the field, in the kitchen, and in the studio, becomes an archive. Plus: the print gods, when to walk away after two messed-up prints, and why you should absolutely pair printmaking with salsa dancing whenever possible.

Christie's Website

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We are delighted to kick off our eighth season of the Hello, Print Friend podcast!

This week Miranda speaks with Shanna Strauss, a Tanzanian American mixed media artist and printmaker based in Oakland, California, and a faculty member at California College of the Arts. They talk about the winding road that led her back to art and how printmaking became not just a medium, but a community, a lineage, and a way of carrying history forward.

They get into Strauss' early inspiration from Charlotte O’Neal’s studio in Tanzania, what she learned from organizing and social justice work in Quebec, and how mentorship connects her to a larger printmaking family tree, all the way back through traditions of resistance print. As well as Beekeeping. Ancestors. And a new body of work Shauna’s beginning around Tanzanian kanga cloth.

Shanna Strauss's website

Shanna Strauss instagram

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This week’s episode is one I’ve been looking forward to for a long time, and if you are someone trying to make a life in the arts right now this is going to be required listening.

My guest is Justin Anthony, co-founder of Artwork Archive – the platform so many of you already use to track your work, your collectors, your exhibitions, and the business side of your practice.

And we’re having this conversation now because, let’s be honest, the art market feels… chilly. A little frigid, even. Many artists who were used to regular sales are seeing things slow down. Institutions with “arts” in their name are watching their budgets get slashed. Long-standing galleries are closing their doors. It can start to feel like the walls are closing in.

But this is not an hour of doom and gloom. This conversation is about what you can do right now – this week, this month, over the next year – to support your career so when the market does bounce back you’re going to be even better off than before.

Justin shares what he’s hearing from art consultants around the world – the people who quietly place art in some of the largest public and private collection. We get into how they actually find artists, what makes them choose to work with someone again and again, and why professionalism, clear communication, and a cohesive story around your work are just as important as the work itself.

We also talk about relationships in the broadest sense: not just customer-relationship management, but relationship management. Your peers, your local art organizations, the artist who recommended you for that show, the collector who bought that small print five years ago and still thinks about it every morning when they walk past it on the way to make coffee.

There’s so much in here and I know you’re going to get a lot of out of it. So give it a listen and share it with a print friend.

Artwork Archive

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Hello, Print Friend Residency in Chiang Mai, Thailand

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Hello, Print Friend MERCH

Hello, Print Friend WEBSITE

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