Ham at 20 is a collaborative poster project celebrating the twentieth anniversary of The Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum. For each month of 2019, a new poster (or two!) will be released via the Hamilton website shop in an edition of 50; 25 will be reserved for year-end portfolios that include all prints. The posters are being created by a roster of accomplished letterpress printers and promising up-and-comers starting in the field.
Martin Mazorra
Martin Mazorra is a Brooklyn based artist originally from West Virginia. He works chiefly in the medium of woodcut and letterpress, in a range of scales from small books, prints on paper, prints on canvas, to site-specific print-based installations. He is the founder of Cannonball Press, formed in New York in 1999.
Born in Morgantown, WV, 1972. Martin has a BFA from West Virginia University 1994 and an MFA from The American University 1996. Currently, Martin teaches at Pratt Institute and Parson's School of Design in New York City. He has been invited to speak at distinguished institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and has been a visiting artist at numerous universities and colleges nationally and internationally. He has been the recipient of a NYFA Fellowship in Printmaking, Drawing and Artist Books, a United States Artists Ford Foundation Fellow, and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio grant. His work is in the collections of the Yale Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Taubman Museum, the Fort Wayne Museum of art, and others.
What Hamilton means to me:
I work chiefly in the medium of printmaking, specifically woodcut. I have chosen woodcut for its tradition of social satire, its immediacy, and its history as a medium in the service of populist communication. My woodcut images are often combined with hand-drawn and hand-carved typography, or use my modest collection of modular wood and metal type, and printed on a letterpress. Wooden type has a reciprocal appeal; It is a medium intended to be disseminated in the public domain, it has a handmade, tactile quality, references history, popular culture, and fortifies the significance of the accompanying hand-hewn imagery.
In May of 2018, I visited the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum. The living museum opportunity provided me with unique insight into the history and manufacturing process of tools that I rely on to make my artwork. In addition to the collections of Hamilton’s wood type and manufacturing equipment, the museums working press rooms, exhibitions of vintage prints, and contemporary print work contextualizes the vital role Hamilton wood type has played and continues to play in the graphic arts.
