Turn-Based Press

Address:  100 NE 11th ST, Miami, FL, 33132
Contact (name):  Kathleen Hudspeth, Thom Wheeler Castillo, Adler Guerrier
Email: KH@turnbasedpress, info@turnbasedpress, ag@turnbasedpress
Website: turnbasedpress.com
Open Hours: By appointment only through January, hours will be set for February. 

How is the project operated?
Turn-Based Press is a for-profit, artist-run entity. 

How long has it been in existence?
TBP has been in the Downtown Art House for two and a half years. 

What was your motivation?
To promote print and book arts culture, to provide a non-academic workshop environment for people to both learn how to print and have access to printmaking equipment, and to encourage the ability of artists to support themselves. 

Number of organizers/responsible persons of the project.
Three: Kathleen Hudspeth, Founder and Co-Director; Thom Wheeler Castillo, Co-Director; Adler Guerrier, all-around supporter and worker. 

How are programs funded?
At the moment, it is privately funded, but the start-up and some programming have been supported by grants from the Knight Foundation and the Miami Downtown Development Authority.  The next step will be for it to be funded by membership, workshops and TBP Editions. 

Who is responsible for the programming?
The Directors are responsible for all programming. 

Number and average duration of exhibitions/events per year.
10; duration varies. 

What kind of events are usually organized?
Exhibitions focusing on works on paper, prints and artists’ books, artist and author presentations, works-on-paper sales and pop-up shops (from which we take no commission or fee from the artist-vendors), tours, demonstrations and workshops. 

How is your programming determined?
The focus of the programming is to foster print and book arts culture in Miami—all programming decisions proceed from that starting point. 

Do you accept proposals/submissions?
We have; we don’t have a formal submittal or proposal process given that the staff is so small. 

What is your artistic/curatorial approach?
Non-hierarchical inclusivity with a focus on works original to print or book arts media.  In terms of media, that means works made not as reproductive artworks, in which a print is made to recreate an original created in some other medium (including digital), but works which use the unique language and techniques of print or book arts as an original voice.  In terms of genre, it means that we welcome sequential art, graphic art, narrative art and illustration just as much as fine and contemporary art.  In terms of artists it means that we will show students and professional artists, represented and non-represented artists alongside each other. Though it is a for-profit, artist-run space, the attitude is more one of a workshop environment despite the emphasis we give to exhibition. 

What’s working? What’s not working?
Memberships are not yet working as anticipated — after some beta-membership trials, we’ve discovered that we’re going to have revamp our approach to membership; even among those who claim experience with a printmaking technique, we’ve realized that we’ll have to impose standardization upon production methods. Individually, we might welcome everyone’s idiosyncratic method of production, set-up or clean-up, but institutionally and practically, it can be a time-management and materials supply disaster.   We’ll be developing some required training sessions at the very least, though we’re also discussing other strategies.

What is working is our large, patient and active supporter base. We’ve reached out to share with our community the resources that we currently have, we’ve connected previously disparate institutional printmaking micro-communities, and we’ve reached out to other artists elsewhere in the country.  We’re also very proud of giving sequential art and graphic novels a louder voice through our programming—we brought the Sequential Artist Workshop, a free-standing comic art school located in Gainesville, FL, down for a workshop during Downtown Art Days, our previous exhibition, Tell It To My Face, which focused on narrative and sequential imagery will be traveling, and we’ve featured artist and author-initiated publications that range from copy-machine zines to hand-made pop-up books to trade publications that were the result of a collaboration with an author a musician and an artist, as in the case of The Good Inn, for which we had a book launch featuring a reading with one of the authors. 

What kind of role do you hope to play in your local art scene or community?
We aim to be the home-away-from-home for local printmakers and a welcoming space for those who specialize in artists’ books and works-on-paper.  At the outset of Turn-Based Press as an idea, one of the goals was to be a post-academic printshop (providing access to equipment for those who had already been well-trained but who could no-longer use their training institution’s facilities), however, since then, academic printmaking instruction locally has become an odd pastiche—some schools are adding courses, others are reducing the number of courses, etc.  Consequently, we have the opportunity to supplant education that was previously more the domain of local colleges and universities—we can offer instruction in techniques they aren’t committing resources towards, and also offer technique-specific workshops. 

What idea are you most excited about for the future?
We’re probably most excited about launching public memberships and also our upcoming foray into organizing a national print exchange to accompany our current exhibition, titled Print Exchange, an exhibition that explores the relationship between printmakers and the traditional print exchange—an egalitarian means of sharing work and a rite of passage for all who seriously study printmaking.

 Another exciting Spring event is the Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, for which we’re planning to be a satellite site during International Womens’ Day weekend.

We’ll also cop to being on the nerdy side and admit to being very excited as well about simply tweaking the functionality of the production facilities.  Already, the production area has a good feel to it—it’s a nice space to be in and to work, but there are some essential changes that will improve it even more.