Phil Hassett
Call & Response
Pinney Studio Residency
May 15 - December 15, 2024
Taking inspiration from jazz and improvisational musical practices, Phil’s residency used letterpress printmaking to explore many levels of interplay and collaboration between text & layout, word and image, letter and ornament, color and form, and artist and community. Over the course of the residency Phil invited patrons into his exploratory processes.
From buttons to posters, patrons explored layering, iterative collaboration, and ways that the rigid grids of letterpress type can be used as a foundation for both carefully planned and improvisational prints. We experimented with the use of letters to create images and the use of ornaments to create letterforms, while thinking about how communities shape words and stories and how words and stories shape communities.
Phil Hassett is a local letterpress printer living in Madison, WI, where he maintains a small collection of historic printing presses and a growing collection of historic and modern printing type. A lifelong musician, he named his print studio Washboard Press because of the sound one of his presses makes, and because he enjoys doing by hand what is now more usually done in a more automated way.
See Phil’s residency photos here!
Return to the residency archive.
Phil facilitated an ongoing project titled What is a Word for Now?
He asked: Is anyone else feeling like there’s just a lot of everything right now? He invited people to share a single word for now, a word for this time. The word could be a feeling, or a mood, or a vibe. It could be a word participants needed to be reminded of or a word they wanted to remind other people of. It could be a word describing what folks are noticing right now, or what they’re are wanting to make happen.
Community members helped Phil print this collection of words during Open Studios at Pinney
This unique residency was made possible with a gift from Madison Public Library Foundation, the Friends of Pinney Library, and funding from the Pinney Library Capital Campaign.
