Since 2010 Hamilton Wood Type has hosted our Visiting Artists Program for printers who have made significant contributions to the craft of letterpress. We're honored to showcase these individuals who serve as ambassadors for the museum, print with our collection and work to advance Hamilton's mission as a working museum.
In 2022, the Museum chose Tom Walker of Ramicack Press as our fifth Visiting Artist. It is a three-year post held by an artist that Hamilton decides has a combination of skills that allow them use of our pressroom and collection to further their work while enhancing the museum’s visibility. Tom’s outstanding abilities as a design practitioner and instructor make him an excellent Visiting Artist to interpret collections and support our mission of education and preservation.
Previous Visiting Artists include:
Jen Farrell
Jen Farrell is first and foremost a letterpress printer. Her Chicago-based studio, Starshaped Press, began in 1999. In her shop she uses a carefully tended collection of historic printing materials to design and produce contemporary projects using handset type. She is well-known for her densely composed pictorial prints built from metal type and type ornaments. “I’m proud that Starshaped has stayed true to the mission of preserving the tools of letterpress printing,” Jen says, “while pushing the craft forward and contributing to the vibrant print community.” Her work has appeared in many books, magazines and blogs, is in many private and library collections, and has been exhibited all over the world.
Jim Sherraden
Jim Sherraden has been an active and popular printmaker since 1980 and his work is collected by individuals and institutions worldwide. His art has toured with the Smithsonian and has been shown at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, as well as multiple venues both in the United States and abroad. He is also an award winning author and lyricist.
Since 1984 Sherraden’s name has been synonymous with Hatch Show Print, the iconic letterpress poster and design shop in Nashville, Tennessee. For his work at Hatch, Sherraden was a recipient of the 2013 Distinguished Artist Award for the state of Tennessee, is the American Advertising Nashville 2013 Silver Medalist, and was awarded the Krider Prize for Creativity by the UCDA in the fall of 2014.
Tracy Honn
Tracy Honn is a printing history educator, curator, and letterpress printer living in Madison Wisconsin. She is retired from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she directed the Silver Buckle Press. In 2020 Honn co-curated Speaking of Book Arts; Oral Histories from UW-Madison held at the Chazen Museum of Art, and also co-founded the Quarantine Public Library. Honn is president of the executive board of directors for Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum (Two Rivers, Wisconsin).
Paul Brown
Paul Brown is retired from Indiana University where he served as a faculty member teaching graphic design and letterpress. His work has been included in Communication Arts and Print magazines and in Graphic Design USA, the Annual of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA). In addition, Brown has received awards from the Chicago Book Clinic, the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, the Miniature Book Society, the American Federation of Arts Design, and the Art Directors Club of Indiana. His work has been exhibited widely including AIGA’s Fifty Books, New York, Art of the Book, Toronto, and Book Arts: Images and Words, Cambridge, Massachusetts.