Visiting Artist Workshop: Low-tech Screen Print Techniques with Aaron S. Coleman

Monday through Thursday: September 28 - October 1, 6-9 pm

Artist Aaron S. Coleman believes screen printing is the most versatile of all printmaking processes — and he has the stories to prove it. In his classes, a student once screen printed an image of a Woolly Mammoth onto a block of ice and watched it melt away. Another printed butter onto bread and watched the image emerge through the heat of a toaster. If it's liquid, it can be pushed through a screen. If it's flat, it can be printed on.

Yet for all its versatility, screen printing has a reputation for being inaccessible — photographic emulsion, digital transparencies, exposure units, scoop coaters, washout booths. The equipment list alone is enough to intimidate a beginner.

Aaron's workshop throws all of that out the window.

Through DIY, low-tech, and budget-friendly methods, Aaron will guide students in transforming screen printing into something fluid, immediate, and surprisingly painterly. Expect to explore direct-to-screen mark making, watercolor techniques, water-soluble crayons, cut paper stencils, tape-outs, and more. Aaron will also introduce students to non-traditional surfaces — old photographs, magazine pages, thrifted fabrics, and other found materials — where the substrate itself becomes part of the work, and the screen print becomes a conceptual object.

Bring what you have. Aaron will make it work.

No experience necessary. Just show up curious and leave eager to experiment.

About the instructor: Aaron is a multi-disciplinary artist, Associate Professor and Kenneth E. Tyler Endowed Chair at the Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis. He received his MFA from Northern Illinois University in 2013. Aaron has participated in international residencies and exhibitions and has received numerous awards for his work in printmaking, sculpture and installation including 2021 Black Box Press Foundation’s Art as Activism Grant. He was nominated for a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship for three consecutive years as was a semi-finalist in 2022 and 2024. In 2023 he was the recipient of the New Voices Fellowship from the International Print Center New York. Aaron is an Indy Arts Council 2026 Dehaan Artist of Distinction. His mixed media assemblages are featured in the 2024 Midwest volume of New American Paintings. His work can be found in the collections of The Janet Turner Print Museum, the Ino-cho Paper Museum in Kochi, Japan, The National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, The Yekaterinburg Museum of Art in Yekaterinburg, Russia, the National Library of France, and the Artist Printmaker and Photographer Research Archive among many other public and private collections. He is a contributing author and artist to the forthcoming Routledge Handbook on Critical Arts-Based Research. Aaron has presented his research in over 50 public lectures in universities and museums across the country and has lead workshops at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Penland School of Crafts, Frogman’s Print and Paper Workshop.

Ages: 18+
$315 / $252 members