By Megan O’Connell, Signal-Return

Signal-Return, a dynamic new letterpress storefront in Eastern Market, Detroit, is progressing at full tilt with an array of events, workshops, and partnerships, along with a growing list of clients and commissions. The inaugural exhibition, BEANS IN ART AND VICE VERSA, features objects, scrolls, books, and suites of prints by Alison Knowles. The artist read poetry and performed Loose Pages at the opening reception last month [see Knight Arts blog post “In Fluxus I Trust.”]

The space hosted the premiere of two films focusing on Detroit: 9 Businesses, a 4exit4 Production and William Foster is a Good Man, produced by Detroit Journal. Musical guest Oak Bones performed post-screening while guests nibbled on Supinos pizza and Love’s pies–both of which are featured in 9 Businesses, along with Signal-Return, of course. View the trailer above. The space, its staff, and its offerings have been reported on by DC3 Speakers Bureau, WDET, The Huffington Post, W Magazine, Faces of Detroit at the DSO, Model D, The Detroit Hub, and CBS radio, amongst others.

Workshops in ephemera making, bookbinding, and letterpress printing attract participants of all ages and skill levels to the space. The Sunday evening workshops, SALON, BOOK + BREAD, connect area creatives and entrepreneurs in a convivial setting. Each participant yields a hand-bound journal and leaves with a renewed sense of possibility about what can happen here.

Area colleges and Signal-Return co-create projects, such as printed matter for the upcoming A.A. Taubman retrospective, Wayne State University. Signal-Return also partners with national and international groups, such as Expodium, an arts organization in the Netherlands. The two entities are working to produce a publication of select photographs and journal entries by a Dutch historian who resided in Detroit last fall paired with those of his father, an AFS exchange student who happened to live in the city during the 1964-5 schoolyear. This letterpress edition, tracing compelling relationships between past and present, will soon be released at a lecture in Utrecht, then circulated in major European cities.

And, finally, speaking of circulating, Signal-Return just launched a successful pop-up store in conjunction with the Geologic Turn symposium at the University of Michigan.