By Ryan Schirmang, Signal-Return Press

Summer is just beginning to break, and at Signal-Return in Detroit’s Eastern Market, we have all hands on deck and all irons in the fire. I don’t recall market crowds ever being this big, this early in the season. It’s really exciting. With several new faces around the market (Devrie’s Cheese, Detroit Mercantile, and others), things are abuzz with change.

At Signal-Return, we’ve recently experienced some changes as well, as many start-ups do. We had to part ways with some personnel, which is never easy, but through these changes, several new opportunities have opened up for us in the larger print + design community. What is that saying… ‘when a window closes another door opens’? This certainly looks to be true in our case.

We just rolled out our workshop schedule for May + June and it includes offerings from our best and broadest range of teachers to date. Many of the biggest names in the wider print community are teaching. Here’s a sample of their amazing work:

Our Letterpress Basics course just ran last night, taught by Bryan Baker. The session sold-out fast at the affordable price of $75. Bryan has nine years under his belt designing and pulling prints at one of the busiest print shops in the country (Yee Haw in Knoxville, TN). He’s also taught loads of classes in New York, in Tennessee, and elsewhere, and now he’s adding Detroit to that list. We’re incredibly honored and excited to have him here.

The one-man-print-shop-dynamo known as Don Kilpatrick is planning to teach students what he knows about Bold Broadsides. He chairs the Illustration Department at CCS and helped revive the letterpress studio at that college into one of the busiest classrooms on that campus. This man even makes his own fonts. Enough said.

Liz Kerner will be teaching the computer generation of designers how to letterpress print their digital designs; she has taught this class many times in the past and is a pro at navigating the tips and tricks necessary for getting a good clean run. Liz operates her own letterpress boutique out of a carriage house on Canfield Street, suitably called the Carriage House Press. On July 3, Liz will also be teaching a section of Letterpress Basics to first-timers, which focuses on personal calling cards.

A variety of basic bookbinding techniques will be taught by Lynne Avadenka this Saturday at Signal-Return; the next night she takes the stage at the Detroit Institute of Arts to lecture about her recent Fellowship at the American Academy in Jerusalem. Lynne is one of the most well respected names in printmaking around, and those who have signed up for her class this weekend will be learning from one of the greats.

We’ve also seen our storefront fill up with work in the past few weeks. Don Kilpatrick’s ‘Nothing Stops Detroit’ poster was recently featured on Design Sponge, and we have a run of nearly one hundred on hand. A brand new member of Signal-Return who prints under the moniker Valdi printed a beautiful, crisp three-color print for Flower Day in Eastern Market that has been flying off the shelves. Valdi graduated from CCS two years ago and his new gig at Signal-Return is one of the main reasons he’s able to stick around Detroit. Keeping good talent here in town. We love that!

Also, beautiful hand-pulled screen prints from IScreenYouScreen out of Cadillac, Michigan, empowering works about farming and agriculture from Joe Wirtheim of Victory Gardens of Tomorrow (he just paid us a visit last weekend), and lots more are on hand. And someone wandered through with some old burlesque printing plates which turned out to be an exciting printing project, we’ve got some of those tucked away somewhere if you ask.

If you haven’t been down to Signal-Return lately, come take a look for yourself. Or visit our Tumblr site, we post an image every day we’re open, so there’s lots to troll through.

What else? We have an evening of poetry and fiction coming up next Tuesday June 5, starting at 7pm with readings by Kresge Arts Fellow Lynn Crawford and noted New York poet John Yau. This promises to be a gorgeous event, with light fare and libation and, possibly, dancing in the streets? Why not, it’s summertime.

Also, if you haven’t laid eyes on M1/DTW’s one hundred-plus pieces of work currently exhibited in our space, come on by before June 13th.  Oh yeah, and speaking of M1-DTW and our space, did you happen to catch the Atlantic Cities video that used Signal-Return as a backdrop? That was flattering.

Finally, part of our mission is to be a community-minded letterpress shop. To that end, we have a workshop with U of M students coming up, we have started planning a session with high school students from Cesar Chavez High School in Southwest Detroit. Also, some of the biggest design and advertising agencies across the region are planning to step away from their desks for a day and come pull prints with us.

Whew! This has been quite a mouthful, so thanks for sticking it out until the end. We’re doing out best to cook everything perfectly, but if there’s something you’d like more clarity on, or another project you’d like to throw on our plate- send us a line at [email protected]. We’ll do our best. Thanks!

For more info, please follow us on:

• signalreturnpress.org
• facebook.com/SignalReturn
• twitter.com/#/signalreturn
• signalreturnpress.tumblr.com/