Hello World!

Welcome to the brand new RisoLAB website! To mark five years in existence, we decided that it was time that we had a site that truly matched the RisoLAB’s spirit, graphic sensibility, and community. We are immensely grateful to Sean Byrne, Mike McCarron, Tim McMahon, Rob Reed, and the rest of the team at 1Trick Pony for their brilliant development and design skills. 1TP worked closely with the RisoLAB to develop this site from scratch, after pouring over a care package of vivid and smudgy Riso-printed ephemera that we sent them. Our co-founder and faculty member Panayiotis Terzis provided the textures, assets, and printer’s marks you see throughout the site, which are brilliantly deployed as headers, footers, graphics, and filters across this platform.

For the first time ever, we have a comprehensive list of previous Artists-in-Residence, bios of our Faculty and Staff, and a massive gallery of prints from our archive of student, faculty, and artist-in-residence work, which will be continually added to. Click around and explore, and if you’re curious about becoming a part of our ever growing community, check out our online course offerings-round two of our classes start in less than two weeks!

As far as the RisoLAB itself is concerned, you may be aware that our physical space has been shut down since March 11th of this year, on the eve of the New York City lockdown in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. This has been a challenging time for our staff and the RisoLAB itself, as Risograph printing itself is by definition a hands-on, physical printing experience, and printing in our Lab is collaborative, social. We miss our students and printers, and hope to be able to re-open soon.

In the meantime, we have been busy working on this site, archiving our prints and zines produced at the Lab, and preparing a number of new initiatives. Our Faculty rallied and developed the RisoLAB Remote Series of online courses for the summer of 2020, with classes taught by Wren McDonald and Panayiotis Terzis. We had no idea if analog printing classes would work in the digital space, but they were a wild success and we’re thrilled to be offering them again this fall and into the winter.

The RisoLAB staff regained access to our space in late August, and since then we’ve been rehabilitating our print drums and preparing publications of student work created by RisoLAB community during the course of the pandemic. We’re excited to announce some other big news very soon, so check back for future updates!

-Pan