Minnesota Center for Book Arts

Transform images before your very eyes 👀 with visiting teaching artist Keri Miki-Lani Schroeder! In this in-person workshop, make assorted paper toys that use transparencies and sliding panels to hide and reveal content. 🪄✨ Visit the Workshops link in our bio to sign up by 8AM CT on Saturday, May 30th. Swipe to learn more about Keri. We are thrilled to have her in our studios this summer!

If you're in Rice County on June 6, join us and make your own watercolor sketchbook at the Rice County Historical Society with India Johnson! The workshop runs 1-3pm.

Register by calling or emailing Rice County Historical Society:
507-332-2121 or [email protected]
$20 for RCHS and MCBA members, $25 for non-members

For this workshop, you'll turn a single piece of art paper into a 24-page sketchbook, complete with a pencil holder and pocket. You will be able to easily recreate this project at home to make your own notebooks to use or gift. All materials are provided, but bring watercolors and a brush–if you have them–to decorate the cover.

India Johnson is half of Late Night Copies Press, a micropress publishing zines, and directs the Workshop for Independent Publishing in Minneapolis.

Snippets of Delia Touché‘s new exhibition, Phiyá Kithí - To Make a New Camp for Oneself. Delia is a Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota and Assiniboine printmaker, bookmaker, and fiber artists based in the Midwest. A citizen of Spirit Lake Nation, their multidisciplinary practice explores the estranged and complex relationship they hold with their Indigenous identity, drawing from familial archives, Dakota and Assiniboine cultural frameworks, Native nuances, diaspora, wry humor, and pop culture.

This amazing exhibition is on view now in our Outlook Gallery. Viewable any time from Washington Ave and from inside our Shop any time the Shop is open.

🎶 It's membership May at MCBA. Become a member today! 🎶

Becoming a member is quick and easy with a variety of benefits. Members save BIG on MCBA Shop retail items and workshops. Starting as low as $5.00 a month, you too can join MCBA's special family of supporters.

Learn more about memberships at mnbookarts.org/memberships.

There’s still a few more weeks to apply to the MCBA Prize!! 🏆 This is our international biannual award that honors outstanding new artists’ books. We are accepting applications until May 31st. One winner will receive a $2,000 cash prize, four finalists will receive a $500 cash prize, and all semi-finalists will appear in an exhibition in our Main Gallery. All entries will appear and be archived on our NEW and improved website, mcbaprize.org.

Pictured is one of our 2024 semi-finalists, Angelica Ong, with her book Garden of Haikus.

MCBA offices, gallery, and retail shop will close at 2pm today so that staff can participate in the Minneapolis May Day March (4:30pm at Chicago and Lake) or have additional rest and time with their community as we move into May Day weekend after a long and difficult winter.

We’re setting the type, pulling the press, and making one final impression on this fiscal year…but we need your help to finish the print run.

Our fiscal year ends at midnight tonight, and we need your help. Please donate if you can so that we can finish the year strong. 💪🏼
https://bit.ly/49j6weA

Interested in photography, art intake, and web management? 📸 Apply for our MCBA Prize and Shop Admin Internship! Join our team from July through September 2026 to assist with photographing Prize work, supporting online product posting, and handling artwork intake. Spend 8-10 hours a week primarily at MCBA with some remote work. This opportunity includes a $1,000 stipend and a one-year membership at MCBA! Read more about the role and apply here: https://mnbookarts.org/employment
The deadline to apply is Sunday, May 31, at 11:59pm CT. ⏰

Erica Spitzer Rasmussen is retiring from Metro State and her retrospective exhibition reception is this Thursday! Erica is an amazing person, artist, and one of our incredibly talented teaching artists.

When asked what advice she would have given herself 30 years ago when she started her career, her response was that she wished she had taken classes with Karen Wirth.

Go check out her show, and don’t forget to look for her classes at MCBA this summer. Our teaching artist community is legendary. Congrats, Erica!

🎉 👏 We're excited to celebrate our Haiku Poetry winner, Marique B. Moss! Last week, MCBA staff and studio fellows hand-set Marique’s poem with lead type, and then letterpress printed it in our studios. In honor of Earth Day, we’ll be giving away prints of the poem today in the Shop (while supplies last). Swing by to grab your own copy!! All online orders placed today will also include a complementary print.

"Seeing my sweetgrass poke through makes me so happy. It’s coming back from where it’s always been. It knows what to do. It feels like blood memory, something ancestral. That’s what this piece holds.”

Marique is an Afro-Indigenous writer and educator from Minneapolis and an enrolled member of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation. She is the author of Sweetgrass and Soul Food: A Memoir in Poems, which draws on lived experience, identity, and memory with honesty, humor, and heart.