The Communication Station is now on it’s 33rd iteration; THE MOBILE REMOTE COMMUNICATiON STATION. The Communication Station is designed to help folks talk AND listen to each other. Right now it’s mission during these strange times is to connect people to the communities and world of people we can’t see face to face. As ofter as we can we load up the truck and head out to connect with folks. We take your messages and put them in front of people! Check out our INSTAGRAM FEED for the latest tours!

The Automat Exchange Machine

(2018–)

Every object tells a story. What story do you want to share with us? The Automat Exchange Machine was created to provide human beings the opportunity to give and receive objects & stories with one another. Each object received is evaluated by the Automat. Based on a complex calculation, the Automat retrieves an object from its catalog and exchanges it in return. Like visiting the oracle, it is up to the participant to divine the ultimate correlation between the two.

From Trash to Treasure – A Portrait of Brown’s Creek

(2019)

At Isle of Printing, we think that the activity of making art can concretely link people, ideas, and places together.

This piece you see before you is a portrait of Brown’s Creek, one of Nashville’s many urban waterways. If you look closely, you will notice that the key image of this piece was created with small stamps of objects we found in our local streams. It is a portrait of the place made from objects and stories found by us in those same spots!

We stamped this portrait over the grand opening weekend of Patagonia Nashville, during which we invited visitors to make their own smaller works of art with the same stamps. While some of the objects that we collected are naturally occurring, some of them are most definitely not! Selected objects, as well as stories and facts about how these objects relate to the world around us, can be found near the mural.

May 20th 2017

The All Are Welcome Project

At the Downtown Public Library

Isle of Printing in collaboration with Andrew Arehart

The All Are Welcome Project: An opportunity to connect members of our native-born and immigrant and refugee communities.   Get yourself a shirt and make yourself a friend!

On May 20th, 2017 -  IOP launched the All are Welcome Project V1. at the Main Branch of the Nashville Public Library

IOP and our partners believe that our city is a welcoming place and we wanted to demonstrate  that fact as well as  give folks from our varied communities a concrete opportunity to meet each to discuss the idea of Welcome together.    

It was a truly amazing experience!  

We look forward to other opportunities to bring the All Are Welcome Project into our community.  Please let us know if you’d like to be a part of the process or would like more information!  

It takes a village to build a community!

Shirts and poster will be available for purchase soon.

Thanks to all of our Immigrant ambassadors, civic partners, and our production volunteers for making this whole idea possible.

Special thanks to Benjamin Sohr for your contribution to the production costs.  

The All Are Welcome Project: An opportunity for face to face communication between members of Nashville's native-born and immigrant and refugee communities. Visitors to the project  can meet a member of an ambassador of our city's foreign-born communities to talk about the experience of being welcome and welcoming others. While they are talking, event staff will print and provide free t-shirts with the word WELCOME in Somali, Kurdish, Arabic, Spanish and other immigrant languages which the visitor then takes home to wear out into the community, sharing a message of welcome to those who can read it and inviting questions from those who can't.

Vision + Care + Craft + Love = Amazing!

In a world where both kindness and avarice swirl around our hearts and commonly-traded coin whispers good and evil into our ears, we at Isle of Printing present a novel alternative that we hope might illuminate the mystery of the collective experiment and dream we call money.

Kindred spirits and speculators alike, please join us in welcoming Bryce Bucks onto the whirling dance floor of capitalism.    A currency based on the value of the things we believe in, Bryce Bucks are available for purchase and exchange at select locations in the Greater Pie Town area and beyond.  Isle of Printing is pleased to offer the service of central repository, mint, exchange and sales of this new art-like currency at various times and locations throughout the coming months while our permanent Currency Exchange is being built.

Exchange rates change daily and include but are not limited to: secrets, acts of kindness, and various more commonly available hard currencies.   

Many desirable goods and services will henceforth only be offered in this new artistic scrip. We also invite all our imaginative and entrepreneurial constituents to consider joining us in such arrangements.   We ask you endeavor to find out what can’t you procure with this new idea. And, we hope to find out where it might go once released from our hands.

Join us and help make the world a better place by investing in kindness.

Welcome to the World's Largest Letterpress Origami art instillation at Barista Parlor Golden Sound - Nashville, TN.

Analog Canstallation

We are inviting Nashvillians to participate in a public art project. The goal of which is to create a portrait of Nashville through a visual conversation of portraits made by its citizens. For one year the Our Town mobile cart will travel around Davidson county helping people to create their own self-portraits for the project.

Many of these portraits will be turned into letterpress prints at our shop – Isle of Printing. These prints will then be traded out to other people who subsequently make a portrait with us on the cart.

Make a portrait – take a print!

As the project progresses, the images will be collected on the Our Town website and in a year used as a group to help create a piece of public art for our city. Art for Nashville made by Nashville. Thanks for your support and participation!

CHECK OUT THE OUR TOWN WEBSITE FOR MORE INFO!

Brought to you by IOP and the Metro Nashville Arts Commission

The end of the self-portrait collection process of Our Town brought the need to exhibit our findings and collections! November 2014 - April 2015 brought Our Town Nashville: Field Reports at the Downtown Main Library. 

Two years ago we asked Nashvillians to help us make a portrait of the city by making small stamped self-portraits. We traveled throughout the city, interacting with as many different people as we could find. The collective findings of our art investigation were spectacular! And as we now attempt to recount your enormous creative generosity, we find that we can only do so by working on an equally massive scale. Nashville, we offer you a celebration of our city in a large format edition we call Together Heroic.

The Act of Creation

After watching thousands of people stamp their art in their own unique way, it became clear to us that the way a person made their portrait was as interesting a part of the story as the result.

We saw that making things together built a sense of camaraderie in Phase One of Our Town. There is happiness in doing. Coming together in harmony is an important part of the creative process and of building community.

We are celebrating the act of making by exploring how we as a city create art together. By enlarging the scale we hope to better show how the creative process happens. We want you to be able to SEE it happen because really seeing things clearly is one step closer to understanding them.

Imagine that the team you see represents a giant Nashvillian. Each person on our team is one deconstructed part of that behemoth. Just as your hands, eyes and brain to have to work together to create a portrait on a piece of paper so to does our team of artists! Each person represents a part of that giant and can only succeed as a unit! As we all know sometimes it goes well and other times it gets messy!

Together Heroic
From the Personal to the Public

All of us have own stories. All of us own our personal actions. Collectively they form the larger public story of our city. We are the public and we are the community. Each action matters and each relationship is important. When we come together, together we can be heroic.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE PROJECT HERE

With support from the Metro Nashville Arts Commission

OUR TOWN EVERYWHERE

Every so often an idea you plant outgrows its garden!

We started the Our Town Nashville project as a small way to celebrate the many facets and people of our fair city and to serve a class we were teaching at the ever amazing Room at the Inn.

From the beginning it was pretty obvious that we had something that really resonated with folks. Fortune and fate kept opening doors until we had created something that was a city wide endeavor supported by The Nashville Metro Arts Commission.

All of the accidental (and occasionally intentional) decisions kept adding up to way more than we had ever hoped. Our 1 year project kept expanding until 3 years later we had covered over 50 locations, made 1000’s of prints and then even giant HEROIC PRINTS!

We had always dreamed that this project might continue outside of Nashville. Life and other projects had other ideas and the machine grew quiet for a time but we continued to make giant portraits and show the work. And then the world changed completely. The Covid pandemic suddenly shuttered the doors of the world and interactive in person public art was on hold.

Time passed and we all changed a bit.

As the pandemic started to wind down our good friends at the Madison Bubbler reached out to see how we could collaborate again. They loved the idea and wanted to bring Our town to their town as an artful way to reintroduce the city of Madison to itself as it emerged from the isolation of the pandemic. We all knew this was a great way to light the fires of the project once more. As we had already discovered - making things with other people builds bridges in ways that are not easy to replicate. With so many people in need of ways to reach outside of themselves again - Our Town found a new mission as OUR TOWN EVERYWHERE!

For a two years they took on the project and we adapted it together to the city of Madison. Changing a few details but mostly remaining true to the mission - Make a portrait and share it with the community and then take a portrait of someone else home with you.

You can read all about what happened next here!

The fine people at the Library system in Skokie, IL library saw what we all were up to in Madison and inquired if they could use our system in a project they are doing in the summer of 2025. It’s called The Skokie Yearbook Project »»»Link coming soon! ««««

And now that the boulder is rolling once more we wonder where exactly it might land next!

Maybe Our Town needs come your town????

If it does… please let us know - we are getting our systems and tools sorted out right now to help in big and small endeavors.

CHECK OUT THE OUR TOWN WEBSITE !

Send us a note for more info on how to collaborate!

Brought to you by IOP and the Metro Nashville Arts Commission

We were asked by our new neighbors to create something special for their newest City Winery location in the heart of Nashville: Pietown! So we decided to art paper their 30 foot elevator shaft with letterpress prints! Are the bottles half full or half empty?!? You tell us!

Pie Town is the neighborhood where the Isle of Printing headquarters resides. We love the uniqueness of our neighborhood and wanted to pay tribute to that via wild and crazy murals! 

OUR GIANT LETTERPRESS TYPEFACE
A joint typographic project between mad Swiss printer Dafi Khüne of Baby Ink Twice and your humble servants here at Isle of Printing

With just 26 soldiers we can wage war on stupidity one word at a time.

Our Goal: To design a 3-D typeface composed of a fill, a shadow and a major letter form that would give us the most design mileage possible. Each letter has three separate blocks that can be used alone or combined together in a seemingly endless parade of permutations. 

Our Hope: To give people the opportunity to artfully use type in their lives in a big way! 

Our Plan: To fill the world with the right words at a scale that cannot be ignored!

The possibilities of language are nearly limitless!

Get the very first prototypes to be run ever now and help support our continuing mission of Uncommissioned Public Art!

 

If the art on a shirt tells a story about the person wearing it, we hope everyone in the world will soon be wearing a Mr. Rogers shirt. He is one of our heroes here at IOP and we are proud to offer his visage as our 2nd Product-like Art Project!

Each shirt is hand stamped for you – by us.  Every shirt comes with a print, consider sharing it with someone else.  If you prefer a print, it comes with another to share as well.

We'd like to think generosity is contagious and that it can someday trounce greed. 

And of course, whether you purchase a shirt/print or not, we hope that you can help us spread his message of kindness in your own world – by being kind.

After all, we only get the world we want to live in by living the life we aspire towards.

CLICK HERE TO GET YOURS TODAY!

Normally we are opposed to large group decision making in the arts.  If you ever watched Snakes on a plane I think you'll understand why.  If you've ever gone to a committee meeting you'll definitely understand why!!!  I don't know why people think it is any different on the internet except now people have the prospect of anonymously making poor design decisions on their phones while ignoring each other at restaurants.  Ugh!!!!

But we can't deny that the internet has given us an amazing opportunity to connect with each other and in that connection IS the possibility for something great. As best as we can tell it has thus far been nearly impossible to do anything particularly interesting interactively on the web arts.  Why? I'm not sure but the talented minds at IOP have begun to think seriously about how we can help break this mental log jam.  

So to celebrate our commitment to connecting with you in a meaningful way.  We gave the world the opportunity to HAIL whatever they wanted via our limited edition short stack sale!  

How did it work???? It's really simple....
For a limited time folks were able to buy into our experiment by purchasing a t-shirt. 1 WEEK ONLY! 
From there they could select your favorite ALL HAIL this subject matter at the HAIL THIS WEB STORE - thus voting your vote.  Then, we took that block from our ALL HAIL THIS collection and stamp it onto a shirt JUST FOR YOU!  Each one was unique and made up only when it was ordered. 

At the end of the experiment  - we tallied up all the orders and it turns out that people do think breakfast is the most important meal of the day! ALL HAIL BREAKFAST wins! Coming in a close second: Dinosaurs. 

Isle of Printing – INVITES, CAJOLES and CHALLENGES every able bodied man, woman and child of the vaunted and proud city of Nashville and all regions beyond its borders - to participate in our 151st annual OLD FASHIONED PIE THROW! 

In a tradition older than time itself...

SEE the spectacle unfold.  CHALLENGE  your senses and TEST your skills.  

Prizes awarded.  Accurate advice given.  No prior experience necessary!!!

ONE NIGHT ONLY
NOVEMEBR 6th 2010
Between the hours of 6 and 9 o'clock 

Find us in the historic Downtown Arcade at number 79  – Nashville Tenn.  Betwixt  space/time and 4th and 5th Avenues of the Arts - second floor - Blend Studio. 

First come, first served – no early admittance.  $5 dollars cash to participate – gawking and loitering allowed at no charge to you.

Both the public and press are welcome – no spitting allowed.  Anyone with a working accordion and knowledge of its use is also encouraged to attend.

Please send a self addressed stamped envelope to 520 Ash ST. NASHVILLE, TENN 37203 for a list of all current and pertinent rules, regulations and admissible hand signals of the 2010 OLD FASHIONED PIE THROW.   All rights reserved – no animals were harmed in the making of this advertisement.

Yours truly,

Hiram Kneesch

Americans your time is now!  Don't waste precious moments deliberating on the litany of details our capitalist system has rained down upon you head. Hand writing your most important thoughts - try the 21th century out for a change! 

Through years of intensive research we at IOP have identified the 4 salient points along every business's golden path to success.  Buy yours today! Ask about our franchising opportunities!

Learn more about this project as you scroll!

Click here to buy yours today!