Letters Home exhibition at CCCAC

HANCOCK, MI – The new exhibition in the Kerredge Gallery at Copper Country Community Arts Center is Letters Home, contemporary letterpress prints by Vida Sačić.

Vida Sačić is an artist, designer and educator who creates work that blurs the distinctions between these areas. She grew up in Croatia, former Yugoslavia, and moved to the Midwest as a teenage exchange student. She attended Marian University in Indianapolis, Indiana. After working as an Art Director in international advertising companies, Vida earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Indiana University Bloomington and focused on working with typography in a non-commercial setting. She uses letterpress printing to teach principles of design and typography, as well as collaboration and communication while emphasizing research, process and expression. Her work explores language, identity and memory.

Sačić is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, where she serves as the coordinator and is the author of the Bachelor of Fine Arts program in Graphic Design.

Letters Home is a selection of her prints, created in the last seven years created on her Vandercook printing press. In her statement she explains, “The prints shown here tell stories about my ancestors and my origins in word and abstract images. I work with printing plates as well as metal and wood pieces of type to physically put letters together to make words and shapes. The resulting prints feature English as well as my native language, woven together. Many prints feature characters with diacritic marks, specific to my native language. My stories are told not only in word but also in image through color, composition and gesture. I am interested in language as a visual presence. I see my working process as a translation of memories into word fragments endowed with typographic bodies that occupy a space between the literal and the abstract. The subject of each print is a story of people, family and connection.”

Letters Home will open on August 9 with a reception for the artist from 6:00-8:00pm and runs through August 31. Vida Sačić is the first artist in residence at the Copper Country Community Arts Center’s Letterpress Studio. In addition to her gallery exhibition she will be working on site and will give a letterpress talk and demonstration on Tuesday, August 13 from 6-7:30.

This exhibition is supported with a grant from the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Copper Country Community Arts Center is located at 126 Quincy Street in Hancock. Hours are Tuesday through Friday 10:00-6:00pm and Saturday 10:00-2:00pm. For more information call (906) 482-2333 or visit the website at www.coppercountryarts.com