MONICA TYRAN
New Orleans, Louisiana
2018-2019 Creative Work Grant Restoration of the Gosserand wooden typeset
Creative Work Grant recipient 2017-2018
monicatyran.com
Monica Tyran is a printmaker who is collaborating with Southern Letterpress and Baskerville Studios to restore a culturally significant wooden type-set, Gosserand, which suffered damage from Hurricane Katrina. Gosserand Superior Printers, a New Orleans family-run print shop, created promotional material for music venues like Tipitina's and the Dew Drop Inn for decades before closing in the 1990s. Concert posters were handset in wood and lead type and printed one at a time on a big cast iron press. Although the Gosserand type cabinet survived Katrina, it is in poor shape. With her collaborators, Tyran will clean, catalogue and repair the typeset. She will produce print proofs of each font to create an archival booklet of the type and any remaining print material, to be accessible to public for study and research. Once the archive is complete, she will use the Gosserand wood type to produce a new eries of posters and broadsides inspired by the archived concerts posters.
Throughout her career, Tyran has balanced her art practice and her passion for arts administration. She studied screen printing and printmaking at Penland School of Arts & Crafts and bookmaking at San Francisco Center for the Book. Her work has been exhibited at the New Orleans Community Printshop, the Contemporary Arts Center and the Stella Jones Gallery in New Orleans. She currently works for the National Performance Network as the Program Assistant – LANE (Leveraging a Network for Equity), and she serves on the board of directors at YAYA. Previously, she served an internship with International Studio & Curatorial Program in Brooklyn, sponsored by Art Table, and worked for YAYA as the Program and Studio Coordinator 2008-2014. Tyran earned a BA in Visual Arts from Dillard University and a MA in Arts Administration from the University of New Orleans.
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Tyran participated in the YAYA young artists’ guild 2004-2007.