YayBig Print Exchange: 3 Year Run -- Summary

The YayBig Print Exchange (view the prints at this link) was framed and exhibited pretty continuously for 3 years -- from 2014 to 2017 -- in 10 different locations. That's a pretty good run.

Joe Marshall's print

for the YayBig Print Exchange

The YayBig Print Exchange grew out of the YayBig Gallery run by printmaker Joe Marshall in Tucson (2013 - 2015).

Tanya Rich and Krrrl then took works by the printmakers in this gallery on the road -- touring as "YayBig Southwest." They did pop-up print shows in El Paso, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Las Cruces, and San Antonio, collecting new prints from each city they visited. In the summer of 2014, Joe, Tanya and Karl had a homecoming show of the expanding print collection at the YayBig Gallery, for which they published their first print catalog, and announced the YayBig Print Exchange.

HOMECOMING

YayBig Gallery in Tucson,

showing prints collected by

YayBig Southwest pop-up road show

Later a selection of prints were framed for a print show in the Rusteberg Art Gallery at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Moreover, this print momentum lead to our first trip to see the printmakers of Oaxaca.

The YayBig Print Exchange framed exhibitions debuted at The Drawing Studio in downtown Tucson in 2014, and then immediately traveled to El Paso. In El Paso the prints hung next to the first Horned Toad Print Exchange (the print exchange which it was modeled after), 60 framed prints altogether, during the Chalk the Block festival downtown. Subsequently a catalog of both prints exchanges was published.

Catalog available on Lulu

View catalog online at ISSUU

Ultimately the YayBig Print Exchange dovetailed into a bigger print project -- the Desert Triangle Print Carpeta -- which was shown at the El Paso Museum of Art in 2016.