Green Garnet Press
In 2020, Christine Forni founded Green Garnet Press, an artist's studio sharing eco-friendly printmaking techniques that use non-toxic materials and water-based soy inks. The artist run project expanded to include artists residencies with curated fine art, printmaking exhibitions and recently small intimate eco-friendly printmaking workshops in the artist's studio space. Green Garnet Press is all about creating community and art in way that cares for our planet.
Imprint: 2nd Edition
The exhibition curated by Christine Forni features diverse works from participating residency artists: Joanne Aono, Mia Capodilupo, Jason Dunda, Hillary Johnson, Noah Kashiani, Stacey Lee Gee, Nora Moore Lloyd, Samuel Schwindt, Leslie Speicher, and Araceli Zuniga highlighting Green Garnet Press's commitment to eco-friendly, non-toxic, and water-based printmaking techniques. This project serves as a natural extension to Christine's eco-social artist practice, which shares environmental stewardship, community engagement, and our interconnectedness to nature.
November 6 - December 5, 2026
Location: Ignition project 3839 W. Grand Ave., Chicago
Opening Reception: 11/6 Friday, 6-9pm
Closing Reception: 12/5, Saturday, 1-5pm
Christine Forni & Joanne Aono Panel Discussion: 12/5 Saturday, 4-5pm
Eco-Friendly Printmaking Artists Residencies, Curated Exhibitions
& Workshops
Joanne Aono
Joanne Aono is a visual artist, curator, and holistic farmer. Her research-based drawings and installations address identity, immigration, and the environment. She draws inspiration from personal histories, observations of nature, and agrarian life.
Her art has been shown in solo and group exhibitions including Boundary, Chicago, IL; the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, New Haven, CT; the Illinois State Museums, Chicago, Springfield, and Lockport, IL; and O'Connor Art Gallery at Dominican University, River Forest, IL. Aono has received support through grants from the Illinois Arts Council, Chicago DCASE, and HPAC's Artist Run Chicago. Her exhibitions have been reviewed in publications such as Hyperallergic, Chicago Reader, and Chicago Magazine and she was featured in an Arts Midwest film. Aono directs the alternative art project, Cultivator - Chicago Art Exhibitions & Farm Art Projects and serves on the Exhibition Committee of the Riverside Arts Center. She maintains a studio at Bray Grove Farm in north central Illinois.
Araceli Zuniga
Araceli Zuniga is a Mexican-American artist based in the midwest whose work is defined by intimacy and play. Through expansive materiality, Zuniga uses child-like qualities to encourage a reflective process as a mediation between self and others.
Zuniga’s work has been featured at crosswalk, Tala, FLXST, Povos, and Genesis galleries, respectively. They were a member of the Underbelly collective based in Madison, WI, as well as the LUNA collective in Milwaukee, WI. Zuniga completed a fellowship at the BlackPaint Studios’ Creative Leadership Program in Milwaukee followed by a growing collaboration with Communication, a Madison-based nonprofit dedicated to fostering a vibrant creative community. After receiving their bachelor’s degree at SAIC, they completed a residency with Chuquimarca, an art library project based in Chicago and attended ACRE, a cooperative residency based in Steuben, Wisconsin. Zuniga is currently a resident at Parlour and Ramp located in West Pilsen, Chicago and at Chicago Art Department.
Noah Kashiani
Noah Kashiani (b.1992 Cleveland, Ohio) lives in Chicago Illinois after receiving his MFA from Northern Illinois University (2019). Kashiani's work pulls on the heart strings of our weakest form. Glamorizing the transient nature of human consumption, exploiting our vulnerability to the American dream and really deciding what objects mean to us as humans. Recent exhibitions include Dubya Em Deez, at Cleaner Gallery (Chicago, IL) and Gimme More at Missouri State University (Springfield, MO).
Nora Moore Lloyd
Nora Moore Lloyd, Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, born 1947 was trained as a photographer and videographer. She works in multiple mediums to create artworks that document the stories of Indigenous elders and to connect with cultural practices related to harvesting birch bark and wild rice. Nora has been an active member of Chicago’s Native American community for decades. Her work has been shown in national museums in Bolivia and Guatemala, “Woven Being” exhibition at Block Museum and a recent solo exhibition at Illinois State Museum. Her interest in nature has expanded to rescuing injured raptors & large water birds.
Stacey Lee Gee was born in New Jersey and currently resides in Chicago. She exhibits both nationally and internationally including at the the Lubeznik Center, Chicago Cultural Center, Ceres Gallery, Terrain Biennial, and Centro d’Art e Cultura. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from the University of Iowa and is the current president of the historic feminist gallery ARC in Chicago.
Stacey's work is an extension of the energy that leaks from her fingertips, a reconfiguration of objects past their appropriate era. Her art reorders the past in order to prepare for the future. She believes art is a service meant to perpetuate the healthy psyche of society.
Stacey Lee Gee
Mia Capodilupo is a sculptor and installation artist originally from Boston, MA. She received a BA from University of Chicago, studied sculpture at Massachusetts College of Art and received an MFA in Sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute.
She has participated in solo and group shows and residencies in museums, galleries and alternative spaces around the country. She has received several grants from the City of Chicago, was a recipient of an individual arts grant from the City of Urbana, IL and received a grant from the Illinois Arts Council in 2011. In 2014, she completed a large public project for the City of Chicago, and was commissioned to create semi-permanent installations for the Indianapolis Art Center and the city of Atlanta in the Summer of 2015, as well as the City of Bellevue, WA in 2016.
Mia is the owner and director of Ignition project space and the gallery director for Lillstreet Art Center both located in Chicago.
Mia Capodilupo
Samuel Schwindt
Samuel Schwindt is a word|object|surface-smith. He is always looking for the maddest spectacles and vampiest explosions.
He received a BFA in Studio Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2019) and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from University of Illinois at Chicago (2024). Now, he works as commission-based leather-gear crafter, archivist, sculptor, curator, freelance writer, and educator.
Recent exhibitions and project-sites include Gallery 400, the Gender and Sexuality Center at University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago Art Department, Evanston Art Center, Boccarra Art Brooklyn, Chicago Sculpture International Project Space, Side Street Studio Arts, the Leather Archives and Museum, Epiphany Center for the Arts, and Parlour and Ramp among others. His writing ranges from exhibition catalogues, and news stories, reviews, and essays for publications such as Another Chicago Magazine, Femme Art Review, Chicago Artist Writers, Sixty Inches from Center, New City Art, and Chicago Reader (among others).
Jason Dunda is a Chicago-based Canadian painter who also creates sewn and carved objects. His work deals with intersections of power, labor, and humor, usually through depictions of figures and the spaces they occupy. He has exhibited in Chicago, New York, Sweden, Iceland, Kuwait, France, and Canada and his work is represented in the collections of Todd Oldham, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre and the Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto. He holds the position of Assistant Professor of 2D Fundamentals at the Wonsook Kim School of Art at Illinois State University.
Recent projects include “A Hall of Unflattering Portraits,” a solo exhibition at the MacLaren Art Centre in Barrie, Ontario, Canada and “Highly Illogical,” a two-person collaborative installation at langeroverdickie in Chicago. International exhibits include the Heine-Onstad Art Centre in Oslo, and the Kuwait Art Foundation in Kuwait City. Recent residencies include the Haystack School of Craft in Deer Isle, Maine, and a four-month research and production residency in Paris sponsored by the Canada Council for the Arts.
Jason Dunda
Leslie Speicter
Leslie Speicher is a glass artist and educator with over 37 years of experience working in the medium. Her work explores the balance between structure and fluidity, often layering transparent forms to investigate perception, interior and exterior space, and the transformative qualities of light.
In 2012, Leslie founded Chicago Glass Collective, a Ravenswood-based studio dedicated to teaching, inspiring, and building community through glass.
Hillary Johnson is an artist, educator, and writer working across photography, handmade paper, salt printing, installation, and text. She is a Teaching Scholar in Photography at the University of Notre Dame, where her teaching invites students to cultivate attention, perceptual discipline, and embodied observation. Johnson has exhibited nationally and internationally and continues to develop site-based studies of light across domestic, architectural, and natural environments. Her work asks a simple and enduring question: what becomes visible when we slow down long enough to truly see?
Hillary Johnson
2026 Fall Weekend Workshops
(Starting November 14th at Mana Contemporary Studio #421)
November - Botanical Monoprint on Cotton
December - Eco-friendly Monoprint Cards
2025 | Stephanie Graham (paused)
Stephanie Graham explores the intersections of social class, subcultures, race, relationships, and gender—not as abstract ideas, but as lived experiences deserving critique and celebration. Her work challenges mainstream narratives while amplifying voices often overlooked in society.
Judgment and dismissal often stem from misunderstanding. She encourages listening and connection over assumption, revealing common ground in unexpected places—like when the football superstar and the goth girl end up at prom together.
Working across film, photography, installation, and performance, she blends humor with seriousness to reflect the complexities of contemporary life. Stephanie combines portraiture, documentary, and staged elements in photography and film, using natural and artificial lighting to shape mood and atmosphere. She keeps her sets and props minimal, allowing human interactions to take center stage.
Juliette Morris is a non-binary artist and printmaker working out of Chicago. They earned their BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022, with a primary focus in printmedia. Morris's artistic exploration revolves around themes of generative queer abstraction and the queer dreamscape.
Their work is dedicated to igniting discussionsregarding the autonomy of queer bodies.
Juliette Morris
Paola de la Peña
Paola de la Peña is a multidisciplinary artist from the Mexico’s Monterrey Metropolitan area, San Pedro Garzer Garcia. Her work embodies the contradictions of being both and insider and outsider of Mexican culture. Her current work focuses on cycles of birth, death and rebirth. Her interests are video animation, the importance and meaning of cultural decoration, and obscure meanings found in color coding. The unification of these contradictions comes together in Paola's work through an abundance of information and vibrations of excessiveness. She combines aesthetics of kitsch from Mexican culture hidden in landscape paintings yet they are referential to the mountain range surrounding the place where she grew up.
