Biography
Nichol Markowitz is an American printmaker and master printer based in Oakland, California, who is the founder of Moonlight Press, the Oakland printmaking studio and limited-edition publisher. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2007 and subsequently a Master's degree in Modern and Contemporary Art History at Azusa Pacific University in 2022. The career between these two degrees was built around hands-on master-printing practice rather than around a conventional academic studio progression. She worked as a printer at Hui Press, the print studio originally established as part of the Hui No'eau Visual Arts Center on Maui — a programme that has since been wound down — and at Mullowney Printing, the San Francisco intaglio publisher; she then served for ten years as art director and master printer for the Oakland-based artist and activist Favianna Rodriguez, where her projects included a suite of eight-foot by four-foot woodblock prints executed using traditional Japanese mounting techniques. She has executed editions for a substantial roster of senior contemporary artists, including Josephine Taylor, Solange Roberdeau, Judy Pfaff, Joyce Kozloff, Nicola López, Sandow Birk, Lothar Osterberg, Emilie Clark, Max Gimblett, Katsura Funakoshi, Swoon and Artemio Rodriguez. Moonlight Press, the Oakland studio she founded, specializes in copper-plate etching, photogravure, mokuhanga, Western woodblock, archival collage, and traditional Japanese mounting and backing techniques, and operates simultaneously as a contract-printing studio for visiting artists and as a teaching space running rotating workshops. Her own studio practice as an artist — distinct from her work for other artists' editions — is organized around the fragility of memory and the construction of the self, and draws image-material from personal family photographs reaching back to her great-grandparents, from natural-history photographs she takes herself, and from scientific illustrations of plants, anatomy and other natural forms. The 2024 International Mokuhanga Conference juried international exhibition in Echizen included her print The Place Between Thought and Feeling, executed as a mokuhanga woodblock print on Gampi Sukiawase paper in a format of 41.3 by 30.5 centimetres. Her work in scroll-mounted format — a discipline she began applying after college, when working on her first large-scale mokuhanga prints, and continued through the Hawaii fine-art-press period — is an unusual extension of mokuhanga into a finished display object that more commonly belongs to East Asian painting practice. She belongs to the senior North American master-printer-plus-mokuhanga-artist generation alongside Mike Lyon, Yoonmi Nam and April Vollmer, and her publishing imprint at Moonlight Press is one of the more active small studios on the West Coast for the medium.
Key Facts
- Nationality
- 🇺🇸United States
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Works Indexed
- 1
Frequently Asked Questions
Nichol Markowitz is an American printmaker and master printer based in Oakland, California, who is the founder of Moonlight Press, the Oakland printmaking studio and limited-edition publisher. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2007 and subsequently a Master's degree in Modern and Contemporary Art History at Azusa Pacific University in 2022. The career between these two degrees was built around hands-on master-printing practice rather than around a conventional academic studio progression. She worked as a printer at Hui Press, the print studio originally established as part of the Hui No'eau Visual Arts Center on Maui — a programme that has since been wound down — and at Mullowney Printing, the San Francisco intaglio publisher; she then served for ten years as art director and master printer for the Oakland-based artist and activist Favianna Rodriguez, where her projects included a suite of eight-foot by four-foot woodblock prints executed using traditional Japanese mounting techniques. She has executed editions for a substantial roster of senior contemporary artists, including Josephine Taylor, Solange Roberdeau, Judy Pfaff, Joyce Kozloff, Nicola López, Sandow Birk, Lothar Osterberg, Emilie Clark, Max Gimblett, Katsura Funakoshi, Swoon and Artemio Rodriguez. Moonlight Press, the Oakland studio she founded, specializes in copper-plate etching, photogravure, mokuhanga, Western woodblock, archival collage, and traditional Japanese mounting and backing techniques, and operates simultaneously as a contract-printing studio for visiting artists and as a teaching space running rotating workshops. Her own studio practice as an artist — distinct from her work for other artists' editions — is organized around the fragility of memory and the construction of the self, and draws image-material from personal family photographs reaching back to her great-grandparents, from natural-history photographs she takes herself, and from scientific illustrations of plants, anatomy and other natural forms. The 2024 International Mokuhanga Conference juried international exhibition in Echizen included her print The Place Between Thought and Feeling, executed as a mokuhanga woodblock print on Gampi Sukiawase paper in a format of 41.3 by 30.5 centimetres. Her work in scroll-mounted format — a discipline she began applying after college, when working on her first large-scale mokuhanga prints, and continued through the Hawaii fine-art-press period — is an unusual extension of mokuhanga into a finished display object that more commonly belongs to East Asian painting practice. She belongs to the senior North American master-printer-plus-mokuhanga-artist generation alongside Mike Lyon, Yoonmi Nam and April Vollmer, and her publishing imprint at Moonlight Press is one of the more active small studios on the West Coast for the medium.
Nichol Markowitz's work was shaped by the Contemporary Mokuhanga tradition in Japanese woodblock printmaking. Contemporary Mokuhanga: Contemporary mokuhanga (literally "wood-block print") encompasses artists working from approximately 1970 to the present who continue or reinvent traditional Japanese woodblock printing techniques.
Nichol Markowitz is a contemporary printmaker working in the mokuhanga (Japanese woodblock) tradition. Their work contributes to the living tradition of Japanese woodblock printing. Prices for contemporary mokuhanga prints range from $100 for smaller works to $1,500 for major compositions. Most prints sell in the $180–$600 range. The global mokuhanga community has been growing, with increasing exhibition opportunities and collector interest. Contemporary mokuhanga represents an affordable entry point for collectors.