Chris Fritton is a poet, printer, and fine artist, who has over two decades of experience writing, printing, and making his own books, in addition to collaborative efforts with other authors and artists. He is the former Studio Director of the Western New York Book Arts Center in Buffalo, NY, and has been a panelist to judge the New York Foundation on the Arts Fellowship in Drawing, Printmaking, and Book Arts (2014). He co-founded the highly-acclaimed Buffalo Small Press Book Fair with Kevin Thurston in 2007, and organized the fair solo from 2009-2016. Currently, Fritton is working on a long-term project called The Itinerant Printer, where he’s visited almost 200 letterpress print shops throughout North America in six years, covering over 75,000 miles and making over 30,000 prints on the road. He recently culminated the journey in an over-sized coffee table book featuring all the places, prints, and people from along the way.

He has been an artist-in-residence at AS220 in Providence, RI, the Denbo Fellow at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center (2015), a TEDx Buffalo speaker (2017), a main presenter at Typecon (2019), the featured speaker at the 10th Annual Los Angeles Printers Fair, and an instructor/visiting artist/presenter at numerous institutions, including the Library of Congress, the Letterform Archive, the Penland School of Craft, MIAD, RISD, MICA, VCU and the School of Visual Concepts. Fritton has been featured in Uppercase magazine, Pressing Matters, Carrier Pigeon, and others. He holds a BA in Philosophy (1998), a BA in Poetics (2000), and a BA in Art History (2010) from SUNY at Buffalo, as well as an MA in Poetics from the University of Maine at Orono (2005).

Chris Fritton Artist Talk, presented in Holmes Auditorium.

Chris setting wood type.

Preparing newsprint for impressions.

First impression on folded newsprint.

Wood type being set in chase for printing.