A Creative Excuse

Annalise Gratovich Returns!

Annalise Gratovich creates her finely crafted prints by hand from start to finish, carving wood, etching metal, dyeing paper, and using manual printing presses to create multiple originals. Each piece is printed on the finest archival papers using oil based inks and hand dyed papers she produces in her studio. Annalise operates as a self publisher out of Austin, Texas and travels frequently across the country as a visiting artist and speaker and to publish prints with esteemed print shops.  In this episode we talk about Annalise’s newest body of work, Carrying Things From Home, a series of 8 monumental woodcuts that are 13 years in the making. On view at Hecho now for the first time in their entirety.

Jaydan Moore

Jaydan Moore grew up in the Bay Area inside a family that has sold tombstones for four generations, an early apprenticeship in how objects hold a whole life. He went to CCA at eighteen, found metals, and never really left. Fifteen years ago he picked up a silver-plated platter at a junk shop and has been working in that single material ever since. We talk nostalgia, tragedy versus comedy, and how he got to metal.

Kat Kinnick Returns!

Kat Kinnick is back on A Creative Excuse for her third solo appearance, and we get into it. We talk process over product, how the animals in her paintings sit at the edge of cuteness and brutality, and how the desire to connect, to nature, to people, to the things we don't say, runs underneath all of it.

Haley Greenfeather English

Haley Greenfeather English is an artist and educator born and raised in Tiwa territory. Their paternal family is from Red Lake Nation and Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and their maternal family is of European/Irish descent. Their art is an extension of their love of storytelling. It is something that deeply connects them to being and understanding what it means to be human. Through collections of loose drawings, written journals, and sentimental random objects, English visually brings pieces of stories together. English incorporates portraits of their family, warped perspectives, historical narratives, Indigenous and medicinal plants, cigarette smoking spirits, insects and animals.

Kate Wood

Kate Wood (voted most likely to have bangs for her entire life) is an interdisciplinary artist working predominantly in painting/illustration, and paper mache sculpture. Kate considers herself a play-based artist whose works explores themes of relationship, body language and communication, family, and the point at which personal experience transcends identity and becomes collective consciousness. The daughter of a school teacher and an archaeologist, story and artifact became loci for Kate’s experience of and orientation to the world beginning in early childhood. Using a cast of glyphs rooted in archetype and mythology, Kate constructs visual narratives that invite and encourage viewers to have fun finding and experiencing themselves within the work. Kate grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and currently lives with her family in a rural mountain village on the High road to Taos.

Juana Estrada Hernández

Juana Estrada Hernández is a Mexican artist and Assistant Professor of Printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design. Born in Luis Moya, Zacatecas, Mexico, she moved to the United States at the age of seven and grew up as an undocumented immigrant — an experience that became central to her artistic practice. She received her MFA in Printmaking from the University of New Mexico and her BFA in Printmaking from Fort Hays State University.
Estrada Hernández's work draws on Mexican folklore, Hispanic cultural traditions, and her family's intergenerational migration stories, with a particular focus on the social and political realities facing Hispanic migrant communities. She is a DACA recipient and self-described "DACA-mented" artist, and her prints speak with both intimacy and urgency to the experience of living, creating, and belonging across borders. Her printmaking — primarily lithography and intaglio — is luminous, narrative, and dynamic, with a touch of the surreal.
She has exhibited across the United States, Mexico, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Poland. Her work is held in several collections including the Janet Turner Print Museum, Chicago Printmakers Collaborative, Zygote Press Archives, Laval University, and Engramme, National Library and Archives of Québec.

Julianna Kirwin

Printmaker and educator Julianna Kirwin presents a window installation combining hand-pulled prints with the woodblocks used to make them. Informed by her experiences along the Camino Real, the work highlights printmaking as a bridge between cultures, revealing process, lineage, and Pan-American identity through image and material.

Moira Garcia

Moira Garcia is a New Mexican-Chicana multidisciplinary artist, educator, and cultural practitioner whose work bridges ancestral knowledge and contemporary visual language. A native of New Mexico, she holds a BFA in Studio Arts with a focus in printmaking from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MA in Latin American Studies with concentrations in Art History and Indigenous Studies from the University of New Mexico. Garcia’s art draws deeply from Nahuatl language, Mesoamerican cosmologies, and personal experiences, using symbol, color, and metaphor to explore themes of identity, memory, and cultural continuity. Her practice moves fluidly across printmaking, painting, fiber art, and mixed media, creating multilayered narratives that honor ancient visual traditions while engaging present-day concerns. Recent work, including her exhibition Xochiyotl: Florescence at Hecho a Mano, probes the essence of floral life as a metaphor for transformation and resilience. Garcia also teaches, advocates for art as social change, and champions indigenous and borderland perspectives in contemporary art.

Sam Hawley, Oskar Petersen & Pearl Hesselden

Sam Hawley and Oskar Petersen artists live and work in their hometown of Albuquerque. They describe their way of living as a process of constant collaboration: "We both end up living among our work, for better or worse, talking about it over dinner and coffee and as we watch TV," they write. "We are very fortunate to spend our time discussing whether or not a goose should have teeth in a painting or what a certain palette is evoking."
Pearl Hesselden is the founder of the Ranch Residency in La Madera, NM. The Ranch Residency offers a distinctive opportunity for artists to immerse themselves in the unique landscape of the La Madera Mountain Range and their own art practices. "Our mission is to offer a respite where artists can explore, experiment, and devote time to their practice in a setting that is both inspiring and nurturing.” www.ranchresidency.com

Alfonso Barrera & Mirel Fraga

Mirel Fraga and Alfonso Barrera are a creative couple based in Oaxaca whose practices intersect across drawing, printmaking, and independent publishing. Barrera, originally from Mexico City, works in graphite, charcoal, oil, and printmaking, weaving together human–nature relationships, art history, and fantastical imagery; his work has exhibited in Mexico, the U.S., and Japan. Fraga, from Puebla, moves fluidly between illustration, graphic arts, and mural painting, often centering nature, cosmos, and feminist themes. Together they co-founded Polvoh Press, an editorial project dedicated to small-edition artist books and printmaking, reflecting their shared commitment to experimentation, community, and the handmade.