About Print a Fish
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About Print a Fish *
Print a Fish is a participatory printmaking project and social sculpture that invites people to create, exchange, and contribute fish prints to a growing collective artwork.
Founded by artist and teaching artist Lindsey Frances Jones, the project uses the simple image of a fish and the process of printmaking as a starting point for making art together.
Through workshops, print exchanges, public programs, and individual contributions, Print a Fish gives people of all ages and experience levels opportunities to encounter printmaking. Each fish becomes part of a growing archive that can be shared, exhibited, exchanged, and incorporated into larger collaborative artworks.
The project asks a simple question: What happens when many people make the same thing differently, through the shared act of printmaking?
Why fish?
A fish is an image almost anyone can make.
It can begin with an oval, a line, a triangle, a few shapes. It can be recognizable or abstract, carefully rendered or made in seconds.
Fish also carry histories and meanings across cultures. They can represent climate, movement, abundance, transformation, spirituality, food, ecology, migration, and community.
Within Print a Fish, the fish acts as a common visual language uniting us. Everyone begins with the same basic subject, but no two fish are quite the same.
If you can draw a fish, you can print a fish.
Why printmaking?
Printmaking is a deeply social medium. Print shops have long been places where artists share presses, tools, knowledge, materials, and ideas. Prints themselves can circulate. They can be traded, mailed, given away, collected, reproduced, and combined. Our ideas generate with each other in community.
Print a Fish builds on these qualities by using printmaking not only to create an image, but as a structure for participation in the arts.
The artistic process is as important as the resulting print. Our emotional and social well-being improves when we come together in art-making.
Printmaking is a resilient medium anyone can learn! And we join by printing a fish.
A social sculpture
Print a Fish approaches social sculpture as an artwork created through participation and relationships rather than a single finished object.
The project exists in many forms: a person learning to make their first print, a makeshift personal or communal studio, a print exchanged between strangers, a workshop conversation, an archive of hundreds of different fish, or a contributed image becoming part of a larger artwork.
Each interaction adds something to the project.
In this sense, the collection of fish is only one part of the artwork. The community that forms through making them is another.
Print a Fish can keep changing as more people participate.
From prints to public sculpture
Print a Fish became part of City in Shapes, City in Fish, a large-scale public sculpture by Lindsey Frances Jones created through the Art Students League of New York's Works in Public program.
Installed in Riverside Park at 145th Street in Manhattan in fall 2026, the sculpture translates imagery originating in printmaking into steel, color, transparency, and architectural scale.
Fish contributed through the project appear in engraved plexiglass panels within the sculpture. Individual prints made by different people therefore become part of a shared public artwork.
The sculpture is one manifestation of Print a Fish, rather than its conclusion.
The project continues through workshops, exchanges, exhibitions, collaborations, and an expanding archive of contributed fish.
Add a fish
Print a Fish is an ongoing and open-ended project.
Participation does not require previous printmaking or art experience. A fish can be carved, stamped, rubbed, drawn, transferred, collaged, or printed through experimental processes.
Make a fish. Print a fish. Exchange a fish. Add it to the school.
Every fish adds to the social sculpture.
Have questions?
Contact me at madebyfrances@gmail.com