Intima: Latin word meaning knowing, within;
intimate: deeply personal, private, or secret;
having a deep or unusual knowledge of; to make known . . .
Artist and Master Printer, Mindy Belloff, specializes in fine book editions and custom letterpress at Intima Press, the only private press in Manhattan, New York. She has been creating art for over four decades in painting, photography, printmaking, mixed media installations, and the art of the book, and wears the hats of educator, gallerist, curator, lecturer, and independent scholar. Her books are in numerous permanent collections including the Library of Congress, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Her volume, A Golden Thread: The Minotaur, A Contemporary Illumination, was described in a Parenthesis Journal review by Michael Ryan as, “a genuine masterpiece of art and design.” The edition received a Fine Press Book Association Award (2020), and was prominently exhibited at the Peabody Essex Museum (September 2019 – March 2020), titled The Creative Legacy of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Selections from the Phillips Library Collection. https://www.pem.org/blog/nathaniel-hawthornes-creative-legacy. Her edition titled W2LZX received a Herzog Honorable Mention for Excellence in Book Design award in 2010. Mindy Belloff’s meticulous, hand-set contemporary printing of the Unanimous Declaration of Independence (2009) as originally printed by Mary Katharine Goddard in January 1777, is paired with her own re-written version of the broadside proclaiming, “all People are created equal.” It received a Puffin Foundation Grant supporting “creative and innovative initiatives that advance progressive social change.”
Early in her career, her mixed media installation from her “Loss, Irony, Identity” series exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Arts was favorably reviewed by Holland Cotter in The New York Times. Mindy has exhibited at multiple venues nationally and internationally, including The Sculpture Center, and PS 122 in New York City. She holds a Master of Arts degree from New York University with studies at the International Center of Photography, and completed extensive graduate work at the San Francisco Art Institute. She has studied postmodernism and cultural critique with Nan Golden, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Saul Ostrow, Vito Acconci, Suzanne Anker, Anne Truitt, Peter Campus, and Gerald Pryor. Mindy is a MacDowell Fellow and has received a National Endowment for the Arts Book Grant through the Visual Studies Workshop. She opened Intima Gallery in upstate New York (2013-14), showcasing photographs, artist’s books, and fine prints on paper.
Mindy has numerous years as an art educator and university art professor (including The New School Writing and Poetry Program, the Rare Book and Special Collections program at the Palmer School of Library Science, the School of Visual Arts, Women’s Studio Workshop, Pyramid Atlantic, the Center for Book Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Florida Atlantic University, New York University, the San Francisco Art Institute, Hofstra University’s College for Continuing Education, and Cornell University’s Experimental College Program). Her teaching archives with approximately a thousand pieces of ephemera and books from over a decade of sharing the traditions of printing and the book with many hundreds of students at her New York Studio on the Square, are held at Columbia University’s Butler Library, NYC.
At the Studio, everything is meticulously crafted by hand. Traditional printing is done on a vintage Vandercook Universal III automatic, adjustable bed (A/B) press. Mindy combines the highest quality classic printing with modern technology. This may include hand setting 3-dimensional type, utilizing digital design for photopolymer or engraving plates, art prints with linoleum blocks, or layering of painterly techniques. On the intaglio press, monoprinting, transfer printing, etching and drypoint prints are created; and techniques such as pochoir, digital imaging, photography, and painting are all done at the Press, as well as editioned prints, portfolios, hand bindings and custom boxes.
A native New Yorker born in Brooklyn, all of Mindy’s artwork and printing reflects her keen eye, extensive knowledge of art history, and wide-ranging skills: fine letterpress, painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, installation art, welding, sculpture, glass blowing, woodworking, writing, and poetry.
