Fifty years of printing, Milestone Graphics celebrates five decades of print in 2026
- Irene Michnicki
- 6 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
This year marks fifty years since Milestone Graphics first opened its doors. The shop began it's journey in San Francisco in 1976 and moved cross-country to Connecticut in 1980. Though it has had many homes since then, Milestone is now located in New Haven and is the oldest professional print shop still operating in the state of Connecticut. To mark the occasion, we'd like to take a look back at where the studio started, the printer who founded it, the collaborator who now carries it forward, and the philosophy that has stayed constant across half a century.
Important dates for the print studio
1976
James Reed establishes Milestone Graphics in San Francisco, California.
1980
Milestone packs up & makes the big move to the East Coast, settling in Connecticut.
2015
Irene Michnicki joins the team at Milestone & begins printing editions for the studio.
2019
Reed donates his historic collection of prints to Fairfield University & Michnicki goes off to Tamarind Institute to continue her training.
2020
Michnicki returns from her training at Tamarind Institute & begins running Milestone towards the end of the year.
2021
Milestone Graphics makes the first move to New Haven, it's current hometown.
2025
The studio makes a second move within New Haven to its current location at 333 East Street.
2026
Milestone celebrates five decades of printing and collaborating with artists on countless editions.
San Francisco, 1976
Milestone Graphics was originally established in San Francisco by Master Printer James Reed, with a founding mission that still guides the studio today: giving artists, regional and national, established and just starting out, direct access to the technical expertise of a professional printer. That mission is built on the traditional model of the atelier, in which a master printer works side by side with an artist to help realize the artist's vision through printmaking. Collaborative printmaking is a truly unique effort between artist and printer that produces work that couldn't exist any other way. The artist's idea is not just simply reproduce, but instead, translated through print.
James Reed's path to the press
By the time he founded Milestone Graphics, Reed had already trained at some of the most respected institutions in American printmaking. He studied at Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the workshop widely credited with reviving fine art lithography in the United States, and worked as a curator of prints at the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, part of the San Francisco Museum system. Over the course of a career spanning nearly five decades, Reed has printed in workshops across the United States, Mexico, and France, and has collaborated with more than two hundred artists. His work as an artist has been recognized with a Ford Fellowship and a Rockefeller Scholarship grant.
Reed is also a practicing artist and print collector in his own right. His work is held in more than twenty public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Public Library. In 2019, he gave a significant gift of historic prints, spanning old master, nineteenth century, and modern works, to the Fairfield University Art Museum, which mounted an exhibition of highlights from the collection that spring.
A cross-country move
In 1980, Milestone Graphics moved from California to Connecticut, first settling in Bridgeport. The photograph at the beginning of this blog post comes from that era: artist and printer at work in the Bridgeport studio, work tables, stones, tools, ink draw downs and prints spread across the tables. What's pictured is the same hands-on, unhurried atmosphere that has defined the shop since its first year in San Francisco. Reed continued printing in Bridgeport for decades, collaborating with artists including Ann Chernow, Nomi Silverman, Margaret McKinnickinnick, Perry Obee, Lucy Sallick, Karen Brussat Butler, Alberta Ciffolelli, André Junget, and Ronnie Rysz, several of whom remain part of Milestone's story today.
Over the years and in the spirit of passing on the torch from master to apprentice, Reed was also a mentor to many students and young printers including Thurston Bellmer, Ronnie Rysz, Andrew Murdoch, Perry Obee of Obee Editions and Milestone's current owner and collaborative printer, Irene Michnicki.
New Haven and a new chapter with Irene Michnicki
Irene Michnicki took over as owner of Milestone Graphics in 2020, while the studio was still in Bridgeport. Her path to printmaking started at Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts, where she earned her BFA in Drawing between 2010 and 2014. She'd enrolled in a required printmaking class expecting to check a box. Michnicki came out unable to think of herself as anything other than a printmaker. She went on to earn an MAT in Art Education from RISD in 2015, and spent years teaching students across every stage of that word, from Pre-K classrooms to adult learners, before her focus narrowed to where it sits today: college and graduate students in the arts.
Michnicki joined Milestone in 2015, trained at Tamarind Institute from 2019 to 2020, and took ownership of the shop that same year. The following year, in 2021, Milestone made the move to its current home in New Haven. As both a practicing printmaker and an educator, Michnicki's goal has been to carry the studio's legacy forward and keep the collaborative printmaking tradition alive for a new generation of artists.
Fifty Years of the Atelier Model
When looking at the photograph from one of Milestone's old Bridgeport spaces, it's honestly not too different from the current studio in New Haven. A stone on the table, the ink, the concentration of the printer mid-printing: this is the same scene that plays out in our studio today. What James Reed set up in San Francisco in 1976 wasn't just intended to be a business. It was a way of working, and it's the same way we work with artists now at Milestone Graphics, fifty years and one cross-country move later.
The atelier model asks something specific of both people in the room. The artist has to trust the printer with their vision, and the printer has to earn that trust by knowing the materials, the chemistry, and the press well enough to solve problems the artist may not even know exist yet. We didn't invent that relationship. It was passed down to printmakers around the world from master printers to apprentices. This is the process of keeping alive traditions, legacies and craftsmanship. Taking on a shop with fifty years of history already built into its walls can sometimes be a lot to carry, but most days it feels like a worthwhile challenge.
Milestone is grateful to every artist who has chosen to collaborate with us over the last five decades, and to James Reed for building something worth continuing. Here's to the next fifty years.
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