Help us build a home for arts and publishing

Secret Riso Club is raising funds to open our new space in Bushwick for printing, art books, community workshops, and more!

We have signed a lease for a 2000 sqft storefront on Central Ave in Bushwick, Brooklyn. We need your support to open our new doors and continue growing our impact.

All funds raised will go towards:

Buildout: Construction materials and labor, flooring, work tables, and retail amenities: ~ $30,000

Studio Equipment: New Risograph printer (sharing our current drums) and binding equipment so that multiple people can work at once ~ $30,000

Inventory: We plan to purchase art books from independent publishers and artists, and produce new publications and prints for our shop ~$15,000

Reserve for building programming in new space: ~$20,000

Moving Costs: ~$5,000

Secret Riso Club started in 2017 in Gonzalo’s apartment. Since then, we’ve evolved through 3 studio spaces, slowly gaining square footage and growing our programs, services, and impact. Our current studio space (700 sqft) allows us to host group workshops for up to 12 people, rent studio time to artists, hold private workshops, do our own Riso and screen-printing, and serve as a gathering place for book launches, pop-ups, and open studios. While we’ve loved our times in this studio, we are limited in what we can do here due to space constraints. In order to host workshops, we have to pause and put away all client and personal work. Events and larger gatherings require moving half of our equipment out of the space. Teaching a private workshop requires others to work offsite. Our new space (2000 sqft), will give us the space we need to grow by allowing us to simultaneously expand programming, offer workshops for larger groups of all ages, bring in guest instructors, make our resources available to more people, and distribute our own work and other artists’ work through the retail space.

For the past 7 years, we have been entirely self-funded, using profits from our contract services and workshops to fund our own artistic practices, publishing projects, and community initiatives such as free and reduced-cost printing services for activists and organizers. We’ve invested thousands of our personal dollars into SRC, taking as little as possible to cover our living expenses and working other jobs to sustain. We plan to take out business loans to cover a portion of expenses, but need your support at this initial stage.

Your contribution will allow us to build a new community hub for learning, sharing resources, publishing, and discovering new work. We can’t wait to welcome you into the space to continue learning and creating. We are tremendously grateful to all who have reached out to connect, chatted with us at book fairs, participated in our workshops, printed with us, and shared their knowledge and resources in the last 7 years. We owe our success to our community, and look forward to the next 7 years and beyond!

ABOUT SECRET RISO CLUB

We are a graphic design and risograph studio that focuses on the intersection of social justice, community building, art and design. In our practice, we work to build a platform that serves as a collaborative space for developing ideas and new projects. SRC is run in collaboration between Gonzalo Guerrero and Tara Ridgedell. Learn More

OUR TEAM

Gonzalo Guerrero (he/him) created SRC in 2017 a few years after immigrating to NYC from Chile. As designer, Gonzalo’s practice is focused on the use of printing as a tool to experiment and explore ideas around identity, activism and culture.

Tara Ridgedell (she/her) has over ten years of public school teaching experience and comes to the practice with accessibility for all learners in mind. Her work focuses on both inward and outward connection and breaking down capitalism’s individual centered focus to form meaningful relationships and stronger communities.

Xena Brar (they/them), a multidisciplinary designer from NYC, facilitates printing for artists, programming, and contributes to design.