Twelve years ago Teresa Mucha was making ends meet slinging coffee at Gourmand cafe in Printers Row when she struck up an acquaintance with one of her regulars, artist Tony Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick had just bought an etching press and had plans to start up a fine-art print studio in the South Loop building that housed his World Tattoo Gallery. Impressed, Mucha, then a printmaking student at the School of the Art Institute, says she “pestered him” until he gave her a part-time job. “I thought, ‘This guy is going places, and I’m going with him!’” A year or so later she dropped out of school and began working for Fitzpatrick full-time at the fledgling Big Cat Press. “I did just about everything, from cleaning the place to getting the coffee,” she says, “but I was also immediately submerged in the technical aspect, etching plates right away. It was a lot of trial and error back then, but I learned quickly.” Big Cat grew over the following decade, moving to its current Bucktown location in 1995, and soon Mucha was rubbing elbows with established artists like Ed Paschke, Gladys Nilsson, and Jim Nutt, all of whom printed at the studio.
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Last fall the sale of about half the “spirit hand” drawings in her one-person show at Aron Packer Gallery enabled her to open her own printmaking studio, White Wings Press. “It was tough leaving [Big Cat], but I knew it was time to move on. I had been there so long; I had learned all that I could learn. I have bigger aspirations.”
