Lake Rats Dispatch: Buffalo has a New Home for Print-Based Art and You’re Invited

Chris Fritton is many things: printer, artist, poet, publisher just to name a few.

The former studio director of the Western New York Book Arts Center, Chris co-founded the celebrated Buffalo Small Press Book Fair. He is also known for his long-running project — The Itinerant Printer — in which he logged more than 150,000 miles traveling across the United States and Canada, visiting letterpress shops and creating exclusive prints.

Chris Fritton is also prolific. And these days, his latest project is a free, anonymously produced Buffalo-based arts newspaper called Lake Rats Dispatch, which for the last several months has been “mysteriously” appearing in coffee shops, record stores, laundromats, galleries, bookstores and numerous other places throughout the city.

Now, this coming Saturday, Chris will be hosting a grand opening party at the Dispatch’s new headquarters at 67 Elmwood Avenue from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. The event — to which the public is welcome — will feature woodblock prints from Sudi Wang, the first chapbook on the Lake Rats imprint by Kevin Thurston, and music from Buffalo folk singer Tyler Bagwell. The new publishing house features a working print shop with an antique press, a small gallery that focuses on print-based art, and a retail space for posters, hard-to-find magazines and chapbooks. Recently, Chris spoke with 1120 Press about the creation and mission of Lake Rats Dispatch, its new space and Saturday’s grand opening event. Check out our interview below.

Chris Fritton at Lake Rats Dispatch HQs (photos: by Matt Smith)

1120 PRESS: Thank you for speaking with us and congratulations on the launch of Lake Rats Dispatch and the upcoming grand opening of your space here. What inspired you to create this newspaper?

CHRIS FRITTON: The initial inspiration was taken from the early 19-teens-and-20s Dada periodicals. Those guys were often putting out work anonymously and they were thinking of the newspapers and magazines they were making as ‘single-art objects.’ That always appealed to me. I thought right away: ‘What if I did this for the city?’ There hasn't been any kind of print publication here in a long time. There hasn't been a weekly, there hasn't been a monthly… But I wasn't interested in your usual arts newspaper, with a list of bands playing each week and stuff like that.

My friend, Max Collins, and I had kicked this idea around about three years ago: ‘What if we made a newspaper, and then maybe turned it into an imprint to make smaller chapbooks. Then eventually maybe make full-size books, monographs for artists, and things like that.’ So that was the initial trajectory. It finally ended up coming to fruition because of another project that failed. I was going to do an art vending machine.

There's Art-O-Matic and a lot of other ones that have really taken off in the last 10 or 15 years. Imagine something like an old cigarette machine, or a snack machine, and in it you would put five-by-seven prints, or small paintings. I received a grant from the Buffalo Institute of Contemporary Art for $2,000 and it wasn't enough to do the vending machine idea. Then I was like, ‘All right. Time for Plan B’ and that was the newspaper and it’s really panned out.

So, it all started with this idea of how to get art to people in an affordable way and in a way that they would engage with in a public space. Although the vending machine idea didn’t happen, with this newspaper I'm still able to get everybody's artwork out there, and it's free and accessible.

1120: The work featured in the Dispatch is anonymous. Can you talk about why that’s so?

CF: The anonymity aspect was always kind of big part of it for me. I love the idea of anonymity freeing up artists. Say you're a painter but you write poetry. A lot of times no one's going to see your poetry, and a lot of times you might even be anxious about putting it out there in the world. You're already pigeonholed as a painter. It can be really difficult to present other kinds of work. This space is like an experimental space that's free, and it's kind of open from whatever judgment or prejudice that might come along with that. So if you’re known for a specific type of work but you want to give me something else, you get to put it in the public with high distribution and you don’t necessarily have to — and I don’t really want to phrase it this way, but — deal with any blowback from it. I really do like the idea that it’s a free and uncensored space.

1120: That's interesting because it almost seems counterintuitive in a sense since it’s important to some artists to be associated with the art they create given that it is a personal expression of themselves.

CF: Fully, fully agree. I think what a lot of people don't talk about — and I would include myself in this — if I’m known for making letterpress prints in a particular style and I no longer want to execute them in that style, what I've found is that even on my own social media channels and things like that, the moment I put out something that's a little bit outside of that box that I’m known for, there’s almost no response to it sometimes.

1120: So, what you’re describing is a lot like an actor who also has a band, but their music is not taken seriously, or ignored, merely because they’re known as an actor.

CF: Yes. I’m opposed to when a ‘cult of personality’ gets built up around a body of work. So, just because maybe I like you specifically as a human, I value your art differently. There's no way around that. But there are spaces, like this newspaper, where you might be able to escape it a little bit. It doesn't carry the weight of that cult of personality if I can produce the work anonymously.

1120: On Saturday you will be having a grand opening here. You’ve been

publishing already for seven months. Why was it important for you to finally have a physical space?

CF: I always do work that is community-based, and what I was creating through the newspaper in a lot of ways was like a virtual community. Even if the artists don't know one another, they end up in the same space at the same time and they are having their work presented to people. In the past, I organized the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair for 10 years from 2006 to 2016, and that was all about bringing together artists and publishers and poets and people like that. I ran the Western New York Book Arts Center for a long time, from around 2008 to 2014. And I started the Itinerant Printer trip, which was traveling all around North America and visiting letterpress shops. So, I think that so much of the work I've done over the last three decades has been about generating community, whether it's on a small scale or really large scale.

With the Dispatch, I felt like maybe that was missing. So, a physical space became a focal point in my head, a place where people could come, hang out while I'm printing something, and meet one another. We'll have small openings here for books when they come out or when a new issue of the newspaper comes out. Having a place to come together, I think, is incredibly important right now. I don't harp on it a lot, but everything I do, and everything you see in the shop, is analog. With the tsunami of AI and everything else that's happening, it feels more and more important to have that kind of real, physical connection with people. I want people to see how the objects are made. I want them to interact with that, and I want them to interact with one another. The only way to do that is to create a space.

1120: You’ve mentioned that you believe it's a critical time for a project like this. Why do you feel that way?

CF: I think of printing and other vocations historically and in the way they originally started. It might have required 1,000 people to produce a newspaper at one time, and then as technology improved, it was only 100. And then as technology improved even more, it was only 10. I've seen that happen over and over again. For instance, consider the robotics now in the auto industry. What we're seeing with AI is really similar. Someone who might have dedicated their whole life to graphic design now sees AI coming for their job. There's an inevitability to it.

But what we can control is the small circle of people that we interact with all the time, and that's what I hope for here. So, if it's the 10 people I know, or the 20 people I'm close to, I can influence those people, and they can influence me. I would love to see a wellspring of these smaller places happen.

1120: At the same time, you say you don't believe print is dead. What gives you that optimism considering all that’s happening with technology?

CF: I see its effectiveness daily, whether it's in a little handbill, whether it's the emotional impact of a chapbook that is really meaningful to people, or whether it’s in the posters we paste all over the street. It's still an incredibly effective method of communication. I think that we thought there'd be a full-fledged turn, 100 percent, to the digital world — that the only place you'd ever know about an event is on Facebook. But every single day, there's still people in bookstores, in record stores, walking down the street and seeing that one poster that was just hung. I still see it work. The pendulum always swings here in America, and that pendulum has swung so far toward digital, and it feels like the absolute apogee of that is AI. Now, the pendulum is starting to swing back, and I think this is sort of the moment for it.

1120: Thank you for speaking with us. Before we go, can you tell us what people should expect at the grand opening and why were you interested in hosting this event?

CF: I think it was just important for me to say, ‘Alright, maybe you have all seen the newspaper now, but what about the other work in print that’s being done in Buffalo in conjunction with it, from the poster work to small chapbooks.’ I want people to see that and experience it. I want people to experience the little analog print shop that I have here because people don’t always get to see the methods of production. I wanted to say, ‘OK, we’re officially kicking this thing off.’ And, also, it was just a good excuse to have a party.