“As a printer, my job is to confront complex issues and render my response to them in book form. As an artist, my job is to do so with profound integrity. As a publisher, my job is to make these issues public. As printers have done every decade since Gutenberg, I’m here to argue for a more just society.”
Felicia Rice is a native Californian rarely found far from the coast. She was born in San Francisco and raised in the Bay Area art world of the ’50s and ’60s. At 19 she discovered her vocation: the art of the book and in 1974 she moved to Santa Cruz to attend the University of California, Santa Cruz and study typography and letterpress printing under designer-printer Jack Stauffacher at Cowell College. During that time, she worked with William Everson, poet-printer in the Lime Kiln Press at the McHenry Library on his renowned book, Granite & Cypress, and with Sherwood Grover, pressman for 30 years at the preeminent fine press, Grabhorn Press in San Francisco. In 1981 she inherited Sherwood’s press and type library. The library, along with the rest of the Moving Parts Press archive, now resides in Special Collections at UC Santa Barbara.
In 1977 Felicia founded Moving Parts Press in Santa Cruz where for over a decade she entertained clients and authors, artists, and students before moving the press to the mountains of Bonny Doon. Under the Moving Parts Press imprint, and occasionally the subsidiary Mutant Drone Press, she has created and published hundreds of books, broadsides, prints and ephemera. These editions of new literature, works in translation, and contemporary art explore the relationship of word and image, typography and the visual arts, the fine arts and popular culture, political criticism and social impact.
Felicia collaborates with visual artists, performing artists, and writers to create book structures in which word and image meet and merge. With one foot firmly planted in the 19th century and the other in the 21st, Rice employs traditional typography and bookmaking methods together with digital technology to bring the flexibility of screen-based design to the texture and history of the letterpress-printed page.
In her spoken word performance practice Felicia explores the book as performance art. In 2014 she published the artists’ book, DOC/UNDOC, a seven-year collaboration with four others: Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Gustavo Vazquez, Jennifer Gonzalez, and Zachary Watkins. Through the process of developing this transmedia project, Felicia experienced a profound transformation that led to her work as a performance artist.
Felicia designed and printed work on commission for over 20 years and taught book arts at UCSC for 14 years before becoming an administrator for UCSC Extension’s Graphic Design Program and later UCSC’s Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program, retiring in 2017. In December 2018 she was featured in PBS’s award-winning documentary series Craft in America in the episode, VISIONARIES.
In August 20, 2020 Felicia’s home and letterpress printing studio in the Santa Cruz Mountains went up in flames in the CZU Lightning Complex Fire. Her letterpress printshop and printmaking studio, along with her entire inventory of artists’ books, was destroyed. She had just announced her most recent edition, The Necropolitics of Extraction, with the texts by T.J. Demos, in June 2020. The book is a critical visual exploration of issues of extractionism of both human and non-human resources. It closes with a call to action, “To make the impossible gradually possible, there is no other choice.” 75% of the edition was destroyed in a devastating fire that can clearly be traced to the climate crisis and only 10 copies survived. Fortunately, Felicia was able to relocate to her family home in Mendocino, and with the generous help of almost 800 supporters, she has been reestablishing the Moving Parts Press studio with new projects underway.
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