Meet the couple behind Strange Powers Press

In between artist residencies, husband and wife Taro Waggoner and Mylan Nguyen added a riso printer to their living room. Around 2015, it was a nearly 400-pound, 5-foot-tall, 2.38-foot-wide RISO MZ790U from Craigslist. By 2019, it was a 258-pound, 2-foot-tall, 4-foot-wide RISO GR 3770 they bought from a church.

The couple are the founders of Strange Powers Press, a risograph press now headquartered at the Bishop Arts shop, WE ARE 1976, with their third printer, a RISO SF 9450. They share the space with Play Nice Press.

The mission of Strange Powers Press is to “promote and publish interesting zines and prints as well as hold workshops on various forms of printmaking and making small publications.”

If you’re not a guru on some of the latest graphic trends, risograph printing (riso) is a technique described as a “digital screen printing” process. First, you scan or upload an image to the machine which makes a stencil, known as the masters, inside. Then, placing a paper onto the feeder tray, it passes through one or two of the ink drums, creating a “digital” stamp based on the image, layering colors together into a finished art print.

“So you have the entire process of how you separate colors and overlay them for different color blending techniques and texture in a lot of the same way that you do with the silk screen, but it’s all contained in the little machine,” Nguyen says.

She says it’s like a screen printing studio inside of a Xerox machine, having discovered the technique through a printmaking toy called a Print Gocco in college.

Although they started the press in 2019, the couple had been in the Dallas art scene for longer. They met through an art show in 2011 and started dating shortly after that. They got married in 2013 and now have a 3-year-old daughter together.

Nguyen is an Oak Cliff native. She says she went “through the art school funnel” here, attending the W.E. Geiner Exploratory Arts Academy and Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing  and Visual Arts. Though she focused on theater in her youth, she did take one printmaking class in high school before leaving for Los Angeles, where she studied illustration at the Otis College of Art and Design, later obtaining a master’s from Southern Methodist University.

Waggoner is originally from Herndon, Virginia and relocated to Texas with his family when he was 13. He attended the University of Texas at Arlington, earning a bachelor’s degree in economics, and during that time also worked as a screen printer for Pony Express Printing where he got his foundation for working in graphic design. His artistic background includes illustration, ceramics and comics, even working on T-shirts for Hot Topic, BoxLunch and Spencer’s.

“After we got married and lived in Japan a little bit, we found some studios out there that would let you come in and use their (riso) machines to create your own artwork,” Nguyen says. “And so that was our first exposure, and our first trials in learning riso. And after that, we’re like, ‘How can we get our hands on one of these? How can we get our hands on one of these?’”

Returning to Dallas, they got the opportunity in 2015 from the former director of the artist residency at CentralTrak Heyd Fontenot.

“That funded our first big zine library show that included having a risograph printer in residence at the gallery, and from there, we’ve just kept on learning the machines and printing for ourselves and friends and opportunities have come up, really lucky ones, to do sort of gallery residencies with the machine,” she says.

Their latest gallery residency was held at the Oak Cliff Cultural Center, titled R.I.S.E. for “Riso Inspires Social Empowerment” to create protest posters. Nguyen says Iris Bechtol, the Cultural Programs Coordinator and Curator at the center, approached Strange Powers Press to host the series of workshops with that intentional art.

“I think we’re really busy, and it’s hard right now to what projects to do and say yes to and take on, but when it’s something that feels like it’s important, and it is for a good cause, and it makes space for people to have a voice in a place like Texas, where sometimes it feels scary to stand up for certain viewpoints, I think it was an easy yes, let’s do it,” Nguyen says.

Community engagement and workshops have been a cornerstone of the couple’s art practice, especially through their work with Strange Powers Press.

“I feel like with riso being essentially a printer, it’s really prime for collaboration with other people, too, and it’s exciting to share it because it’s not difficult to learn how to operate the machine. I mean there’s some nuances that you have to get used to, but it’s totally teachable in a workshop,” Waggoner says. “It’s really exciting to get to see people make something cool, and then they might even do some techniques that we didn’t know would look so cool.”

Nguyen added that it’s exciting to see what different voices bring to the table with this medium. She said that hosting a workshop like R.I.S.E. was on her New Year’s resolutions list.

“We’ve had a few projects where the intention was resistance or protest or activism in a few different ways,” Nguyen says. “And it’s something that we do want to keep doing and keep aligning ourselves with.”