Drum Roll Please: Risography for all!

nia musiba is an ant-loving, asparagus-hating multidisciplinary creative based in Portland, Oregon with a lifelong commitment to diversifying art and design spaces. nia is interested in collaboration, experimentation, question-asking, friend-making, and above all else, dreaming big. Her depictions of Black and brown bodies serve as a way to reclaim the tenderness and complexities of her own identity as well as an opportunity to hold space for other people of color who historically have been misrepresented in overly flattened, brutalized, and hyper-sexualized ways within art and media.

Risograph served as one of nia’s earliest entry points into art, eventually evolving into a trusted tool of communication, self-expression, connection, and even time travel. Through works like “Worm Slut,” a collaborative, nonsensical, spiritual zine experience, and “Echo Chamber,” a mind dump of rage and lust and vulnerability, risograph has offered a way to connect nia with her inner workings and illuminate universal feelings in approachable and artful ways. Risograph has also become an invitation for nia to see the machine itself as a collaborator, using it as a translator between different periods in her art practice. Bringing past works in mediums such as cut paper or acrylic on canvas to the risograph and allowing them to be transformed then feels like a practice in embodying the beauty of flexibility, fluidity, and the ability to let things be exactly as they are in any given moment.