NORTH ADAMS - As part of Downstreet Art 2012, PRESS: Letterpress as a Public Art Project opened its doors at 105 Main St. for a second year as hybrid workshop, studio and gallery with "Ink in the Blood: Printed Works on Paper."

This first show of the DownStreet Art 2012 season will feature the broadsides of artists Barry Sternlieb and Julio Granda.

For "Ink in the Blood," Sternlieb prints and Granda designs. Together, they create broadsides. Sternlieb, the original owner of the gallery's cornerstone Vandercook Universal III letterpress, defines broadsides as "a hybrid form that creates an interdependent or symbiotic relationship between word and image. The impact of this marriage should be greater than just reading one poem or viewing artwork, and should represent a new experience in which each element carries its own weight while contributing to a perfect balance of power as a whole."

The collaborative work displayed at this exhibit combines the images and text of two artists to create cohesive and interdependent pieces.

Some of the pieces take the words of poets, such as Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Pablo Neruda (translated by W. S. Merwin) and Jack Gilbert off of the bookpage, interprets them visually and typographically, and frames them on a wall. This allows the audience to view them from a new perspective and to interpret their meanings with the aid of color, font choice, image and overall layout.

"Barry and Julio, two creative forces, not

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only work together, but with poets from around the world, interpret their work through letterpress," Mowinski said in the new release announcing the exhibit. "Anyone interested typography should see this show."

During the run of the exhibit, Sternlieb will print a new broadside at PRESS, and will present an artist talk.

Granda, a member of the U.S. Navy, was born in New York City and spent his high school years in Tampa, Fla. He received his art training at the School of Visual Arts and Cooper Union in New York City.

A poet, Sternlieb is the author of four chapbooks, the latest of which, "Winter Crows," was awarded the 2008 Codhill Press Poetry Prize. His works appears in Poetry, The Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Commonweal, Journal of the American Medical Association and many others.

In addition, he was the recipient of a 2004 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Poetry. Sternlieb also edits Mad River Press, which has specialized in the very slow creation of handmade, limited edition letterpress poetry broadsides and chapbooks since 1986.

PRESS is supported by Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. For more information, go to letter-pressasapublicartproject.wordpress.com, find it on Facebook, http://www.facebook.com/letterpressaspublicart, or contact press.at.105main@gmail.com.