Book artist Felicia Rice started practicing her craft as a teenager in the 70s, but she wasn’t fully comfortable with the designation of ‘artist.’ The daughter of artists, she saw her role as revealing the work of others.
But over her lifetime, experiences in both the professional and private realm have helped her feel more confident that the books that she creates in collaboration with others are, in fact, her art. Raising a son and a stepson helped her look at her own interactions with others and she realized that she is a person who doesn’t step forward until the right time.
Now, she says, is the time. Having lost her home in the CZU Lightning Complex Fires of 2020, Felicia has rebuilt her studio and moved forward with her art, culminating in her latest release, the art book, trade edition, and film, Heavy Lifting. The book was a collaboration with poet Theresa Whitehill.
“I was very self-deprecating as a young person, very self-effacing,” Felicia reveals. “Even as I stepped into the community I was I was careful, humble. Now I’m not so humble anymore. I’m trying to show off some of what I can do and I feel that, yes, I have something to add to the conversation.”
“I just listened to your interview on The Babblery; it is so wonderful that I want to go back and take some notes to remember various of your eloquent words.”
Linda Smith
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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. In 1974 she moved to Santa Cruz to study typography and letterpress printing under designer-printer Jack Stauffacher at UCSC. During that time she worked with William Everson, poet-printer in the Lime Kiln Press, and with Sherwood Grover, pressman for 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, is held in Special Collections at UC Santa Barbara.
Felicia founded Moving Parts Press in Santa Cruz in 1977 where she entertained clients and authors, artists, and students for over a decade before moving the press to the mountains of Bonny Doon. Her letterpress shop was destroyed in the CZU Lightning Complex Fire in August 2020. She relocated to Mendocino and, with the help of 800 supporters, was able to reestablish Moving Parts Press in her childhood home.
Under the Moving Parts Press imprint, Felicia has created and published hundreds of books, broadsides, and prints in close collaboration with visual and performing artists, writers, and philosophers. 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.
