The Art Lab at 180 Willey Street is not the kind of place that announces itself. It is a pop-up art space, one of the storefronts that Main Street Morgantown has temporarily filled through its Morgantown ReStored program, an initiative that puts art and history exhibits into underused downtown windows and empty retail bays rather than letting them sit dark. On the first Friday of October, from 6 to 9 p.m., it will be full of ink, paper, and people.
The occasion is First Friday for the Arts, the free monthly gallery crawl organized by the Arts Council of Greater Morgantown, which sends visitors, locals, experts, and amateurs alike through rotating exhibitions, live demonstrations, music, and hands-on activities across downtown. The Art Lab is one of the newer stops on that route. For October, it belongs to the WVU Print Club.
Twenty to 30 framed prints will hang on the walls, a collection drawn from last year's printmaking classes at West Virginia University. Alongside them, students will be selling unframed prints, stickers, and other work, a mix of assignment pieces and personal projects made outside of class. "Students are always making work beyond assignments, so there will be a range of things for sale at many different price points," says Joseph Lupo, the club's faculty advisor and a professor of art at WVU.
Lupo knows the club well. He has spent his career at WVU teaching printmaking while maintaining his own studio practice in printmaking and comics. His students' work has traveled widely under his watch, including a two-day visit from printmaker Leigh Garcia for the Lost Arrow Printmaking Lecture, in memory of Joe Hestick, during which WVU printmakers pulled a series of intaglio prints on Kitakata paper to be dyed and constructed into their final forms back in the studio.
But the centerpiece of the October evening is not on the wall. It is the movable press. Buyers choose from six to nine original designs, pick a T-shirt size, and the students print the shirt in front of them, right there on the spot. "Live T-shirt printing is always fun," Lupo says. "People get a kick out of seeing their T-shirts printed right then and there."
That immediacy is the point. First Friday is built around art happening in real time, and a press rolling ink onto cotton is about as direct as an art demonstration gets. It is also, for some of the students involved, a first real encounter with an audience. Lupo notes that for some students, an exhibition like this is the first time they get to show their work to the public at all, which makes the evening as much about encouragement as commerce.
And the commerce has a purpose. The sale of prints, stickers, and shirts is a fundraiser, with the proceeds aimed at sending students to the 2026 Mid America Print Council Conference in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. That conference, titled "Printelligence," runs October 7 to 10, 2026, at Louisiana State University, and it is one of the significant gatherings in the printmaking field. The Mid America Print Council's Outstanding Printmaker Award this cycle went to Jenny Schmid of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.
Getting students to a conference like that is not incidental to a printmaking education. The WVU Print Club exists precisely to build community outside the classroom, expanding students' knowledge of printmaking methods through hands-on experience, live printing, and print sales, and organizing travel to conferences such as SGC International and the Mid America Print Council gathering. Fundraising is written into its mission, because conference attendance is expensive and the costs keep climbing.
"This funding will help pay for their airfare costs, which have been getting more and more expensive," Lupo says. "So it's going to a good cause."
Admission to the evening is free. Visitors can simply walk in, look at the work, talk to the people who made it, and, if a design catches their eye, leave with a shirt that did not exist a few minutes earlier. For anyone who has wished that more of the art made at WVU circulated around town, this is the chance to do something about it, and to send a few students a long way from Willey Street in the process.
First Friday for the Arts runs from 6 to 9 p.m. on Friday, October 2, at the Art Lab, 180 Willey Street. The Arts Council's website lists the month's participating locations.