ACP: Your work is informed by family, queer domesticity, and life’s little moments that are often overlooked. What is it about these themes that compels you to capture them in your work?

DD: I have been hesitant to include myself in my past work—there’s a vulnerability in allowing your experiences to reflect onto an audience. I wanted this work to push me into that space, and in doing so, it led me to better understand more about the parts and pieces I am made of: a family of turn-of-the-20th century Italian immigrants, a deep-rooted connection to a few blocks of Gravesend, Brooklyn, a childhood of car trips, weekends with Grandma and parents who would lead separate lives with separate partners. It opened me up to exploring my own queerness—and just how far back I’ve been able to recognize it.

The work is a record of these memories, constructed with images, text (and text-adjacent mark-making), color, textures, and drawing. It’s simple post-it notes, like the ones attached to the top plastic wrapped cupcakes dropped off at school for your birthday, it’s the seeds and plants you helped your dad bury in the garden at the top of the hill in the backyard. It’s the nursery school paper plate handprint Christmas wreath hanging off the closet doorknob that my mom probably still has somewhere in the attic. And those so-vivid-you-can-smell-them memories of growing up—and the shape of everything they’ve made me.

ACP: What is it about printmaking as a practice that speaks to you? What would you tell someone who might be interested in the medium but doesn’t know where to start?

DD: I am almost sure you do not have the space for me to extoll everything I love about printmaking and how it is my not-so-secret plan to make everyone a printmaker. Above all of it though, is that really anyone can be a printmaker. Have you made fingerprint paintings? You’ve experienced inking a matrix. Have you ever walked in fresh snow? You’ve made prints. Have you ever made a batch of slice-and-bake cookies? Congrats. You’re a printmaker.

Printmaking—for as long as it has existed—is technique. It is learning how to carve a block, scratch a piece of metal, push ink through a stencil, draw on the surface of a stone. Like tying your shoe, printmaking is a series of steps to follow that lead to a satisfying result. As a teaching artist and ACP’s Printmaking Studio Manager, I believe in the transformative power and small-d democracy of printmaking—that anyone can make prints and anyone can be a printmaker. The practice of printmaking—the day-to-day making—is the thing that makes you better at it.

What would I tell someone who doesn’t know where to start? “Try it.” Take a workshop, check out the ACP’s printmaking classes, buy a DIY kit, watch a video, go look at prints. Discover something you would have never known about your ability to make art. That’s the real power of printmaking, a real “I made that, and that, and that…” (printmaking, after all, is about making multiples). I have a deep respect for and seriousness about the traditions of printmaking, it’s techniques and tools—but at the end of the day, it is ink, paper and a little bit of time. Try it.