Felice Regan

Felice Regan has had a long love affair with art and nature, which began in 1970 when she started producing photographic silk screen images of animals at the Franklin Park Zoo outside of Boston. That same year, Regan received her B.F.A. degree from the Massachusetts College of Art and promptly founded the Graphic Workshop, an artists' collaborative.

At the outset, the workshop offered few paid jobs. Money, however, was never a driving factor. According to Kevin McCollough, a Harvard business student, "the workshop was really subsidized with sweat, blood, friendship, and everybody living cheap." As long as Regan and her friends had a place to work and the materials to express their artistic ideas, they and the workshop would survive.

In 1975, they got their first big break designing posters for the World Society for the Protection of Animals. Even after the project fell through, Regan decided to proceed anyway, creating what became known as the "Endangered Species" Series. The series, which has become a trademark of the workshop, led Regan and her colleagues to produce some of their best-known works.

Today, the Graphics Workshop is a viable commercial enterprise, providing both the space and the freedom for imaginative work. Felice Regan continues to encourage new generations of poster artists as a guest lecturer at the Massachusetts College of Art.

Therese Thau Heyman Posters American Style (New York and Washington, D.C.: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., in association with the National Museum of American Art, 1998)