Felicia Rice is Miriam’s youngest daughter. A book artist, arts educator, and sole proprietor of Moving Parts Press in Mendocino, CA, Felicia has collaborated with visual and performing artists and writers to create book structures that combine word and image since 1977. Moving Parts Press publications have been included in exhibitions and collections nationally and internationally and have been bestowed numerous awards and grants. She writes, “As a printer, my job is to confront complex issues and render my response in book form. As an artist, my job is to do so with profound integrity. As a publisher, my job is to make these issues public. As printers have done every decade since Gutenberg, I’m here to argue for a more just society.“
In August 2020, a devastating megafire destroyed almost one thousand structures in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where Felicia had lived and worked for fifty years. The fire took her home, letterpress shop, and entire inventory of artists’ books. She was lucky to be able to relocate immediately to the Rice family home in Mendocino where her parents Miriam and Ray Rice had lived since the 1960s. The tremendous loss was mitigated when eight hundred amazing individuals, institutions, and organizations donated to a GoFundMe campaign which enabled the full recovery of her lost letterpress printshop. She is currently hard at work in a brand new studio built using these funds which is modeled on drawings made by her father in 1980.
The mushroom depicted in the current logo is Felicia’s work and dates from the 1980s when her mom asked her to develop a logo for the organization. After her mother’s death in 2010, Felicia became active with the IMDI. She became the IMDI director when Dorothy Beebee stepped down in 2011. In this role she focuses on:
• keeping Miriam’s book, Mushrooms for Dyes, Paper, Pigments & Myco-Stix™, in print,
• filling book orders,
• updating and maintaining the IMDI website which she redesigned in 2021
• maintaining the Miriam C. and Raymond Rice Archive at UCSC,
• acting in my role as IMDI director as needed, currently updating the mission statement and bylaws.
