Printing Big: 2026 Road Roller Day Transforms Woodblocks into Public Spectacle
03.11.2026
The public 2026 Road Roller Day event will be held on Friday, April 10 at Rowland Commons on the Kansas City Art Institute campus.
This free event will run from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM, offering a full day to watch the process.
Put simply, Road Roller Day at the Kansas City Art Institute features large-scale woodblock prints created with heavy construction equipment (not a steamroller; modern road rollers run on gas), using designs specially crafted for the event.
Miguel Rivera, Associate Professor and Chair of Printmaking, says the public is welcome to witness the activity unfolding in front of Vanderslice Hall. The scale of the project and its public setting add an element of mystery, with anticipation building for each reveal.
The finished work will be a multi-panel print, with each segment designed to fit together like a puzzle and form a larger composition. The public is also invited to bring nontraditional items to print on, such as hats, shirts, or even a banana, anything that can hold ink, for an impromptu press by the road roller.
The Kansas City Art Institute extends special thanks to Herc Rentals and Speedball Art Products for directly supporting Road Roller Day 2026 with equipment and materials!
The guest visiting artist for the 2026 Road Roller Day is Eric Saline, and the theme for this year’s event is “Home.” In his work, Saline creates imaginary worlds he calls home in response to the modern realities of migration and involuntary displacement.
Leading up to Road Roller Day, sophomore students will use virtual reality for initial sketching and brainstorming, collaborating online with Saline through Gravity Sketch to develop a basic CAD model of a home. From there, they will select a view within the VR environment to capture and use for subsequent CNC routing.
These prints may reflect universal stories of travel and the reconstruction of identity, speaking to the origins of our existence and our enduring need for a foundational place. Beyond the initial conceptualization of the artwork, preparation for Road Roller Day begins days in advance in the Printmaking department, where students spend long hours carving large-format wooden plates in the studio.
Image: Miguel Rivera, Associate Professor and Chair of Printmaking, on a road roller
Visiting Artist Eric Saline
What is a home?
Nowadays, in the age of globalization and internationalism, this concept can take on an abstract dimension that expands far beyond a specific physical location.
Visiting Artist Eric Saline is a global nomad, a “third culture kid” long before the term was coined: born to an American-Venezuelan mother and a Swedish-American father, his formative years were spent growing up in France, skateboarding in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. He had moved 11 times by the time he graduated from Colorado College in 2000.
Now living in Göteborg, Sweden, since 2010, home for him has to do with family, landscape, climate, and community.
With abundant evidence of various structures in his work, from brick walls and buildings to Moroccan-inspired patterns and spider webs, Eric explores the production of images through a wide range of CAD-CAM approaches, always returning to the authentic materials and techniques of an analog art-making practice.
Visiting Artist Lecture
Eric Saline
Monday, April 6
8:30–10:00 a.m.
Epperson Auditorium
Road Roller Printing
Friday, April 10
9:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.
Free and open to the public
KCAI Rowland Commons
4415 Warwick Blvd.
Kansas City, MO 64111
Media Contact
Miguel Rivera
Printmaking Department Chair
Kansas City Art Institute
816-802-3549