For over a decade, Nuria Montiel has worked to expand the artistic and political significance of printmaking in her home country of Mexico and abroad. Her innovative participatory project, the Imprenta móvil (Mobile Press) (2010–ongoing), has been an important part of this effort. In the early 2010s, Montiel began pushing a makeshift printing cart through the streets of Mexico City, inviting passersby to create prints in this mobile workshop. Several of the prints produced by participants reflected on the violence caused by the ongoing war between the Mexican state and illicit drug cartels.     

Mundos posibles / Possible Worlds presents extensive documentation of past iterations of the Mobile Press. Moreover, the exhibition features a new selection of prints created by Montiel in collaboration with students from different institutions. Specifically, the artist worked with students from the Universidad de las Américas Puebla in Mexico and from Portland State University in the United States. Montiel first conducted a series of art workshops with her students at UDLAP, asking them to reflect on the social issues affecting their everyday lives; working together with the students, the artist then created numerous prints that she brought with her to Portland. After arriving in the city in the fall of 2023, Montiel conducted several art workshops with PSU students studying art history, graphic design, and art practice. In these workshops, she encouraged the students to engage in an artistic dialogue with the prints produced by the UDLAP students, underscoring the transnational connections that can emerge between different communities. The resulting graphic works, presented in the gallery space of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at PSU, further showcase the transformative potential of printmaking in disparate artistic and geographic contexts.