How an artist best known for potty-mouthed cards became her small Minnesota town’s soul

ST. JOSEPH, Minn. — On a quiet street on a quiet October night, a group gathered in a garage-turned-studio for a party, one that revolved around a hulking, century-old letterpress machine. Artist Mary Bruno smeared bright pink ink on one side of the machine’s roller and teal on the other.

Then, with a grin, she flipped a switch. The roller started spinning, smacking with ink, moving left to right to create a third color in its center: purple.

“Magic,” someone murmured.

“Oh, yeah,” Bruno said, nodding, “she’s real nice.”

Bruno, owner of Bruno Press, brings people together to fashion beautiful posters in this studio, which is itself covered with beautiful posters, even on the ceiling. It is a straightforward task — set type, apply ink, crank press — but no small feat in a time when cellphones sap our attention and politics divide our blocks. And, thanks to Bruno, the process always makes a bit of magic, too.

“Awesome, dude!” she encourages the newbie printers in her thick Minnesota accent. “Good one!”

A letterpress artist, Bruno has committed to St. Joseph, a city of 7,000 an hour northwest of Minneapolis, and to this garage, where her father worked before her. His death two decades ago brought her back, to a place she never expected to find herself.

Here, the 51-year-old has become known for her potty-mouthed greeting cards, her bold art prints, her general badassery. (Her cards are divided into categories like “sweet,” “salty” and “boozy.”) Her prints often have a feminist bent. (Her latest depicts seedlings sprouting from a charred forest floor: “We are the granddaughters of the witches you couldn’t burn.”) She promotes the annual Shop Small Crawl, a local event she invented, with goofy videos. (This year’s involved her “smoking wheelies” on a BMX bike.)

But her greatest work is subtle, elegant, even pious.

Amid the pandemic, Bruno created a 36-foot-long, 30-page scroll of the Rule of Saint Benedict, now on display at St. John’s University, consulting nuns about its text and hand-carving its intricate images.

When Bruno took it on, those close to her wondered why. “I was like, ‘What are you doing?’” said Sam Bruno, Mary’s niece and studio-helper-turned-business-consultant. But over time her niece realized that the values of the Benedictines align with Bruno’s own. Community. Craftsmanship.

Plus, “she saw it as a challenge,” Sam Bruno said. Could she overcome her reputation as “just the sweary card lady?”

The October print party, held for employees of Jupiter Moon Ice Cream, began as many gatherings in Bruno’s studio begin and end — sitting around the work table, swapping stories.

“OK,” Bruno said, wiping her hands on her apron. “I’m just gonna start with, you know, who the hell I am.” Bruno’s family moved to St. Joseph from Philadelphia in the mid-1970s because her dad, artist Don Bruno, got a job at the College of St. Benedict. Between photography and silk screen courses, he designed religious text for the liturgical press at St. John’s University. Then, at St. Cloud State University, he taught typography and design.

Meanwhile, he designed logos for local businesses and started hanging out with “these old letterpress printers,” Mary Bruno said. When technology moved on, they were ready to scrap the presses and recycle the type. “But my dad was like, ‘Can I have this stuff?’ So he had an instant print shop.”

Bruno hung around her dad’s studio, carving linoleum and listening to Neil Young.

But she wanted to get away, and after earning a BFA in printmaking, she worked — and got fired from — a bunch of gigs, including as a cake decorator and a camp counselor, landing in Madison, Wis.

“I didn’t want to be in my dad’s shadow,” Bruno said, shaking her head, “a dick move.” And she didn’t believe she was anything like him — “also hilarious,” given the similarities she now sees in their style, on and off the paper.

Then, in 2003 at age 63, he died of a brain aneurysm, and she found herself back in St. Joseph, back in his studio.

“I probably came back with a chip on my shoulder, you know, there’s nothing cool here, no cool people here,” Bruno said. “I just always thought I was a big city kid.”

She would pick up her 13-year-old niece from school and the two of them would “just print stuff that made us laugh,” she said, “like print swears because, like, there’s no adults around, right?”

They attended a card convention in New York City, and their stuff stood out. Then, everyone was designing on computers, printing via polymer plates. Neon pink was trending. Bruno was setting type, hand carving linoleum blocks. And she hated neon pink.

Even as the cards took off, Bruno struggled to figure out what type of printer she was. The assertion, on her first business cards, that she was a “fine” printer felt like a lie. Other printers handled paper with gloves, inspected type with a loupe.

Then she met Amos Paul Kennedy Jr., a printer from Detroit, who slung his bold prints from a beat-up suitcase. They understood each other. They both approach the press with a childlike enthusiasm, Kennedy said, and don’t take themselves too seriously. Kennedy convinced Bruno that “printer” was an honorable title, no “fine” required.

“She prints for the people,” Kennedy said.

Which isn’t to say she doesn’t create fine art. “Her carving skills are just magnificent now,” he said. And the scroll! “The scroll is a masterpiece,” Kennedy said, drawing out the word. “It is the piece that says, ‘I have arrived.’”

On a recent morning, Bruno sat at her work table, carving trees from a large linotype block. One cut went off course, but she didn’t pause, slicing the next at a new angle.

She was making another edition of her popular witches reduction print, a process of carving, inking, carving, inking, carving and inking again. And she had a deadline: That afternoon, she and a few other local business owners were set to deliver a $2,800 check to Planned Parenthood, raised in September via an annual “Make & Bake” fundraiser they’d dreamed up. Then she was headed to Obbink Distilling to taste-test a whiskey collaboration called Craftsmen Ship, for which she’d designed the artwork.

Plus, it was her busy season, so there were more cards to print, more events to plan.

“Mary is the heart and soul of St. Joe,” said Mayor Rick Schultz. “She knows everybody, she reaches out to everybody.”

At first, Schultz and Bruno didn’t get along, both said. Bruno was creative, outspoken. Schultz played by the rules. But both loved this city. “We just started listening to one another rather than arguing with one another,” said Schultz. He credits Bruno with rallying people around “a vision of what St. Joe’s should be,” with small businesses at its center. She branded the nickname “Joetown,” and “was right on the money with that.”

Now, Schultz dog sits Bruno’s rescue pup Snow. He keeps a bottle of tequila in her shop.

“What is said in the shop stays in the shop,” he said with a laugh.

Bruno traces her full embrace of the city back to 2014, when doctors diagnosed her with breast cancer and as a carrier of a BRCA gene mutation. As an independent woman, she had an “extreme aversion” to asking for help or money and “would have rather died in the gutter than say, ‘Hey, man, I’m struggling,’” she said. But a friend persuaded her to launch a GoFundMe, and within hours, folks had given $20,000.

They included a woman who’d been in her kindergarten class and someone she’d worked with one summer at the paper mill.

“It still chokes me up me,” she said, her voice catching. “That was sort of the beginning of me realizing the extent of what community means, right?”

As Bruno approached the scroll, set in a long wooden case, she got close to the plexiglass protecting it and, with the tip of her index finger, picked up a bit of dust.

At the scroll’s start, two figures, haloed in gold leaf: Saint Benedict and Saint Scholastica. But throughout, local references, too: Sacred Heart Chapel, as seen from the nuns’ entrance in the back. The swooping knot of the Four Fine Arts, a logo made by Don Bruno.

“If there are artisans in the monastery,” one piece of highlighted text says, “they are to practice their craft with all humility, but only with the abbot’s permission.”

Master potter and artist-in-residence Richard Bresnahan, who had known Bruno’s father, came to her with the idea for the scroll, part of a piece he’d planned for a new sculpture garden at St. John’s. He wanted the work to be made by a woman.

Bruno was flattered, if a bit uneasy. She began by spending time in the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, taking in its scrolls and imagery. But she struggled to get through the rule’s text. She relied on the nuns to share its highlights, its deeper meanings.

“I don’t think people would have naturally said, ‘Oh, yeah, they’ll get on,’” said Sister Karen Rose, prioress of St. Benedict’s Monastery. People have a stereotyped idea of what a nun is going to be, and Bruno is an artist with “some very down-to-earth language,” Rose continued. But they hit it off.

“Mary roots herself in the place where she is, and tries to build community in that place — rather than looking for the perfect place to do it.”

Rose was moved by Bruno’s commitment to the rule’s content. One of its themes: How do you create a loving community of people who care about one another? “The word that springs to mind is ‘reverent,’” Rose said. “She was very reverent toward the project. ... It really came from her heart.”

Rose helped find funds for the scroll’s handmade traveling case, which folds up to squeeze into the back of Bruno’s Subaru, “I mean, barely,” as Bruno put it. “You can’t fit a sandwich in there.” And Rose helped Bruno find other religious homes that would appreciate seeing the work. Bruno has taken the scroll on the road, both to religious centers and to one of her artistic homes: Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wis.

Then, last year, a dozen nuns and administrators met at Bruno’s print shop, crafting their own poster, picking their own type.

Bruno left that gathering more convinced than ever that although she’s not a practicing Catholic, “I am a Benedictine in some ways, right?”

“Just the collaborating and community and hard work,” she said. “I mean, hell, yeah.”