Printmakers,
Some of you may recall we were interviewed during our card sale last week (which was very successful) – School videographer Alberto Vargas will be visiting us again today at 1:30 to document our activity.
As you know our new meeting place is P101. Please come at 12:45 – we have some work to do transferring our big cart down from 1122. There will also be an explanation of the photopolymer plate production process. See you there!
Also…exciting news! Can’t wait to tell….
September 17, Room N1119
Club Hour (12:45-2:15pm)
Please come to our first meeting this Thursday September 17th at 12:45 in Namm 1119.
There will be a demonstration of a two-color linoleum printing process that you can learn how to do this semester.
The print below was made right here at City Tech using materials you can easily master.
We’ll also do a little organizational work to choose club officers and take down names for club certification.
If you wish to be listed as a club member but cannot attend this meeting, it is important that you provide us with your name, full address, email, and empl. ID, which is the eight-digit ID number issued to you by the school. Club rules require that we have a least 15 non-officer members, so your name is needed!
Please feel free to contact us with any questions.
See you soon,
David Barthold
Club Co-Advisor
718 260 5139
Prof. Libby Clarke
Club Co-Advisor
sclarke@citytech.cuny.edu
We shall continue the creative madness. See you soon in room N1119
Bite. Spit. Repeat.
The Gowanus Studio Space 2014 Printmaking Residency Exhibition
April 17-19, 2015
Opening Reception April 17, 6:00 – 9:00 pm
(if you come, there will be alcohol and I will be all over you checking for ID because I like you safe and sound!)
Julia Elsas | Rita MacDonald | Daniel Anthony Vasquez
There will be two musical interludes during the 6-9pm opening:
7pm:
8pm:
The GSS Print Residency is possible due to generous donations by Bill Goldston and Kiki Smith.
Learn more about the studio and the Print Residency including how to apply at www.gowanusstudio.org
Julia Elsas
Julia Elsas was born in Birmingham, Alabama and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received a BA from Carleton College and an MFA from UC Davis. While studying at Davis, she received the Robert Arneson Award, the Fay Nelson Award, and two Freedmond Gadberry Awards. Past exhibitions include: Art Merge Lab, Los Angeles, CA; One Mile Gallery, Kingston, NY; International Print Center, New York, NY; CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY; Bronx Art Space, New York, NY; Textile Arts Center, Brooklyn, NY; Barbara Archer Gallery, Atlanta, GA; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; Branch Gallery, Durham, NC; Lump Gallery, Raleigh, NC; Cinders, Brooklyn, NY; Pigman Gallery, San Francisco, CA; JAYJAY, Sacramento, CA; Richmond Art Center, Richmond, CA. She was an Artist Fellow at Virginia Center for Creative Arts in Amherst, VA in 2009 and 2010 as well as an Artist-in-Residence at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA in 2010. She is a 2014 Resident Artist at Gowanus Studio Space in Brooklyn, NY and teaches printmaking and bookbinding at SUNY Purchase and Montclair State University.
Daniel Vasquez
Daniel Anthony Vasquez was born in Las Higuerras, El Salvador. He received a BA from Rowan University in 2007. Vasquez works predominantly with works on paper. He is currently focusing on printmaking as the result of his recent awarded residencies at the Lower East Side Printshop and the Gowanus Studio Space. His selected exhibitions include Language Forged out of Place; In and Out of Context; and Treasure Island at the Lower East Side Printshop. Other recent group exhibitions include Greenpoint Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Brooklyn Waterfront Coalition, Brooklyn NY; Studio 1950, New York, NY. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Rita MacDonald
Rita MacDonald is a Brooklyn based artist whose work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Wave Hill in the Bronx, Smack Mellon in Brooklyn and The Soap Factory in Minneapolis, MN as well as in group exhibitions at Storefront Ten Eyck in Brooklyn, Lehman College Art Gallery in the Bronx, Cheryl Hazan Gallery and Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery, both in New York and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, WI. Through a Fellowship Grant from Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosedale, NY, MacDonald published an Artist’s Book which is included in several major Public Collections, including the libraries of both Yale University and The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN. In 2011, she completed her first major public work – two permanent mosaic works for New York MTA’s Arts for Transit Program at the Ave J and Ave M Stations on the Brighton Line (B/Q) in Brooklyn. MacDonald was born in Braintree, Massachusetts and received an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, NY and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI.
Rita MacDonald
Working with images of decorative patterns in clothing, interior design and architecture, I make both small-scale pencil drawings and prints on paper and large-scale temporary wall drawing installations using everyday building materials. In both bodies of work, I’m primarily interested in pattern for its geometry and for that geometry’s relationship to the human body.
Much of my installation work is site-specific, and I’m often drawn to transitory or overlooked public spaces in an attempt to make them places for a more personal interaction. I like to explore the line – and the sometimes inexplicably fuzzy edges – between the grandness of scale in public architecture and the intimacy of personal domestic spaces. The images in my wall drawings begin as flat pattern, then contort to form a recognizable image of loose fabric or paper in a three-dimensional space. The optical effects of the pattern create scale shifts and illusions of movement and volume that push up against the flatness of the wall.
In much the same way, my works on paper begin with images of patterns on clothing and explore the body’s implied connection to, and impact upon, that pattern. They are very deliberate observations of very small subjects – a swatch, a fold, a seam, a pleat or an indentation – and are recorded at actual size through a process of building up layers of repetitive marks.
Julia Elsas
As a mixed-media artist, I am continually exploring a range of materials and processes. My current work encompasses monoprints, cyanotypes, collage and other works on paper, as well as textiles, sculpture, installation, and ceramics. I am especially interested in clothing and fabrics used in and associated with women’s intimate apparel, which I often incorporate into my two- and three-dimensional pieces. Since these garments are made to reveal and conceal, I see them as suggestive of the tension between secrecy and exposure in acts of courtship, sensuality, and violence. In my current monoprint series, I am exploring the physical, aesthetic, and conceptual ramifications of inking and printing industrial elastic and nylon that has been reconstructed, stretched, and torn.
Daniel Vasquez
My works on paper include drawings and printmaking, with a special interest in woodblock printing. Drawing is an essential and preliminary step in my artistic practice and final Woodblock prints. In producing my designs and abstractions for my prints, I’m greatly inspired and influenced by patterns and designs of Tribal Arts from Africa, Oceania and Southeast Asia among other communication forms of indigenous cultures. After I have my desired drawings on paper to work from as guides, I carve out my designs and images onto found processed plywood plates to be then printed onto paper. Each woodblock comes with its own individual temperament and workable limitations, which at times, forces me to diverge from my original sketches. Regularly, the individuality of each wood piece predicates the design it will accept. Through the act of laboriously carving out my design, I engage and explore the different and unique qualities of each specific woodblock. I choose found woodblock plates to allow for unexpected nuances and imperfect elements to surface onto my work. In addition, working with wood material provides an organic aesthetic and visually tactile quality to my works. The wood quality of my prints carries with it an historical precedence and legacy, significantly speaking to a loss and rediscovery of my identity. As such, the wood medium is itself the source of inspiration.
Here is a presentation I prepared for the meeting today!
Every student at City Tech should know we exist.
Events, demos, classes, shows… I want the whole community to know us as a force for good. Printmaking is about generosity, democracy, opportunity, and making something with what seems tone nothing.
Let’s make our own equipment, be scrappy, fight the good fight!
This club is about empowerment through personal visual communication. Printmaking taught me problem solving, gave me a history of protest, propaganda, and commerce to draw from as I made my art. I want to get the students excited about the potential involved in a few simple items, some ingenuity, and a lot of elbow grease. Let’s build presses, screens, tools! Let’s find all we need on the cheap, or from stuff being thrown away! I am tired of dependance upon others!
Let’s make some art.
Yes, we are in a design program, and we have plenty to learn in that arena in formal classes. The PMC will be a chance for pure expression through printmaking. We will hold critiques, shows, set up our own print exchanges with other schools in the area, all while learning our butts off! ART!
Let’s make all of our own visual resources: textures, etc.
What we make has to start showing up in their design. My art leeches into my every step, even now that I don’t get to make it very often. It’s in my blood. I want that for all City Tech students.
Let’s learn to love the evolution and flux of technology!
Printmaking has evolved in close step with every major revolution in communication, manufacturing, and communication. Let’s take it all apart, look at the basics, and understand how the tools change over time. Technology is not the tool, it is how we use and develop tools to achieve our intentions.
Let’s collaborate with process and learn to love chance.
Fine art printmaking is not so much about complete mastery of your materials as it is about dealing with what the materials and environment do to the ink and your idea. You have to always be aware of how the paper is behaving, how much moisture is in the air, or whether the plate is hot enough to soften the ground. When you are less aware, the process will teach to be more so, but most of the time, the mistakes are revelatory and exciting.
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