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.
