New West Philly Shop Committed to Popular Education

A Print Community Report by Beth Pulcinella

At the intersection of 49th and Baltimore Ave, behind a modest storefront, beyond a metal gate young entrepreneur Quan Blanche and his business savvy partner Darnell Thomas are building an impressive production silk-screen shop. Boxes, ink and piles of tee shirts set the stage for this young and growing business. The days here are spent hustling jobs, making prototypes, cleaning screens, negotiating new designs, printing, printing, printing and training and supporting the young people who hang around the shop, partly because of employment but really because this is the place to be. It hangs in the air here at The Grind House a calm sense of determination, an aura of magic, and a belief that our lives are our own and can be lived on our own terms. This is a special place for yet another reason; its founders have a rock solid commitment to using some of the profits from the business to support educational programming for youth. The questions of how to design a shop that can support production as well as workshops for folks in the community is forefront in the minds of Blanche and Thomas.

In line with this educational mission the shop decided to partner with teaching artist Beth Pulcinella. Blanche and Pulcinella met in 2001 when Blanche was a member of the Student Union, a group with which he is still associated. Pulcinella was an employee at Spiral Q Puppet Theater and worked with activist groups looking to make puppets, signs and banners for protests and actions. The Student Union was organizing around the state take over of the Philly school district. This past fall they realized that they share yet another common vision. Both are passionate about providing access to silk-screen skills to folks in Philly who might not have an easy time finding affordable ways to learn these skills, and also a commitment to the idea that art must support progressive political movements.

Blanche and Pulcinella applied for a Leeway Art and Change Grant. They were awarded $2,500, which will be used to run a free 15-week “Print for Change” class. This class begins on Saturday November 1st and will be from 3-6pm. The class is for individuals, ages 14- 21 and will explore how print and print shops have played an active role in movements for social justice. Participants will learn about South Africa in the 1980’s, Indonesia in the 1990s, Mexico during the Mexican revolution, Emory Douglas and the Black Panthers and more. Participants will print multicolored posters and tee shirts of their own designs. They will learn about the art of stencil cutting, of how to make screen prints with low-tech traditions and they will also learn about photo emulsion techniques as well as Adobe Photoshop computer skills. The class is also partnering with three or four Philadelphia activist groups who will present to the class and provide an opportunity for the participants to develop art and posters that will be used in current local campaigns.

The project struggles with resources, the small grant barely covers the cost of the materials required to provide the participants with a state of the art experience. The project could use of few things. The list is as follows; a metal spring drying rack (preferably a smaller size), folding tables, tee-shirts, squeeqies, hinge clamps, screens, silk screen mesh, water soluble poster inks, visiting artist one day skill shares, books, field trip opportunities, spaces to exhibit our work, and monetary donations are always welcome.
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If you are interested in this project you can contact Beth at bettypulse at gmail. And if you have other Philadelphia area community print projects, please let me know at cperkins@philagrafika.org

Fresh Pressed

A new enterprise and marketing concept just hit Los Feliz in L.A: a little screen-printing shop called Fresh Pressed that allows its customers to design and print their own Ts, totes, and whatevers. At a whopping $40 for your first item, the idea is still pretty charming, and, for the common doodler, quite alluring... but the potential for dangerously cheesy apparel authored by Hollywood Blvd. residents may dissuade you from fully endorsing the idea. That said, it's a great way to get people thinking about screen-printing, making art, and making it public.

Here's a video that'll give you a bit more sense of what the store is like:

Ready, Squeegee, Go

So here’s yet another Youtube-based entry for all of you out there that have been avidly following Caitlin’s sporadic use of that oh-so-entertaining website!

Aesthetic Apparatus - the guys that brought us the latest Burger King crown design as well as countless Modest Mouse, The Black Keys, and Mountain Goats concert posters (not to mention the Walk the Line movie poster!) - have created a humorous and semi-educational video about their screenprinting practice:

Although it’s hard to imagine them being prolific and still having that much fun, you can also check out their huge website of products here.

If you’re interested in starting up your own screenprinting studio, the Philly-based Print Liberation collectivejust released a beautiful and playful-looking “primer” on how to get that going. While you’re on their website, you should also check out some of the really neat artwork they’ve been doing around the city.

But Aesthetic Apparatus and Print Liberation aren’t the only ones keeping busy with screenprinting these days.

In fact, Philadelphia is currently hosting a couple noteworthy exhibits that feature screenprint artists:

Taller Puertorriqueño
Miguel Luciano
May 9 - July 19, 2008

Miguel Luciano's work addresses playful and painful exchanges between Puerto Rico and the United States, questioning a colonial
relationship that exists to the present and problematizing the space between both cultures. His work organizes popular, historic, and consumer iconography into fluctuating new hierarchies to describe the complexity of contemporary belief systems.

Galería Lorenzo Homar
2721 N 5th Street, 2nd floor
Philadelphia, PA 19133
Taller Puertorriqueño website

Space 1026

Out of the Shell of the Old
Opening: July 4, 2008 at 6 pm

Running throughout July 2008 at Space 1026, will be a unique collaborative installation/exhibition from members of the radical artists' cooperative Justseeds. Based on the theme of "a new world rising out of the shell of the old", this show will incorporate built environments, video installation, and printed work to explore both the dark and troubling times we now live in, as well as our hopes for a better, brighter world. Members of Justseeds will be traveling to Philadelphia from across the country to collaboratively create a unique and exciting body of work.

Justseeds website
Space 1026 website

- Jacob Carroll

Cardboard Carpets

One of my favorite materials to screenprint on is cardboard. (As part of an installation at the ICA last year, Space 1026 printed over 3,000 shingles of recycled cardboard!) So, I was immediately drawn to this design idea of printing cardboard with designs to create cardboard carpets by Wendy Plomp on the Free People blog today. An entirely new idea for urban installations - creating beautiful patterns, laying them out in the street and creating your own living room outside!

And, when you are finished laying out your carpet you could furnish your outdoor street installation with cardboard furniture by Cardboard Robot.

Here are some more links to blogs about the cardboard carpets

Wendy Plomp design site and another blog with article after seeing her in Domus magazine
http://www.wnd.nu/works/show/64/message-in-a-box.html

http://bloesem.blogs.com/bloesem/2008/01/message-in-a-bo.html

Shades of Forgiveness in Multiple

THE THING is a quarterly editioned object offered by two editors, Jonn Herschend and Will Rogan. Each year, four artists, writers, musicians or filmmakers are invited by the editors to create an everyday object that somehow incorporates text.

The first edition was created by Film maker and writer, Miranda July who created a silkscreened window shade with the text: "If this shade is down I'm begging your forgiveness on bended knee with tears streaming down my face."

An object such as this could easily be trite, but the theatricality of the language plays off the whimsy of the action of pulling the shade, with a balance of humour that I find intriguing. Or perhaps it is the irony of the bathroom setting?

See more about this editioned multiples at www.thethingquarterly.com.

I've recently been thinking about how artists other than visual artists might approach printmaking - and this is a great example of a project that expands out the medium of print.

I'm looking forward to seeing more by this group.

Caitlin

José Roca and I visited the Santos de Puerto Rico: Carvings of Faith and Sentiment curated by Anabelle Rodríguez. The exhibition just opened at the Lorenzo Homar Gallery located in Taller Puertorriqueño and it includes more than one hundred santos carved from wood. It is a delightful example of the carvings by these masterful craftsman side by side by the wonderful prints showing the intertwined traditions.





For example, to the left is a serigraph
depicting master carver José Orta.

Next to this print is a case (below) containing a delightful a self portrait in wood This thoughtfully arranged mix creates a wonderful vignette which repeats throughout the exhibition--a mix of fine art, cultural anthropology and craft.





Taller Puertorriqueño is located at 2721 North 5th Street (corner of 5th and Lehigh) The gallery hours are Tues-Sat 10am-6pm; 215-426-3311 for more information.

So, I wanted to invite anyone who might be interested to come to my little side project at Space 1026 next week. It is an exhibition about collaborative printmaking.

Space 1026 is located at 1026 Arch Street featuring several different makes and models of print collaboration with projects by local and national artists.

Cannonball Press and Howling Print Studios are brewing up a highly caffeinated, giant relief print mash up, served strong and black, of course. Cannonball Press is the gnarly, but lovable print dudes from Brooklyn, New York--Martin Mazorra and Mike Houston, who crank out more prints than you can shake a stick at. Their co-hort, and partner in crime, Dennis McNett of Howling Print Studios, also of Brooklyn infamy.

And in the opposite corner, facing off against the stark black world of Cannonball and Howling Print will be the tie dye musings of hippie love, featuring an evolving oversize screenprint featuring image casualties from the summer of love, what printer, O. Roman Hasiuk has been describing as "a dynamic collaborative print. It's an organic, process oriented, ongoing large-scale screenprint that features the imagery of many different artists, with no set beginning or determined end." Lucky gallery visitors will be treated to impromptu ink slinging sessions in October by Hasiuk using screenprint printing and his forearms of steel.

Next, a Broadside Battle will be raging on the big wall in the gallery! This "battle" is an open competition for printmakers and artists, featuring single sheet printed matter. The battle promoters are expecting a slew of gig posters, public notices, wanted posters and more. That's when the competition begins...a "printoff," sort of like the NFL playoffs, but no pads or mouth-guards required. Each week the best printed matter (determined by a rag-tag team of judges) will advance until a winner is declared. That lucky winner will receive all of the prints as their prize!

And, Drive By Press will be cranking out the prints, in the gutter outside Space 1026 on Friday night, and Saturday, too. Drive By Press is a traveling print shop housed in the back of a pickup truck based in Wisconsin. Drive By printers Gregory Nanney and Joseph Velazquez will be stopping in Philadelphia on their east coast tour. They bring printing to the streets with their very own brand of print pulling action!

Hope you can make it out!

Generous-T was a public t-shirt printing event at the Institute of Contemporary Art as part of the Locally Localized Gravity exhibition. This public participatory event by the artists of Space 1026 featured screenprinting, the same print technique they used to create the shingle covered installation at the ICA.


This event attracted over 200 people visiting the museum installation, participated in the event Printing with the artists. The results were hung on ropes within the installation incorporating the new prints into the installation, and engaging the gallery space for the event.