Letter from Singapore and Shanghai

Dear friends:
I just visited Singapore, where the 6th Singapore Biennale is being held. The Biennale, curated by Japanese curator Fumio Nanjo (director of the Mori Museum in Tokyo) for the second time, was hosted in three main venues, with other projects also located on alternative sites. Here’s a link to the official website:
http://www.singaporebiennale.org/
And to Universes in Universe coverage of the Biennale:
http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/bien/singapore_biennale/2008

The 2008 Biennale is based on the concept of “wonder”, both in its demand for amazement and for questioning. The theme lent itself to a rather simplistic approach to the selection of works, all of which had, for the most part, some kind of spectacular or gimmicky character. Many pieces moved one to ask “how did he do it”? Large-scale, labor-intensive works coexisted with works that invariably had a trick, but all of them were intended to awe you in some way. For example, Zhan Wang’s Stone To Fill the Sky features a vitrine with a hovering silver rock that defies gravity; Marielle Neudecker’s piece is a striking model of a mountain range in a water-filled glass case with milky water that suggests clouds; Jane Lee’s impressive large-scale tapestry-like painting was done directly on the wall with paint flowing from a tube; Lee Yong Deok made bas-relief paintings,that appear convex to the eye if viewed from the right direction and thus seem to move as the viewer approaches them; Sergio Prego’s video is of a firework-induced cloud of smoke that was photographed simultaneously from all sides by an array of cameras, resulting in a video with a continuous shot around the cloud that allows the viewer to experience it in a quasi-sculptural manner; or Leandro Erlich’s twin barbershop rooms, one the exact reflection of the other, trick the eye into thinking that one of them is merely a reflection on a mirror. This quality of trickery made the event read very much as an archetypal Biennial: a theme-based, well-funded, cultural-tourism-driven event composed of spectacular rather than meaningful works. However, even despite this catering to tourism, the Biennale included many interesting artists.



Among the most beautiful works were Ben David Zadok’s Blackfield, a field of plants and flowers etched out of metal, inserted one by one on a sand carpet. The motifs for the plants were taken from 19th-century botanical illustrations, multi-colored on one side and completely black on the other. The resulting effect caused the viewer to witnesses the “field of flowers” as it came to life or died out, depending on which side he or she approached the work from.



Another work that interested me was the one by Indonesian collective Tromarama’s Serigali Militia, a fast-paced music video done entirely with woodcuts that were animated with the traditional step-frame method. Visually it was very effective, and the raw quality of the woodcuts reinforced the band’s punk attitude. The video showed various steps in the carving of the wood, and, as the image developed and morphed into something else, the viewer witnessed the carving of the wood incorporated in the video, which in terms of process was very engaging and self-reflective.


Joselina Cruz, on eof the co-curators, comments on this work in universes-in-universe, the leading website for the often-overseen art from Latin America, Africa and Asia-Pacific. It can be found on this link (there is even a snippet of the video):

http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/nafas/articles/2008/tromarama

Also, on Tromarama’s blog, there are some images of the process of turning a live performance into frames that were then carved one by one and then animated:

http://tromarama.blogspot.com/search/label/BEHIND%20THE%20SCENE

Scroll down to: Behind the Scenes Serigala Militia.



While in Singapore I visited the world-famous Singapore Tyler Print Institute (SITP), a veritable cultural center devoted to the print medium, which was conceived by the American master printer Kenneth Tyler, who for more than 40 years collaborated with artists such as Josef Albers, Anthony Caro, Helen Frankenthaler, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Motherwell, James Rosenquist, Frank Stella and Donald Sultan. I saw Sema Upadhyay‘s exhibition there, which featured large-scale prints in mixed media, often incorporating sculptural elements like Chinese wooden puzzles. Here is the link to the STPI site:
http://www.stpi.com.sg/

The STPI also hosts a residency program. The current resident was Japanese artist Tabaimo, whose work was prominently displayed at the last Venice Biennale.
Tabaimo is known for her references to Japanese Manga culture, which are often displayed as animations on video installations:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYL-9A5SZag&NR=1

She was working on several projects at the STPI, most of which involved collaborating with the Institute’s two main strengths: etchings and paper-making. Tabaimo’s drawings of different types of insects were printed in lithography on a gossamer vellum-type paper, which were then incorporated in a single sheet in alternating layers: printed vellum, paper pulp, another printed paper, another layer of pulp, etc. With the paper still damp, Tabaimo proceeded to cut “windows” on the paper, thus revealing motifs hidden under the paper pulp. The results were large-scale prints with round “potholes” that reveal fragments of insects, delicate and poetic, yet powerful and visually striking.

From Singapore I traveled to Shanghai, to visit the 7th Shanghai Biennale. The Biennale was curated by a team composed of Zhang Qing, Julian Heynen and Henk Slager.

Here’s a link to the official website:
http://www.shanghaibiennale.com/

And to UIU’s coverage:
http://universes-in-universe.de/car/shanghai/eng/2008/index.htm

Like the Singapore Biennale, the Shanghai Biennale had a distinctive title and theme: Translocalmotion, which demands a sense of migration in the featured works. But, unlike in the Biennale in Singapore where the works themselves were strong and varied, in Shanghai it was difficult to find truly engaging pieces because most of them tended to be subsumed in the illustration of the all-encompassing thematic premise of mobility and migration. There were many videos that tracked the experience of migrants in different contexts around the world. Other works showed different aspects of displaced cultural groups clinging to tradition as a way to maintain a connection with their homeland. The wall texts tended to give a reductive view of the works by attempting to tie them too tightly to the curatorial premise. They lead so often into the same argument that in most cases any given text would have worked equally well for any given work of art.



Among the works that I found most interesting was media theoretician and artist Harun Farocki’s video on immigration, a fast-paced slide-show narration done entirely with ideograms and charts taken from German official documents.



Two other videos also based on graphic illustrations were visually and conceptually interesting. The first one was Bu Hua‘s Savage Growth, an animation whose aesthetics reference woodblock-printed children’s books; the other is Huang Hsin-Chien’s Shanghai, Shall We Dance?, a three-screen video interactive installation in which the viewer feels completely immersed. The animation reacts to the viewer’s movements, mimmicking the viewer’s shadow with computer-generated images of buildings. It thus comments on the rapid urban development of China through this flowing dance of images.



The Biennial was full of young people on a Sunday morning, and in this sense, it seems to be capable of fulfilling its role of creating a new audience for art. The “pièce de résistance” was Yue Minjun’s impressive cavalcade of dinosaurs, which referenced the famous display at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Each one of the dinosaurs had a human head that boasted Yue‘s signature grinning smile, and could be interpreted as an ironical commentary on China’s happy and relentless “evolution” towards globalization. Take cover: the dinosaur is waking up…

José Roca.

Letter from L.A.

Dear friends of Philagrafika:
For those of you in the West coast or planning to go there in the coming months, there is a wonderful exhibition at the Hammer Museum. Curated by Allegra Pesenti of the Grunewald center, the exhibition, titled Gouge: the modern Woodcut 1870 to Today traces the evolution of the woodcut as a distinct art form. From Gaugin's rediscovery in the late nineteenth century to the present day, so many artists are using it because, as I have written elsewhere, its atavic associations (being arguably the oldest of the printing techniques) contrast with the visual output of the technologically-driven society we live in.

The show includes wonderful works, some of them rarely seen. They range from one of the few Matisse's woodblock prints with the only known block (a strong sculptural presence that contrasts with the seeming lightness of the resulting line) to anonymous Indian printers from the 19th century. It also includes an impressive group of artists such as Vallotton, Munch, Nolde, Picasso, Kollvitz, Beuys, Baselitz, Kiefer and, more recent artists like Terry Winters, Christiane Baumgartner or Zarina Hashmi.

The exhibition is divided into themes that address issues like the re-emergence of the medium after it had fallen into oblivion due to the developments in etching; the presence of the grain of the wood as an important component of the work; sacred imagery, a section that brings together works from India, Korea, and a series of German expressionist woodcuts; and the role of woodblock printing -accessible to anyone with a carving tool and a sheet of wood- in social struggles. Indeed, one of the most striking pieces is Carmelo González-Iglesias' The Pseudo-republic and the Revolution, an enormous seven-block woodcut done in 1960 in the wake of the Cuban revolution.



One of the most beautiful pieces is Artemio Rodríguez' The Triumph of Death, inspired equally by Brueghel's work as for Mexican calavera woodcuts. Rodríguez, who did the linocuts for Juan Devis' award-winning online video game Tropical America (www.tropicalamerica.com) has a project called Graficomovil, which is, in his own words, "a traveling mural, a mobile cinema, gallery and print studio dedicated to promoting the graphic arts and independent filmmaking". Rodríguez's activist attitude is an example of the only thing lacking in the exhibition, namely the current activist woodcut scene better exemplified in collectives like Cannonball Press or Drive By Press and artists like Swoon. One could imagine a lively room filled with these strong works and their creators staging interactions with the public, but it would have certainly required a far bigger space and maybe would have offset the grave tone that this wonderful and tightly curated show has.

Jose.

Philagrafika trips: Argentina and Chile

Dear friends of Philagrafika:
As part of the research for Philagrafika 2010 I have been traveling in different countries, giving public talks about the festival and making studio visits. My recent trips in Argentina and Chile were very productive both in getting to know artists that are working with expanded forms of printmaking, and visiting artists or collectives that we have already invited to Philagrafika.
In Argentina I had a long conversation with Javier Barilaro, the founder and leader of the Eloisa Cartonera group. Eloisa Cartonera has been working with cardboard recyclers, some of whom are homeless, providing them with a means of expression as well as a means of survival. When we invited them to the Sao Paulo Bienal they replicated the project, and have done similar projects in Bolivia and Peru, among other cities.



Barilaro is the only one who studied art and works in the artistic realm proper; the other members are more poets, social workers or activists, and of course the cartoneros themselves.
Javier told me that the experience they had had in first world cities was completely different than in Latin America.

Barilaro has a very interesting practice of his own. I am enclosing some images.
He recycles printed materials, some of them done by him or Eloisa Cartonera, or replicates the printed look with drawing and painting. He has been doing large works or installations.



In Santiago I visited Eugenio Dittborn, one of the key figures in Latin American conceptualism, and very well known for his Airmail paintings (the New Museum in New York devoted him a retrospective some years ago). He had prepared a mini-display of his work for me to see, which was a treat since most of his works I know from books, since they spend most of the time either traveling or folded in the envelopes, awaiting to embark in a new trip.










The person in the photo with Dittborn is Alexia Tala, who is the author of “Installations and Experimental Printmaking”, a handbook soon to be published by A&C Black in London. Alexia had put together a very intense studio visit program for me, focused in alternative forms of the print. I did see some interesting work, some of it historical like Dittborn’s or Lotty Rosenfeld’s, who was invited to the last Documenta. Since the beginning of the dictatorship in Chile, Lotty has been marking the territory with crossing lines, sometimes done in tape, sometimes imprinted on the road. The message is at the same time subversive and poetic, and has never ceased to acquire new meanings whenever it is done/shown.

I saw works by other interesting artists:

Graciela Sacco.www.gracielasacco.net
She etches Perspex sheets and hangs them in various positions. Projected light creates the image by casting shadows on the wall.

Gerardo Repetto. Lives in Córdoba.
His work is closer to photography. People send him images taken with cell phones, which he then enlarges and prints digitally.

Patricio Larrambebere. He founded “ABTE” a real/fake association (the acronym stands for Agrupación Boletos Tipo Edmonton, which translates as Association of Edmonton-type Tickets). Edmonton was the inventor of the classic train (and metro) ticket that is used everywhere, the small cardboard rectangle. In reclaiming these tickets as a collector, Larrambebere is referring to the history of trains in Argentina, which were instrumental in the development of the country but that have almost disappeared because of corruption and, more recently, privatization. The ABTE organizes events in train stations, shows their collection of tickets, and published tiny “catalogs” the size of a ticket that opens like an accordion.

Agustín Blanco. www.Blangustin.blogspot.com
He has been working with stencils like the ones used in schools in Argentina. They provide the students with stencils of the faces of national “heros” (e.g. Bolívar), and all you have top do is draw with the stencil as a guide. It’s an interesting commentary on the role of education in the shaping of political ideology early on. He has taken other educational materials such as “simulcoop”, a letraset-type system used in public schools in Argentina, as with the stencils the public is encouraged to print their own images.

Eduardo Molinari. Has an ongoing Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne-type project titled Archivo caminante, which is quite interesting conceptually although visually not very compelling.

Camilo Yáñez. He is an artist and a curator, he will curate the upcoming MERCOSUR Bienal.
He recycles soviet graphic imagery and replaces the political signs for quotes to art history such as op-art. He then prints the images as large digital prints. He has also worked with catalogs of household objects of the Allende era.

I will be posting soon from Brazil.

Jose.

Post from José Roca: Philagrafika trip to Brazil

José Roca, the Artistic Director for Philagrafika is going to begin a series of posts from his curatorial travel to South America and Asia. This travel was funded by a grant by the Warhol Foundation.

Dear friends of Philagrafika:
In Brazil I installed a small show in which I had been working for more than two years, and that was finally realized this past month. There is more information on the website(http://www.nararoesler.com.br/exposicoes/otras-floras)





It is a reconsideration of the scientific traveler, and the relationships between botanics and politics, and includes older artists such as Arnulf Rainer, Mark Dion, Roxy Paine, Jan Fabre and Maria Fernanda Cardoso. There are also younger artists like Jaime Tarazona and Miler Lagos, whom we have invited to participate in Philagrafika 2010. Miler created an 8-foot tall tree made of stacked newspapers, which he then carves to create the sculpture. I am enclosing some photos of the installation.



The Pinacoteca do Estado de Sao Paulo, has a beautiful show of Maria Bonomi, a highly respected artist here in Brazil who has worked in xylography (spanish for woodcut) since the sixties. I also visited Regina Silveira's exhibition at Brito Cimino, and later her studio (http://www.britocimino.com.br/en-exposicoes-presente.html). The show looks amazing, and has everything to do with our ideas for the festival in Philadelphia in 2010. I am also enclosing photos. The current show is about the biblical plagues; some of them are all types of bugs, that were gleaned from old engravings and illustrations and either blown up and rendered in plotter-cut vinyl, or screen-printed on decals that were then applied to white china (for the table service visible on one of the images).


For those of you that might not be so familiar with her work, since the seventies, Regina has been working in alternative forms of printing, using toner in lithographic stones, distributing flyers, applying screen-printed decals on various three-dimensional surfaces, and eventually taking this work to the public sphere by intervening façades of buildings. I did a survey show of her work last year at my (ex) museum in Bogotá.

The opening of the Bienal de Sao Paulo was a success. As the curators Ivo Mesquita and Ana Paula Cohen (whom I invited last year to co-curate the Encuentro de Medellín) chose to discuss the ideas associated with the void, the space looks, well, empty.

Prior to curating this show, I first saw this space completely empty when I met with my fellow co-curators in 2005. Yet, it’s breathtaking to see this immense building with hardly any works of art installed as part of a curated statement.



Here’s a link to the curatorial statement:

http://bienalsaopaulo.globo.com/english/fundacao/noticias/noticias_evento.asp?IDNoticia=154

There are works, of course, but most of them are almost imperceptible, since they either reflect on emptiness of the space or on the idea of the archive. One of Ivo’s ideas was to use this biennial as a think-tank to reconsider Biennials and “Biennalism”, so there is a large archive with catalogs of all the past and current biennials, triennials, quadriennials, etc, and many artists working on personal or public archives.

There is a very beautiful work by Dora Longo Bahía. She has been an artist concerned with counter-culture in Brazilian poorer neighborhoods, especially the alternative rock scene in Brazil.

She has done several works where she sets up a radio station in the gallery.She is also a painter, and calls her large-scale paintings “scalps”, as they seem something that has been pulled off with force and scarred, a bloodied trophy of sorts.

For the Bienal she covered the whole floor of the third level (more than 12.000 square feet) in screen-printed self-adhesive tiles, which will be walked upon by visitors, slowly revealing the red paint underneath and in doing so, mapping the various patterns and intensities of the circulation of the visitors of the exhibition.





Another project that interested me was Erick Beltrán’s “The World Explained”, an encyclopedia that is done in real time with the definitions provided by the public. I worked with Erick in San Juan and Medellín, and each time he pushes his ongoing project of mapping the way thought functions, a little further. For the Bienal he set up a sort of edition house in real time, with tables where people write their definitions, his assistants transcribe them, a designer does the mise-en-page, and the page is immediately printed on an offset press. By the end of the Bienal we will have a 200-page encyclopedia. On the third floor of the Bienal there is a structure that tries to represent visually and spatially the processes of thought.



At the Pinacoteca I saw Spanish artist Cristina Iglesias’ show. It was a series of large-scale installations; models of site-specific projects and public art commissions; and some interesting printed works related to the installations. There was a labyrinthine installation done with tresses made with braided wire, and a very beautiful suite of prints based on photographs of this installation. The technique was described to me as this: she takes photographs of the installations, which she prints digitally on a metal plate and etches, then reworks directly on the plate with drypoint.


There were also two large-scale screen prints on copper plates done from images of the models for her installations.



More to come.
Jose.

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

More Type: Why Not?

As an addendum to our earlier post on type, we thought we would share what we learned about artist Gordon Young and his long-time collaborators Why Not Associates from the latest issue of Wallpaper*. Gordon Young is a visual artist that likes to work with environments – he is always concerned with making installment pieces that match and influence their own contexts. For a Yorkshire Sculpture Park fund-raising project, for example, he made a “Walk of Art”, a pathway 110 meters long carved with the names of all the donors to the park. Another project in Ayr featured words by Robert Burns carved into the steps in front of a local pub. In other words, Young accomplishes his environmental pieces through several media, but always makes use of some form of type, some kind of written language.

... and that’s where Why Not Associates come in: as graphic designers that do everything from museum catalogs to Nike posters, they’re Young's go-to team for the precise, sleek-looking fonts that suit his every purpose. If you’re on their website, you should definitely take a look at some of their non-Gordon-Young-related projects as well – their work for the Royal Academy of Arts is particularly chilling…

According to Wallpaper, Gordon Young and Why Not Associates are currently working on an installation piece for the Crawley public library. For the project, he is etching literary quotations on fourteen green oak tree trunks that will be place around the area. Each trunk will don quotations selected specifically for the environment in which the trunks are going to be located. Each quotation will be etched in a font that suits the subject matter, the era, the author, etc. A Harry Potter quote comes in a 16th century font, while an Austen quote comes in a "feminine Joanna."

Occasionally, while perusing Young and Why Not’s extensive work together, the obvious strikes you as suddenly fascinating: fonts and styles really do affect the way we receive the written word, and, in turn the environment on which they are imprinted. If you’re keeping your eye out – like we are – for innovative and harmonious usage of type, these artists are definitely worth keeping tabs on. The oak trees at Crawley will be visible to the public in January 2009.

Contemporary Art News Sources

You may have noticed that we recently added the “Printmaking in the News” feed to our blog’s sidebar, but we also wanted to keep you all in the loop about some other great contemporary art blogs and websites, some of which even have a special emphasis on prints and/or Philadelphia.

The Journal of Contemporary Art Online – which used to be a printed magazine, but has been a purely internet-based publication since 1995 – hosts upwards of fifty interviews with international contemporary artists. Among their interviewees are Buzz Spector, Kiki Smith, Jeff Koons, and Takashi Murakami. They also have a “Projects” section to their website, to which Renee Green, Steven Salzman, Mark Morrisroe, Andrei Roiter, and Catherine Wagner have contributed.

Fecal Face is a self-proclaimed “content-rich, comprehensive, multidisciplinary art and culture website supporting the art scene in San Francisco and beyond since 2000.” This is truly an exhaustive website, with many interviews and feature articles about artists like Mark Mothersbaugh (of Devo and Wes Anderson films fame), Ben Woodward, and Jim Houser (both Space 1026-ers). The website also hosts postcasts – mostly music mixes by artists – blogs, videos, and a large online store.

New Art is a blog maintained by several writers, and, as a result, can vary in quality. However, the articles, for the most part, do a relatively effective job of displaying artwork and starting discussions on the topics that the pieces raise.

Modern Kicks, although hosting average quality content, is the blog of all contemporary art blogs – a place from which to get some news, but also to connect to many other resources, whether they are other blogs, books, or websites. They even host links to our Summer Solstice MCs’ Artblog – an excellent place to hear about new exhibits, and read some brief, perceptive reviews.

Back to School Basics for Printmaking

I know many of you are heading back to school, I know many of my friends who are faculty are spending this week prepping their syllabi. Thought I would point out our new bibliography available through Working States - which is a great resource

http://www.philagrafika.org/workingstates1.html

And, I just got an email post today that pointed me in the direction of these really well made instructional videos out of the Minneapolis Institute of Art its Artsmia channel about printmaking.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNKn4PORGBI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHw5_1Hopsc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0skLwaFpn0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wogKeYH2wEE

http://www.youtube.com/user/artsmia

Half Tone Surprise

Receiving packages in the mail from artists is always a treat. And, yes the multiple does allow us printmakers the luxury to be more generous than other folks. A slick half tone checkerboard patterned paper – magenta on one side, cyan blue on the other. I was expecting text or a poster with information, and at first it just looked like a checkerboard, until I realized that there were aberrations on the surface. Low and behold, when held up it revealed a face – Obama on one side and McCain on the other!

The package was from Jason Urban, who is now in Austin, Texas. Jason is one of the contributors to the Printeresting blog, and has kept in touch with Philagrafika, even after heading west.

Jason made an offset edition of 1,000 prints for a show at the Schmidt Art Center in Belleville, IL (outside of St. Louis). The show is a two-person show along with St. Louis artist Charles Schwall.

We’ve been having a grand time showing off the poster to interns and people stopping in to the office. The trick is that if you hang it in a window, it looks from the outside world like you are supporting one candidate, and from the inside another. Although, the one facing the outside world would be upside down.

Jason explained in a recent email conversation, “The prints will be shown in the stacked print tradition of Felix G-T. Visitors will be allowed to take one. And because it's a two-sided poster, people can take it home and decide which side to hang against the wall. I’ve been doing so many posts about Obamagraphics on Printeresting.org that I felt compelled to add my own piece to the pre-election imagescape.”
Jason informed me that if anyone is interested, they can contact him for copies, which are available for $10 each.

www.jasonurban.com
printeresting.org








some updates of other posts:

http://www.posterdistrict.com/?p=938
http://www.obamaartreport.com/2008/08/art-of-jason-urban.html 

Woodcuts on a Grand Scale to Visit PMA Next Year

Albrecht Dürer and other canonical printers will never lose their relevance and art historical importance, so here is yet another blog about yet another exhibit that features those incredible mid-millennium printers who defined the artform for us. The exhibit, Grand Scale: Monumental Prints in the Age of Dürer and Titian, is coming to the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) in February 2009, after traveling to both Wellesley and Yale College galleries.

The exhibit will feature monumental-sized (for their time) prints: rare products of European masters testing and pushing the limits of the recently invented printing press. These were printed at a time when the limitations of a print (which were dictated by the paper size that the press could run) were in tension with the print-makers’ desire to compete with painters and sculptors by making art on a similar scale. As a result, these are ambitious, experimental, and both technically (most are woodblock, but there are also etchings and engravings) and formally fascinating pieces that are seldom exhibited in public.

The following excerpt from a Greg Cook review of the show hints at the visual power wielded by these works:

"You have to see them in person to really get it. In reproduction, Jacopo de' Barbari's 1500 bird's-eye "View of Venice" is a tight maze of buildings, ships, streets, and canals. But in the gallery, the vista opens up to about 9 feet wide. The point of view feels more godlike than birdlike in its all-seeing, all-knowing vision. You understand why the marvelous woodcut - assembled from six unprecedentedly large carved wooden plates printed on six unprecedentedly large sheets of paper - was one of the first images to be protected by what we now call copyright."

The exhibit features work not only by Durer but also by Tintoretto, Botticelli, Mantegna, and Titian. Judging by the roster of artists and the selection of works, these prints will without a doubt impress themselves on our memories, and remind us once again how indebted we are to the old masters for foraging new territory for us.


Exhibit Catalogue Available from Amazon.com


Link to exhibition information: Grand Scale: Monumental Prints in the Age of Dürer and Titian

Organizers

The exhibition is organized by the Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, under the direction of Elizabeth Wyckoff, Assistant Director and Curator of Prints and Drawings.

Curators

Shelley Langdale • Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings
Larry Silver • Farquhar Professor of the History of Art, University of Pennsylvania

Location

Berman and Stieglitz Galleries, ground floor

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:

Philagrafika's Working States new bibliography

We haven't sent out the press release yet, but we are all really excited about the annotated bibliography that just got updated and put onto the Philagrafika site - take a look. I think it will be a really good resource for printmaking faculty - and if you have suggestions for new listings we'd love to include them. Just email me at cperkins@philagrafika.org

Here is the link to Working States
then, just click on the bibliography - you can download an pdf (15 pages) with active hyperlinks or use the html version which is broken down into sections.

Nostalgic Technologies

Soft dreamy crossed with quixotic imagery are often my favorite images...and I've been thinking about photogravure workshops...here are a couple that came across my desk in the last few days - maybe you have time to take one.

Photogravure workshop at Project Basho in Philadelphia with Kevin Martini Fuller

and at the...

Robert Blackburn Workshop in New York with Savanna College of Art and Design professor Robert Brown.