Interested in incorporating papermaking into your printmaking practice? This demonstration will walk you through creating your own paper pulp at home, pulling and drying sheets, printing on handmade paper, and even how to embed prints into new sheets of paper! This demonstration will focus on papermaking processes that you can do easily at home and on a budget using easily accessible items such as a kitchen blender to make pulp, old frames to make mould and deckles, and windows to dry your paper flat on.

This pre-recorded demonstration shows how to use CNC routers to scribe and engrave plates, showcasing an innovative approach to printmaking. Topics include image planning, file prep, materials, engraving, etching, and printing. The demo will start with an accessible, hand-built CNC router in the artist’s studio and show how the process translates to professional and institutional settings. Resources include a lesson that can be adapted to diverse educational settings. Low-toxicity printmaking approaches and materials will be emphasized.

This pre-recorded session will provide a step-by-step explanation of a wallpaper project that I designed for my screenprint class. The project requires students to design a repeat pattern unit, screenprint a large edition using multiple color layers, and use the edition of prints to create a panel of wallpaper. During this session, I will explain my goals and expectations and outline the thematic approach used for the wallpaper project. Several recommendations will be offered for readings to accompany the project. I will also demonstrate how to design a repeat pattern by hand and in Photoshop, including tips on how to create successful designs and avoid patterns that don’t line up, as well as strategies for trimming the prints, aligning, and attaching the units to the wall. To illustrate the variety of possible solutions to the project, numerous examples of wallpapers printed by students will be shown.

DALL-E 2 Print Workshop

 The DALL-E 2 Print Workshop will examine the relationship between printmaking and Artificial Intelligence.

 We will examine:

• Discuss whether AI image-generator are able to capture the nuance and detail of mark-making specific to printmaking
• Review additional AI image tools (Stable Diffusion, Dataform, Playground AI)

We will demonstrate:

• How to use DALL-E 2’s basic and advanced tools for editing, variations, and language-specific tips
• Attempts to gear the system towards print-like imagery

AI experts claim that DALL-E 2 is getting “too close to human-level visual creativity.” (1) However, in all the DALL-E 2 generated artworks out there from the DALL-E team, from everyday users or artistic collaborations (such as the 2022 exhibition “Artificial Imagination” at Bitforms Gallery (2)), these images lack a sensitivity to graphic detail which draws many artists to printmaking.

 If, for example, you asked DALL-E 2 to render in the style of a woodcut, the system understands that many woodcuts are printed in stark black ink on whitish paper. However, upon a close inspection, DALL-E 2’s marks are more of a charcoal drawing or a pencil-rubbing. It does not capture how a blade removes the surface of linoleum and does not recreate a rhythmic spacing of marks, as in “Sharecropper” by Elizabeth Catlett. While DALL-E 2 easily formulates figures using abstract mark-making and composition, it does not express human experience. The mark-making does not express urgency or show sharp pain as embodied in “The Mothers” by Käthe Kollwitz.

We will discuss AI’s relationship to the history and theory of art-making. There are many historic occasions on which mechanical reproduction caused a deep existential crisis for artists and creators alike, such as the Arts & Crafts renaissance of woodcut in the early 1900s as a direct reaction to mass-produced lithographic advertisements. We will also explore theories of what makes analog vs. digital art good, meaningful, or beautiful through art-theory and digital journalism such as “The Future Is Analog” by David Sax.

 We will challenge DALL-E 2 to play the role of the master printer in the digital realm, utilizing our best language skills to publish a print-like digital image.

1. Romero, Alberto. “Dall·E 2 Will Disrupt Art Deeper than Photography Did.” The Algorithmic Bridge, Medium, https://betterprogramming.pub/dall-e-2-will-disrupt-art-deeper-than-photography-did-b900b52c1ea2.
2. Benzine, Vittoria. “In Pictures: Dall-e Makes Its Gallery Debut in a Show Where All the Works Were Created with an Assist from A.I.” Artnet News, 14 Nov. 2022, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/in-pictures-dall-e-makes-its-gallery-debut-in-a-show-where-all-the-works-were-created-with-an-assist-from-a-i-2208441.

Left: “Die Mütter” by Käthe Kollwitz, woodcut 1921 Right: “Die Mütter” by DALL-E 2, AI woodcut 2022

Layers of Accessibility

This panel will consider how printmaking practices for Artists/ Researchers/ Teachers necessitate transitions from traditional studio’s notions into more accessible and inclusive standards of printmaking. This panel will explore diverse conceptualizations of accessible printmaking through the lenses of printmaking practitioners that have made print more accessible for themselves and others. These adaptations consider an expanse of inclusions and innovations to traditional print practices, exhibition formats, community organization, resource sharing, and/or teaching methods. The artists, printmakers, and educators on this panel explore how to transition conceptual accommodations into more accessible realities of printmaking.

Panelists:

This is a pre-recorded discussion with contributions from staff, students and graduates of the Print MA at the Royal College of Art London about the nature of print practices in a time of digital immersion. We will enable an insight into the philosophies and sites of our work and the ways it gets distributed and shared. We will include clips of students talking about their work in the studios. I will be in discussion with Dr Meg Rahaim, Dr Gareth Polmeer on the way the digital has shaped how we think about print and address the importance of older pre-internet forms of distribution and reproduction in continuing debates.

Jo Stockham, Finlay Taylor and Meg Rahaim, Royal College of Art Battersea London and current students  

Liberty Quinn, Chaoming Zhang, Anna Marris, Katrina Nzegwu with the participation of fellow students and staff. 

Working across national borders has been a leading influence in the direction of many of our careers as artists, educators, and mentors. This proposal brings together four such artists, two from the US and two from India, who have initiated international exchanges in a variety of traditional and innovative ways.

Through attending international conferences, organizing portfolio exchanges, and establishing artist residencies relationships have been created and friendships forged. The four artists on this panel will discuss their experiences of forming international relationships, and how these events have affected them and led to greater commitments regarding building greater cultural understanding and exchange all through the common ground and language of printmaking. These artists facilitate cultural exchange through art, resulting in mutually beneficial relationships that explore many individual perspectives and experiences.

The four artists on this panel will discuss the ventures that have expanded their connections and knowledge of printmaking techniques as well as the exhibition of their art and that of many other artists. The panelists will also consider and brainstorm with one another about the possibilities for future expansion and greater inclusion that others can readily adopt. The ventures these panelists have been pursuing to build and be part of an active community that freely crosses borders and leans into conversations about art as an important, necessary, and reciprocally valuable aspect of a beautifully diverse global public underscore the power of printmaking as a fine art reproducible and interventionist medium.

Participants:
Anita Jung
Rajesh Pullarwar
Kavita Shah
Rachel Singel

Anita Jung, is a professor at the University of Iowa. Over a thirty-year career, her artwork has been curated into solo, group and juried exhibitions throughout the world. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and drawing from Arizona State University and the Master of Fine Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in graphics. She has directed numerous study-abroad programs to the Czech Republic, France, Italy, and India. She recently spent six-months as a Fulbright Scholar to India in 2022. She fully utilizes being an artist to practice grace and engage the world.

Rajesh Pullarwar, is the founder-director of the International Print Exchange Program which facilitates an exchange of print works and exhibitions by artists from around the world and is in its tenth year. Pullarwar earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai, India. His work has been exhibited in national and international art shows as well as Biennales. He has presented solo exhibitions at Chatterjee & Lal, ART India Gallery, and Phillips Contemporary, in Mumbai, as well as group exhibitions at Tao Art Gallery, Mumbai and BCA Gallery, Milan. The Pierre, located in New York City, has editioned prints of his works on permanent display.

Kavita Shah, is the director of the Chhaap Foundation in Vadodara, India. Founded in 1999, Chhaap is of one of the first community-based printmaking studios in Vadodara. Her masters in Printmaking was awarded from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja SayajiRao University in 1985. She has worked in the printmaking studios of Kanoria Art Center, Ahmedabad; Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal; in addition to working with Robert Blackburn in his Print Making Workshop, NYC; and the historical Atelier Couriere et Frelaut in Paris. Under the Chhaap umbrella, she organized many international exhibitions, workshops, lectures, exchange portfolios, artist-in-residency programs, and outreach projects to make printmaking popular and spread awareness for limited edition original prints within India.

Rachel Singel, is an Associate Professor at the University of Louisville. She received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Virginia and a Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking from the University of Iowa. Singel has participated in residencies at the Penland School of Crafts, the Venice Printmaking Studio, Internazionale di Grafica Venezia, Art Print Residence in Barcelona, Spain, Wharepuke Print Studios in New Zealand, and Proyecto’ace, an Artist-in-Residence Program in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has studied non-toxic printmaking at the Grafisk Eksperimentarium studio in Andalusia and will continue her research at AGA LAB in Amsterdam, Netherlands in April 2023. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and represented in private, public and museum collections.

“Fine Print” is an on-going curatorial project by artists Henry Gepfer and K. MacNeil. We are deeply interested in the moments where print intersects with performance, action, music, happenings, comedy, drama, video, new media, and all the exciting betweens and beyonds. Our goal is to create a recurring space for print and adjacent artists to try new things and push themselves into unknown and experimental territories, paving the way for future generations of performative printmakers.

For this iteration of “Fine Print,” we will be inviting a selection of artists and performers to share pre-recorded video and sound-based work that blurs the line between print-media and performance art. This showcase will be followed by a round-table discussion – chaired by Gepfer and MacNeil – contextualizing the work presented within the broader field of contemporary printmaking and performance art. 

Exhibting Artists: Jacq Garcia(@garciajacq), Josh Graupera (@graupyyy), and Laura Grier (@lalalauragr)