The Center for Book Arts and IPCNY

This week the class went down to Chelsea.
We visited the Center for Book Arts, located at West 27th Street. This place is amazing! I'm so happy we went there. I really love book arts. Our tour guide was very informative. She ld us about all the programs available in the studio such as artist memberships, residencies, and studio rentals. They also have classes there that teach you about letterpress and various bookmaking techniques.
They have a really great show going on there as well. They had a bunch of prints and articles having to do with Occupy Wall Street. They also have an exhibition of the book artist Kumi Korf, who's work is really beautiful.
This is definitely a place I would like to visit again, and hopefully one day work in!

Our next stop was the International Print Center New York, or IPCNY, located at West 26th Street. 

This was another great place. Unlike the previous stop, IPCNY is not a studio, just a gallery. Their current show is their New Prints 2012/Autumn show. The show was very well put together and included work of all types of printmaking. It's really amazing to see work from all over the world, from all different skill levels, all placed in one show.

That's the best thing about IPCNY. They accept applications from everyone for their shows, giving everyone an equal opportunity, which is hard to come by in the art world.

Lower East Side Printshop and Dieu Donné

The class finally met again for the first time in about a month. Between Hurricane Sandy and the Nor'easter, this whole semester has been a giant mess. Every class is scrambling to get work done, and it really isn't working out and just causing tons of unnecessary stress for both professors and students. So it's really great that this terrible semester is almost over...
So for our first trip in ages, the class stayed in Manhattan. 
We visited the Lower East Side Printshop, which is lovated on W 37th St. and 8th Ave.

This printshop is a really great resource for everyone! Whether you're an just out of school trying to find a place to work, or a well established artist wanting to make some prints for the first time, you're welcome here. The shop also has a great residency program, where 10 applicants become key-holders for a year! 
Our tour guide was extremely friendly and welcoming to the class. We started the tour in the great public work space, where you can rent time to work. They have a huge amount of resources available. 24/7 access to the darkroom, solvent room, and of course the work studio, with two beautiful etching presses.

They also do contract printing. This is where we met the master printers of the shop. Both of them were willing to talk to the class about their experiences of working in printshops, or putting up dry wall. They told us how they came to have the title "master printer", which seemed to be by accident for both of them. 

We got to see some prints that were made in their shop.

Our next destination was one block away, on W 36th St and 8th Ave.
This was Dieu Donne, a paper making studio. It was so interesting to see an actual paper making studio! I have never had any interest in taking the school's paper making class due to the fact that it more sculptural based. But, if it was like what was going on at Dieu Donne I would definitely rethink that decision. 

Our tour guide was an intern at the studio. He said this was his first tour ever, and it showed. This had to be our fastest visit ever! I'm still not really sure how anything really happens in that shop. Do they have residencies? Do people rent time to work there? I have no idea.


But, they did seem to make some beautiful work there. While showing the class the studio's portfolio, they had a beautiful watermark piece from Chuck Close. I don't really know who any of the other artists he showed were, but trust me, they were nice.

Chuck Close it that grey one in the back

They also had some paper they made for sale. It was really nice paper, but for $20 a sheet, I passed.

Booklyn, Kerry Downey, Heliopolis

Last week, The class took a trip down to Greenpoint, Brooklyn and visited two very different studios. and a gallery put together by my professor.

The first studio we went to was the studio of a really great organization called Booklyn. This group has over 500 members and counting. The organization helps artists all over the world create publications, cataloging them, and finding ways of getting the work out to the public. They have many gallery shows in their space in Greenpoint as well as around the world at book fairs, craft fairs, art shows, and even in libraries and museums. 

Our tour guide was really great. I don't remember her name but she was hilarious and so down to earth. She told us the history of Booklyn and how she reluctantly became the person in charge of going to museums and libraries to try and sell different books. I loved her attitude towards us, she spoke to us as equals and was just bullshitting with us at the end of the visit. She also told us to get a day job that won't interfere with out art making (if anything it should help with it!). 

So many books!

View from a window in Booklyn's studio

A few blocks away was the studio of Kerry Downey. This was a very interesting artist to visit. Unlike many of the artists that we have spoken to, Downey never plans on selling any of her work. 

This seemed crazy! One of the many topics of this class has been how to find a way to make a living from your work. Instead, she makes her living by teaching. She said it was probably because she gets too attached to what she makes. It was kind of refreshing to hear. I really relate to her because of that. I have a really hard time detaching from a piece I spent forever working on just for someone to hopefully hang it on their wall to look at occasionally.
It is very easy to understand why she would be so attached to every drawing or print she makes. A lot of what she does deals with very personal issues, such as phantom limb. Her work also deals a lot with the idea of failure and elderly people. She explained that she grew up in Florida and has been surrounded by and working with elderly since high school. Most of her work stems from an obsession with self help magazines trying to sell you mostly junk that you really don't need and a few things that might be helpful to a handful of people. So, there is a strange humor in all of her work that I really enjoyed. 

Her deck had a beautiful view!

Some of Downey's work.

Basically around the corner was a gallery called Heliopolis. The show that was currently there was put together by my professor, Bill. The show consisted of proofs, works that didn't actually work, notes, and other forms of planning. It was a really interesting show. I was very surprised by the fact that if I wasn't told what the show was about, I would have just guessed that everything was a final, well thought out piece.

MoMa, Brand X, Alpha Price

Thursday, September 27th, the class visited two studios in Long Island  City, Queens and MoMa.

The first stop was Moma. We saw a new exhibition of the Slavs and Tatars. The exhibition was behind two huge beautiful rugs that opened as curtains. Inside, was a very dark room light up by four neon green lights hanging from the ceiling and some black lights on the underside of benches. The benches ran along two walls and were covered in literature based on the Slavs and Tatars. In the center was a fountain and on the far walls were two huge prints.

While there, I flipped through two of the books on the benches. One text spoke about a certain noise in a language formed by the sounds of the letters "Khhhhh". They explained that it had special meanings in different languages and how only people who spoke certain languages were able to make that noise. I believe thats the whole idea behind the "MOTHER TONGUES & FATHER THROAT" print.

I found the exhibition to be very interesting space. The benches, sound of the fountain, and reading was very meditative. Yet, if you stop focusing on those things and just looked around the room, it was extremely chaotic due to the lighting  and agressive prints. I found that if you tried to look near the floor or at people's feet,  your eyes couldn't focus on anything due to the lighting. I'm not sure if that was on purpose or just a coincidence. But there was a really interesting duality being created between  meditation and chaos.
After that exhibition, we went to MoMa's permanent print collection. That was a big change. This collection had your "normal" prints. The collection contained work by Warhol, Bourgeois, Matisse, Jasper Johns, Picasso, Clemins, Turrell, and many others. It was really nice to see less well known work by artists like Warhol, Matisse and Picasso. I also fell in love with a few pieces by Celmins and Turell.

Turell

Celmins

After that exhibition, I snuck away from the group for a little while and checked out an exhibition going on across the hall of the Quay Brothers. That exhibition was so awesome, for lack of a better word. When you walk in theres huge birch trees in the room and one of their silent films playing. The Quay brothers, I learned, did tons of films. Most starred many of their extremely creepy puppets they created. They also made absolutely beautiful drawings and prints. I really wish the rest of the class had gone to see it!

Our second stop was the studio of Brand X Editions. This studio was very different compared to the others we have been to so far. Unlike the past studios, Brand X does only commercial printing. Unlike other studios, they do oil based silk screening and use tons of chemicals and solvents. We got to see the extremely strenuous, time consuming process they go through to create silk screen prints for other artists. These prints are exact copies of the artist's work. It was really amazing to see how they are able to figure out how to create the same textures and brush strokes and imitate the hand behind each painting so exact. 
I learned about tons of hints for silk screening that I never would have thought of. For example, having (at least) two people pulling a print if the screen is too large and taping down little pieces of foam to stop the screen from sticking to the print.

They also had two printshop cats! Unfortunately I didn't get to meet them, but I saw them from afar and they were adorable. But I really don't see how they could survive there with all the chemicals in the air.

Our final stop was the studio of Alpha Price. Her studio was half of a tiny room in a beautiful old building. 

Her work was very interesting. I really enjoyed the piece she did with cutting an old iBook in half and carving into the screen. I wish she had shown more of her work though! I feel like we only saw four different things she had done, which was pretty disappointing.