I was invited to be the 2023 visiting artist at the Hartford Art School Print Workshop after it had been canceled since 2019 due to the pandemic. The Print Workshop has been running since 1978 and has hosted artists including Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Susan Rothenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, and Ed Ruscha, among others. The print shop includes a lecture and the creation of an edition of prints. This is one of the students’ most beloved events of the year and a great opportunity for the community to observe and/ or participate in an artistic project closely.
As somebody that has done print making as part of my artistic formation but not incorporated printmaking much in my practice, I was both very excited and honored by the invitation but also terrified. I asked to visit the school and the print shop in advanced of my scheduled visit in order to familiarized myself with the space and explore the possibility of developing a project that was responsive to the space or its material history.
That is how this project took its form. It became an intrinsically collaborative project that brought together multiple generations of students, technicians, professors, and instructors. In the back of the print studio there where two large wooden tables that showed on its surfaces the traces of multiple printing process. Scot Maccluggage thoughtful artist and Printshop monitor right knew the history of these tables and had developed many prints on their surfaces as a student of the school. The tables were built by Professor Thomas Bradley around 1973 for the print studio to provide extended surfaces for the students to work on their print making projects. Learning that these tables had been at the school for five decades and recognizing the traces on its surfaces as marks left by the many artists from over decades that unknowingly had prepared the “plates” for this project made the decision of printing the tables an easy one. It was important to me that the current generation of students and faculty could add traces or mark the surfaces in some way before thinking of the tables as ready to print plates. For this we organized a series of events that brought us all to use the tables one last time before printing them.
We had Karaoke sessions on top and around table 1, we had a dinner and a sobremesa conversation around table 1 and 2, and we created a transiting print on top of table 2.
After these social gatherings we closed the activities on the tables and commence the printing process.
We were able to print 2 large scale prints of each table, each measuring ten feet by 6 feet and 56 people participated in the project, helping to print, singing on top of the tables, and gathering for extended conversation. The last day of my five-day residence at the print shop I printed 56 fragments of table 1 all done at a 1’to1” scale of the table to leave with the 56 collaborators.
Two of these prints stayed at Hartford Art School as part of their print collection.
Special thanks to Profesor Kasey Ramirez and Scot Maccluggage for the invitation to participate in this beautiful program, their advice, and selfish collaboration through this project.
Students spent time singing karaoke atop the print making tables.
Sharing a meal around the table.
Full size table prints