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THE SAN FRANCISCO CENTER FOR THE BOOK PRESENTS
The Fifth Annual
ROADWORKS: Steamroller Prints Meet the 2008 Roadworks Artists
Patricia Curtan Patricia Curtan is an artist and designer living in Berkeley, California. She combines her interest in food, cooking, organic gardening, art, and printing in her work, rendering images of plants in the medium of linoleum block printing, making images primarily of plants, particularly edible plants. Most recently, two print suites, one of fruit and one of vegetables, were produced in limited editions and reproduced as illustrations in Chez Panisse Fruit (2002), and Chez Panisse VegetablesCurtan's process of making the prints is three part: drawing, carving and printing. She begins with a pencil drawing, which is then transferred to linoleum blocks: a smooth layer of linoleum mounted on wood. The linoleum is carved with a knife and gouges to remove the negative space of the image and leave a raised relief printing surface. A separate block is cut for each color in the image. The blocks are then printed, one color at a time, on a 10 x 15 Chandler & Price letterpress – a one-hundred-year old, cast-iron beauty. In some images, some of the blocks are printed multiple times to make layers of color. Some images have as many as twelve blocks and may pass through the press twenty times.
The avocado print was used to illustrate a trade-book calendar. The persimmon illustration shows a 9-block printing sequence, which you can also see as a larger-scale "flip book" on Curtan's website.
Progressive states of the printing process of Persimmons, Edition of 60, image 5 x 7 1/8"
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Emory Douglas Asserting that "all art is political and valuing real-life action and change above all else,"
Emory Douglas provided the visual branding image to the Black Panther Party beginning 1967, the year after the organizations' founding, until 1985. During this period, Douglas used his illustration skills with pen and ink "chunky black lines", airbrush, paper, collage and gouache to raise consciousness about Blacks in America and to give a sense of humanity and empowerment "to those customarily portrayed as social pariahs" — to turn ordinary people into heroic images.
Always, his work was directed to ghetto residents, and was some of the first visual art in America FOR Black Americans rather than about Black Americans. Douglas and the Black Panthers are credited with stirring forces that likely was "the first time in U.S. history that blacks broadcast their intention to fight back against those who sought to exploit them." Their crusade was for freedom to determine own destiny, full employment, decent housing and education, free health care, end of police brutality, end of wars of aggression, and equal availability to modern technology.
Many of his subjects are angry females. In one of his drawings, a black mother is carrying a baby that is clutching a pistol in his hand, and another work shows a black mother with a baby on her hip and a shotgun strapped to her back. A 1968 Douglas political illustration showed four lynched pigs labeled as President Lyndon Johnson and three members of his cabinet. (Lynching activities and pig verbal connotations are associated with some whites' treatment of blacks, especially in the American south.)
Emory Douglas moved as a child with his mother to San Francisco, where he continues (2008) to work as an illustrator. He is production artist for the Sun Reporter, the city's oldest African-American newspaper. As a youngster, he did much cartoon drawing and after a period of 'juvenile delinquency' when he was incarcerated at the Youth Training School in Ontario, California and worked in the prison's printing shop, he studied art at the City College of San Francisco. At the time of the founding of the Black Panthers, he became associated with its founders Bobby Seale and Huey Newton and from the beginning, having joined the Panthers, helped them compose words and images to promote their organization. One of the methods has been to include full page poster by Douglas at the back of each Black Panther newspaper, which, unlike other publications for Black Americans at that time, was directed to all classes, primarily the lower, downtrodden people.
Poster from The Black Panther, November 8, 1969, offset lithograph, Collection of Alden and Mary Kimbrough, Los Angeles © Emory Douglas, digital imaging by Echelon
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Poster from The Black Panther, 1969, offset lithograph. Collection of Alden and Mary Kimbrough, Los Angeles, © Emory Douglas, digital imaging by Echelon
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Jason Jagel Jason Jagel was born in 1971 in Boston, Mass and later received degrees from the California College of Arts and Crafts, BFA 1995 and Stanford University, MFA 2002. Gallery affiliations include Plane Space, NY, NY; Queen's Nails Annex, SF, CA; Greg Kucera, Seattle, WA; and Richard Heller, Santa Monica, CA. He has been featured in numerous solo and group shows since 1995 including those in New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, New Orleans and more. Recent solo exhibitions include Paper Record at Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, WA (2007); One Thing About Music at Plane Space, New York, NY (2007); and Flesh Of My Skin, at Queens Nails Annex, San Francisco, CA (2007). Jason lives with his wife and two daughters in San Francisco and teaches at the California College of the Arts.
Jagel pursues fictional autobiography through drawing & painting as well as paper sculpture, wood carving, sound, video and installation. His work is largely informed by his fixation with music, fiction, comics and movies. In addition to his studio practice & other work, Jason has made artwork for album covers for the likes of Our Lady of the Highway, Dudley Perkins, Egon, MF DOOM, Madlib and more.
Reading & Writing, 2007, gouache, Blo-Pen, ink and pencil on paper, 60 x 88"
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Fiction, 2007, gouache and ink on magazine, 4.25 x 7,
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Favianna Rodriguez Favianna Rodriguez uses the arts as a tool for liberation. Since 1998, Favianna's pieces have been posted on street corners, store windows, telephone poles, raised at mass rallies and community festivals, or may have found their way into your mailbox. Her artwork carries on a Bay Area tradition of designing and printing socially conscious art for progressive political causes and grassroots organizations.
Favianna is a founding member of the EastSide Arts Alliance (ESAA), an Oakland-based collective of third world artist and community organizers who use the arts as a tool in the freedom struggle. She is the director of Visual Element a graffiti arts organization that trains young graffiti writers to produce political murals in communities of color. She is also the co-owner of Tumi's Design, a multi-service technology and design firm. Implementing advanced graphic & web technologies with a social consciousness, Tumi's seeks to use multimedia to engender global communication between oppressed communities and to promote political art and open forums of expression.
Favianna is unabashedly committed to the art of political propaganda. She readily assumes that role, utilizing the graphic arts as an educating tool, affirming a progressive cultural consciousness, providing community access to art and technology to assert an independent voice, and producing propaganda for the people.
Hermano Kyang Hae Lee, October 2003, Silkscreen, Self Help Graphics, Los Angeles
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Oakland For the People,
December 2005, Silkscreen
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Rik Olson |
A California native, Rik Olson received his B.F.A. from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. He has studied under such masters as Barry Moser, John DePol, Richard McLean, and Ralph Borge. He has lived, studied and exhibited in Italy, Germany and the U.S. His influences include the years he lived in Europe and currently the beautiful countryside of Sonoma County, California. He enjoys pushing the envelope in printmaking and has recently been working on editions of multi-color linoleum cut prints. He has exhibited work widely in Europe and the U.S. For the past 20 years he has worked as a freelance illustrator.
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Steamrollers In Space, Pluto Project, 2008,
black and white linoleum Roadworks print,
48" x 48"
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Ole Olson, 2004, black and white linoleum Roadworks print,
48" x 48"
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San Quentin State Prison printmaking students of
Katya McCulloch and Art Hazelwood Thoughts on the San Quentin project by Art Hazelwood:
Katya McCulloch invited me to come and show my prints to her printmaking class at San Quentin. The experience was very powerful for me. It is something I have since heard from many people who have taken art work in to show prisoners, but their attention and focus is unparalleled. I don’t believe I have ever had as attentive and perceptive an audience as I did showing my work that first day. Since then I have been back a few times and always found the guys work to be outstanding, and their dedication to making their art inspiring. When the opportunity came up to work with them on a large print both Katya and I thought it would be a great opportunity.
The prisoners mostly make their own individual work so making a large scale linocut print in collaboration is a bit of a challenge, as it would be to any group. But the chosen subject of censorship certainly makes for rich material for them. For the prisoners censorship is not a remote concept but one that they encounter on a regular basis.
We worked together to talk about different aspects of censorship, and then each of the guys made a drawing that we would later incorporate. Working together we developed an overall composition that has a central motif a man behind bars reaching for a book. As we develop the image we look forward to seeing how each prisoners different cutting and drawing skills can best be used.
The prison printmaking program is part of the Arts in Corrections which is funded by a private foundation the William James Association, Prison Arts Project.
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