The Fine Print
Columbia's new partnership with Anchor Graphics honors the collaborative, experimental nature of both the college and the printmaking workshop.
By Ann Wiens / Photography by Eric Davis ('06)
An Read > |
For centuries, artists have turned to hand-printmaking techniques to fulfill their visions. Rembrandt and Dürer are well known for their etchings. Audubon furthered the fields of both art and science through his famous “Birds of America” prints. Picasso made prints throughout his career. And Toulouse-Lautrec’s lithographs of the Moulin Rouge are icons of their time. All were made in collaboration with master printers, whose technical skill and expertise were critical to helping the artists achieve their visions. The artist-master printer relationship is a symbiotic one, a collaborative process to which the artist brings an initial vision that will likely be enhanced and improved by the knowledge of the medium offered by the printer. It’s similar to the relationship between an architect and a master carpenter, in which the vision of one is enhanced by the skill and expertise of the other.
Chicago’s art community has a long tradition of enthusiasm for collaboration, respect for skilled craftsmanship, and skepticism of fleeting trends. These are all characteristics that have made the city fertile ground for hand printmaking. From the academic and community-based studios of the early twentieth century to the professional presses that emerged in the 1970s, printmaking in Chicago has a long, rich history.
A standout in that history is Anchor Graphics, a lithography and etching workshop founded by David Jones in 1990. Jones built the nonprofit Anchor Graphics into a bustling workshop, attracting artists from across the country. In addition to publishing limited-edition prints, Anchor’s program included extensive educational programs, outreach projects, lectures, residencies, and studio resources for artists. In recent years, however, the press had reached a point where Jones felt it needed a change. Something to revitalize it and take it to the next level. This spring, Anchor and Columbia College Chicago entered into a partnership that combines the strengths of each and promises great benefits for professional artists and students alike.
Printmaking in Chicago Before 1970
In 1960, an artist named June Wayne founded the Tamarind Workshop in Los Angeles out of frustration at having to travel to Paris to work with a master printer. “The art of lithography had gone into a grave decline,” Wayne writes in her introduction to The Tamarind Book of Lithography Art and Techniques. “Master printers were extinct in the United States and were dying out in Europe.” The first modern American printmaking workshop to follow the European model of collaboration between artist and master printer, Tamarind brought the tradition back to life, training a new generation of master printers, many of whom went on to establish their own workshops across the country.
Chicago artists managed to muddle through the first half of the century without benefit of atelier-trained master printers, producing sophisticated prints in academic and community-based shops. In 1941, under the sponsorship of the Federal Art Project/Works Progress Administration (FPA/WPA), the Southside Community Arts Center opened, providing a studio where artists including Charles White, Eldzier Cortor, and noted printmaker and DuSable Museum cofounder Margaret Burroughs practiced their art. Through the 1930s and 1940s, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Iowa each had influential printmaking programs that helped keep the techniques alive in the Midwest, despite the “extinction” of American master printers.
In 1953, Chicago artists Ellen Lanyon and Roland Ginzel, who had studied at both schools, joined with several fellow students to establish the collaborative Graphic Arts Workshop in Chicago. Many artists of the time printed at the Graphic Arts Workshop, which served as a locus for a close, supportive printmaking community in the city until it was destroyed by fire in 1955.
Landfall Makes the Scene
With its most lively artist-run press gone and its few well-trained printers ensconced in academic positions, Chicago did not immediately join the professional workshop trend started by June Wayne’s Tamarind Workshop in 1960, although printmaking continued to be taught in Chicago’s art colleges. But in the early 1970s, the Chicago art world changed. The New Art Examiner—the only monthly, national, contemporary art magazine ever based in Chicago—began publication. Artists founded the now-legendary alternative galleries ARC, Artemisia, N.A.M.E., and Randolph Street Gallery, and a new wave of commercial galleries opened in River North, a bleak stretch of warehouses that would become the city’s primary gallery district. And a distinctly Chicago artistic style known as Chicago Imagism made its debut on the international art-world stage with buzz-generating exhibitions at the São Paolo Bienal, the National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. (Several artists who would become icons of Chicago Imagism have recently printed with Anchor Graphics, including Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, the late Ed Paschke, and Karl Wirsum.)
The city was finally ripe for the emergence of a professional print workshop, and as if on cue, Tamarind-trained master printer Jack Lemon founded Landfall Press in 1970. Landfall quickly became one of the most respected print workshops in the country—a peer to the venerable Tamarind, which is now affiliated with the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Perhaps Landfall’s greatest contribution to the discipline, however, is the number of accomplished master printers it has trained, many of whom have gone on to establish their own presses.
Among them was Anchor’s founder, David Jones, a production printer who was apprenticing with Landfall. Originally from California, Jones studied photography and printmaking at schools in the Bay Area, Kentucky, Canada, and Missouri, eventually earning a B.F.A. in printmaking from the Kansas City Art Institute at age 37. He then headed to Chicago for an internship at Landfall, which led to the production printing job. In 1986, he and his wife, painter Marilyn Propp (who has taught part time at Columbia since 2002), made Chicago their home.
"I realized that Anchor was at a juncture in its evolution and it needed a change." – David Jones
Jones had been at Landfall for three years when Lemon gave him a significant gift: a 24- by 36-inch Bavarian limestone—a valuable tool in the creation of lithographs.* Jones took the stone to a small, Ukrainian Village studio, and Anchor Graphics was founded.
*Hand lithographs are created by drawing with grease-based materials on either special aluminum plates—which can be mass produced—or smooth slabs of Bavarian limestone, which are increasingly rare, as the quarries from which they’re mined were largely exhausted well before the post-Tamarind resurgence of hand lithography. The stones or plates are chemically treated, and multiple prints are made through a process based on the natural repulsion of oil and water. Individual plates or stones are required for each color, and keeping the image consistent throughout an edition is tricky.
Anchor Graphics:
a New Collaborative Model
Jones founded Anchor as a nonprofit organization, with education and collaboration central to his vision for the press. In many ways, the workshop is a synthesis of several models that have flourished in Chicago, combining the professionalism and technical expertise of shops like Landfall, the collaborative spirit and support for experimentation of places like the Graphic Arts Workshop and the South Side Community Arts Center, and the educational rigor of the best academic programs.
“Everything we do revolves around education. When we work with an artist, or have a lecture or demo, there’s always a teaching component.” – David Jones
Jones modeled Anchor largely after the cooperative New York shop of one of his mentors, Robert Blackburn, and he was profoundly honored when he was asked to help reorganize the 55-year-old shop following Blackburn’s death in 2003. The honor grew when he was offered a job as director last September, truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. By then, however, Jones was already deep in negotiations with Columbia to bring Anchor under the auspices of the college—the route he ultimately decided to take.
Anchor Comes to Columbia
“I started talking with Jay Wolke [then chair of the art and design department] about partnering with Columbia several years ago,” Jones says. “I realized that Anchor was at a juncture in its evolution and it needed a change.”
Initial conversations with Columbia progressed amiably but slowly until the arrival of Leonard Lehrer, an internationally respected printmaker himself, in fall 2001. Lehrer came to Columbia to serve as dean of the School of Fine and Performing Arts after chairing the art department at New York University. He saw the presence of Anchor on campus as a huge opportunity for the school and a potential “jewel in its crown” for the Department of Art and Design—comparable to the benefits brought to the photography department by its relationship with the Center for American Places, or the music department by the Chicago Jazz Ensemble. “These programs that bring the professional world to the institution are one thing that separates Columbia from other schools,” Lehrer says.
The new dean also saw the partnership as a chance “to raise the profile of what it could mean for a student to study” at Columbia. “If you point to those programs in the country that have professional fine-art print shops in their programs,” Lehrer says, “you’re talking about the best—Tandem at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, GraphicStudio at the University of South Florida, Tamarind at the University of New Mexico—these are synonymous with the highest quality, and they’ve established a strong precedent for fusing the professional and the academic.”
Jones was excited by the potential offered by that fusion, especially given Columbia’s stated commitment to community engagement. This, combined with his desire to see the shop to which he’d devoted 16 years of his life rise to the next level, convinced Jones to turn down the enticing Blackburn offer and stay in Chicago, overseeing Anchor’s transition from an independent, nonprofit workshop to a college-based facility.
"Over time, Columbia will become known through Anchor as a leader in the field of contemporary graphics." – Leonard Lehrer
With a full-time staff of just three—Jones, master printer Chris Flynn, and assistant James Iannaccone—Anchor Graphics maintains an impressive schedule of classes, workshops, residencies, and lectures, all the while publishing exquisite, hand-pulled prints. The parade of professional artists that comes through the workshop—when asked, Jones rattles off a list of names including Kerry James Marshall, Ellen Lanyon, the late Ed Paschke, Jim Nutt, Karl Wirsum, Michiko Itatani, Gladys Nielssen, the late Hollis Sigler, Kay Rosen, Tim Anderson, and others—will be a great benefit to Columbia students, who will have opportunities to meet the artists, watch them work, and even assist with printing. Anchor has an active internship program that will provide opportunities to Columbia students. And both Jones and Lehrer are excited about the opportunities for artists on Columbia’s faculty and staff to print at the shop.
One of the characteristics that makes the workshop such a good fit with Columbia’s mission is its emphasis on outreach and community engagement. The Press on Wheels (POW) program brings traditional printmaking processes into schools, galleries, community centers, and museums, giving participants an opportunity to see how prints are made and understand the process. During the recent Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition at the Art Institute, for example, Anchor’s staff was on press right in the museum, demonstrating the processes used by Lautrec in the works surrounding them.
Anchor also offers affordable open studio time to local printmakers, free classes for high school students, and low-cost adult classes and workshops. This fall, the press presents its first lecture series at Columbia, with Debra Wood, senior curator at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, kicking off the season on September 6.
“Over time, we will become known through Anchor as a leader in the field of contemporary graphics,” says Lehrer, who envisions the partnership producing portfolios, publications, and periodic symposia down the line. “Over a ten-year period,” he continues, “those are the things that separate an art department that simply has an etching press and a department that has a full-scale commitment to the field. Our students will be the beneficiaries of that.”
 |
 |
 |
Author’s note: An excellent reference on printmaking in Chicago is the catalogue for the 1996 exhibition at the Mary and Leigh Block Gallery at Northwestern University, “Second Sight: Printmaking in Chicago 1935-1995.” I consulted the historical essays by Mark Pascale, James Yood, and David Mickenberg frequently as I prepared this article.
Ann Wiens is an artist and the editor of Demo. Photographer Eric Davis (’06) is a graduate of Columbia’s photography program. He is a freelance photojournalist currently working in the Chicagoland area.
