Prints reclaim their space

By Farrah Madanay     8/22/12 7:00pm

Though printmaking may not be as readily recognized as a high art compared with en plein air painting or bronze sculpture, the art has a storied history, from the woodcut blocks of Japanese ukiyo-e to the dark rooms of the house of Francisco Goya. 

Co-curated by Visual and Dramatic Arts professor Karin Broker and Baker College senior Elena Lacey, "Houston Ink," in the Rice Cinema gallery, disengages visitors from their assumption that printmaking is art solely acculturated into

common culture.

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From the simple black and white "Free Hugs" T-shirts to an intricately designed poster for a Black Keys concert, printmaking is an art form that can be effectively used and appreciated outside of stuffy, juried exhibition spaces. Perhaps because of the ubiquity of printmaking in everyday American culture, prints seem out of place when wrangled and returned to the stark white walls of art galleries, such as in the Rice Cinema.

Today is the final day of the exhibition, which displays a collection of masks, tapestries, posters, sculptures and framed wall hangings, all created through printmaking.

   Red, white and black anthropomorphic masks, created by Dennis McNett and Burning Bones Press, stand at various heights at one corner of

the gallery. 

An accompanying photo book shows the masks were worn at the 2012 Art Car Parade. However, the masks took a back seat to the art car: a 1997 Honda Civic outfitted with a woodcut and screen-printed plywood structure of a

Mayan Temple. 

In the middle of the bottom floor, a sculpture, which looks like the Mayan analogue to the head of a Chinese lion dance costume, sits with its split tongue hanging out. The "Pleased to meet you!" lettering on the floor in front juxtaposes with the multi-patterned, jagged-toothed face. The art car, masks and sculpture break the stereotype that printmaking is one-dimensional.

Concert posters for venues ranging from the Continental Club to the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion fill the entire length of the wall behind the Mayan head sculpture. The wall brings the everyday into the gallery; this wall of posters could just as easily hang in a college student's dorm room. The wall highlights these posters as art, blurring the line between mass-produced advertisements and collected original prints.

Upstairs, the gallery reverts to tradition: Framed prints hang at measured intervals from each other, individually lit by can lights. Prints vary from abstract depictions, such as the Adam and Eve apes, complete with green serpent and John Milton's red apple "forbidden fruit," to video game-esque figural designs such as a scantily clad woman with

a headdress.

Broker and Lacey, who is the Thresher illustrator and news designer, curate an exhibition which not only asserts a place for printmaking in the gallery, but also reinvents printmaking as a 3-D art form. Printmaking is urban and urbane, an art of the past designing

the future.

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