Screenprint on Paper, 22″x15″, 2024
This print was created for the Waterline: 30 Years of Newcomb Art Printmaking exchange curated by Professor Teresa Cole of Tulane University.
The Waterline exchange will be exhibited alongside three decades of printmaking class print exchanges that Professor Cole has elicited from students over the course of her career teaching in the Carroll Gallery, Newcomb Art Department at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. The show will be up August-September 2024.
From the exchange’s prospectus:
“The English master printer Stanley William Hayter who founded the legendary Atelier 17 workshop in Paris referred to printmaking as the journalism of a line. The process of printmaking treats markmaking as reporting, editorializing, or interrogating. Bay Area artist Wayne Thiebaud declared printmaking not as something you know but what you are surprised to learn. This portfolio explores this translation of mark and surprising results with 30 years of past printmakers from both the MFA and BFA programs of Newcomb Art Department, Tulane University, New Orleans.
“Each of the artists listed have their embedded history with a city that might not have risen from the ashes but understands regeneration and rebirth, rising above the waterline. This portfolio is intended to present each artist’s voice as they are now probing concepts, events and current situations.”
The idea for this print originated with something I was told during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, in the days where it was difficult to find food, clean water, an apartment to rent, street signs, healthy trees, a bit of relief. An acquaintance said that if you were in a relationship when the storm hit, in the aftermath you were either gonna get married or break up. Mixed with the acute housing crisis in the city post-Katrina, this made for some very complicated knots to tie and untie. Ultimately, I borrowed a friend’s pickup truck and left my former life behind to forge a new one.