Anna Laurie Mackay and Professor Garold Barton, Visual Arts
Within our local working art community there seems to be minorities. Women artists being one and Printmakers being another. By organizing a print exchange and having a exhibition including 25 women the hope was to work collaboratively and establish unity as women artists and printmakers. The participants were carefully chosen, with the help of my mentor Gary Barton, out of professional artists, faculty of the surrounding universities and MFA and BFA students from Brigham Young University and The University of Utah. The diversity of the participants resulted in a eclectic collection of prints for our exchange. To further individualize this project the exchange was letterpressed with text and hand bound into books which each of the participants received. The advantage of having the prints bound into books was to make the art more accesible as well as to make the exchange more unique. Each artist had the option to have a paragraph of text accompany their work which gives the viewer further insight into their work as well as tying the exchange to the traditional book form.
The students who were involved were encouraged to work closely with the participating faculty and the working artists to push their own work towards a more professional level. Jennifer Watson, Jean Richardson and I particularly benefitted by doing the printing for several of the participants. By offering our technical skills as printmakers we were able to invite some well known artists within our community, including Jacqui Biggs-Larsen, Jennifer Barton, Pam Bowman, and Von Allen. As students we were able to build rapport and establish our reputations as printmakers and artists with these women through working closely with them as well as my mentor to refine our creative and technical skills.
The countless hours of work that went into printing these artists pieces could not have been estimated. Many problems arose during the process which helped to further polish our skills and knowledge about printmaking. Jennifer Barton’s print for example had to be redone three times because of unforseen processing errors. Jacqui-Biggs Larsen’s print used flat areas of color that didn’t absorb into the paper and had to be modified several times until they were able to be printed constantly. My mentor was actively involved in helping resolve these issues and the artists were very patient in helping us in the learning process.
In addition to building my skills technically and creatively it stretched me to explore the business aspect of art. Bids were collected for contracting out the letterpress and binding of the project. All the work from our part had to be completed in a timely matter in order to accommodate the needs of our sub-contractors. Also, as part of my original proposal a gallery had to be secured for exhibiting this body of work. The connections with the established participants of the exchange provided me with several excellent venue options. After reviewing options with my mentor I applied to a few select galleries and was fortunate to be accepted into the Finch Lane Gallery in Salt Lake City in addition to the Harold B Lee Library at Brigham Young University. The exhibit is to be on show at the Harold B Lee Library the months of October and November and will be shown in the Finch Lane March of 2007.
Perhaps the biggest challenge that I faced was the completion of my own print. As the organizer of this project I wanted to push myself creatively to make sure my work was on par with the other participants of the exchange. After working closely with these talented women I learned to look and think more critically at my own work and polish it to a more sophisticated and professional level. Through my own participation in this project I was challenged and stretched in ways that have helped to push me from a student into a more confident and accomplished artist.
At the completion of this project I was pleased to find that my expectations were exceeded in the quality of the work that we recieved from each of the participants as well as the craftmanship of the letterpress and bookbinding. The students that were involved in this project undoubtedly benefitted and will benefit as I have, by achieving exposure through our future exhibition, by working collaboratively with working artists an by learning problem solving skills technically, creatively and logically. Each participant likewise benefits by being able to recieve this fine collection of prints bound beautifully into one of a kind books.