A Woman First

 Long ago I went to a Right to Choose march in Washington DC. I went with a friend and her young daughters. I was telling a makeup artist who occasionally worked at my studio about my upcoming trip.

This woman was a gorgeous orthodox observant woman. She was inspired that I was going to Washington; she couldn't go because the march was on a Saturday. My surprise was when she told me she was decidedly Pro Choice. 

I was under the impression people of such strong convictions would be quite the opposite. However, she explained: "I'm religious, and I'm looking forward to a large family. Chances are strong I'd never have an abortion or question God's will for me. But life isn't black and white. Life is all about the grey area. And though God and my belief is at the center of my existence, I'm a Woman First". 

A Woman First, 2024. 2-color 
RISO print. 10 x 10 inches.

Time Races Without Pause

A re-design of RDWB -- Ringing Doorbell While Black was accepted throughout the US in numerous exhibitions, and in surprising areas...who would have thought that a 2-color letterpress print about gun violence would be hanging in a university museum in Laramie, Wyoming or a gallery in Austin, Texas?

Likewise, the work won an international award for the Defense of Human Rights by the FL3TCH3R Exhibition Foundation, and exhibited at the Reece Museum in Tennessee, also surprise. The latest news is that it won Honorable Mention in the 85th Annual Guild Hall show in East Hampton and that I've been invited to give an artist talk, scheduled for December 8th, 2024. 

The remake is the same size; also printed via letterpress. At the Guild, for some reason, my piece was hung far above the rest...but I still got many questions and a nice group of viewers. Letterpress is the best medium for this work, in that the deep impression drives home the point. This group was printed in Utah by an independent press; I find their presses are big and they're artsy, unlike many other letterpresses that now dedicate themselves to wedding "packages". 

This is what printing has become: wedding packages are now custom-made pocket folders with a collection of letterpress-printed documents and matching envelopes for the RSVP: the announcement, the engagement party, the rehearsal dinner, the wedding itself, and even a cocktail after-party. so much for sustainability.

No more cynicism. The sad reality is that the defense called for a mental evaluation of the assailant (Andrew Lester) because he of the mental suffering he's endured from the media publicity he received for shooting the teenager. The evaluation deadline was November 9th, with a trial date set for November 26th.

left: RDWB - -Ringing Doorbell While Black, Guild Hall, East Hampton.

Us and Them

After walking from Venezuela through the insane lawlessness Colombian border. Walking further north though Narcoville--8 Central American countries--might seem like a cakewalk, if you ignore any variety of human, drug, weapon, automobile traffickers. Then you get to the US where your kids used to be taken away from you with the intention of deterring your emigration, but we've gotten away from that.

Once you get here, you're crammed on a bus or charter plane in Texas or Florida and end up in freezing New York, where you're promptly shipped to where...? tropical Canada in April? 

The political stunts keep getting worse. 70,000 migrants came to New York City in the Spring, 100,000 since August of last year, exhausting even the most liberal NY-ers dealing with a--remember?--resurgent Covid wave. 

And, many more are emigrating from other frightening areas around the world: Haiti, warring countries in Africa, and, the US's favorite, the Ukraine. 

   13 x 18" 2-color letterpress print.

Where will they live? What will they eat? Where will they work? 

The Mayor is a wreck with confrontations from all sides. The governor will give $1B to feed and temporarily house the great number of people before their application for asylum (which could take 3 years  to process) is approved. A temporary work permit may be issued--get this!--150 days after the application for asylum was filed and the mayor is pushing the Biden administration to shorten the wait (awwww, how nice. You wait over four months to work landscaping, construction, or meat processing if you're lucky.)

I feel horrible that the only thing I can do is donate a few bucks and make a print. My Catholic parish has maintained a shelter for years, opened during the Trump years when ICE hounds crawled our sanctuary city. But now? What are we (all) going to do?

RDWB

As if the gun crisis wasn't a bushel of insanity all on its own, the Stand Your Ground law tops the heap. According to Bradyunited.org, "They allow anyone who believes their life to be in danger to use lethal force in an act of self-defense, completely removing the duty to retreat in a public space." (https://www.bradyunited.org/fact-sheets/what-are-stand-your-ground-laws)

Further, it states that these laws:

"are made more lethal by our nation’s history of racism, are reinforced by our nation’s weak gun laws, and are galvanized by outside influence by gun rights groups like the NRA."

Sixteen-year-old Ralph Yarl, a high school junior, sent by his parent to pick up his younger siblings from their friends' house, made the mistake of ringing the doorbell at an incorrect address. 

He was met with a bullet to the head, shot through the glass door, where the shooter could easily see the teenager was just ringing the doorbell. When the boy fell to the ground, the shooter advanced and shot him a second time in the arm.

2-color planned letterpress print

Wounded, the boy got up and ran to three different locations seeking help, until a neighbor on the street told him to lay face down with his hand extended (never mind that his arm was bleeding) until the police responded to the 911 call. The shooter was arrested but freed after 24 hours on the Stand Your Ground law. 

Wrap your head around this: Only after national outrage did the police return to arrest an 84-year old white man, Andrew Lester, and charge him with assault--not attempted murder or a hate crime.

I won't show this creep's picture, but NPR, posted it. 

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/17/1170479923/ralph-yarl-kansas-city-teen-shooting

Plan B

The strongest image of the RISO series on reproductive rights, in my opinion, is Plan B, right. When sifting through the images readily found online and digging a little deeper on pharmaceutical websites and medical journals, I found an NTY article that noted the rush many women have made to purchase Plan B medications and other forms of birth control in the event that restrictions will eventually apply to these areas of reproductive rights as well. 

Get this one: a group called Students For Life Of America is planning to test water "in several large U.S. cities, searching for contaminants that  result from medication abortion." Is this where their financial aid money is going to? Don't these students have something else to do (like...having sex?) https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/12/14/abortion-pills-bans-dobbs-roe/

A Full Redesign, and Now to Print

Since  the original LGBTQ+ was illegible, I had to reconsider the visuals. I redesigned the letters, still in outline, still in process colors, but in a row.

The printer who I'd wanted to print it went out of business as I was waiting for him to quote the job. Grrr. The disappointment is that the fellows over at Highland Press didn't mind me rolling into town to oversee the job to see it print, whereas other presses, would.

Soliciting bids from printers in the NYC area is a drag. "You don't want to print this digitally? Do you know the difference between inkjet and offset?" The usual condescending crap from combed-over print salesmen, although they've mostly graduated from the wood-paneled office with fax machine, bald eagle inspirational posters and  male desk chachkas.

I miss the days of when I was fore(wo)man at a small, fairly horrible press in Long Island City. I'd get the guys there to print just about anything in between runs for BAM membership offers.

Tracey Moffat, from Scarred for Life, offset print
1994. Tate Gallery, London.

Another issue with printing my job offset is the size press. The press where I was a foreman, we had a 4-color Heidelberg GTO (see above), an awesome press that was perfect for small and short runs. The college where I work had three 1-color GTOs, but had to dismantle its printing lab for many reasons--the most obvious one that offset printing is no longer relevant. Shame, but not a shame. And, using it as a fine art machine is beyond what most pressmen want to do; and nothing associated with offset printing is environmentally friendly.

That's not to say that offset was never used as a fine art medium. Tracey Moffat, an Australian artist and filmmaker, used offset printing to create her Scarred For Life I and II series among many other works that was wildly popular in the mid-1990s. At the Art Institute of Chicago, they had a 1-color press (not sure the brand), available to execute prints. Other than E, printing my contact with offset has been limited. However, it's interesting to report that a product now exists to create plastic offset plates that can be made from a laser printer and produce up to 10,000 impressions. The drawback is that the resolution is 133 dpi--lower than the sharpness of a newspaper image.

Right to not be a Slave

I just finished these three and will send them to print this week. A number of iterations were done since I designed the first one in August when Justice Alito leaked that Dobbs and therefore Roe was on the chopping block.

I've been too busy to write about it's development. I had sat down and designed them planning to make RISO prints out of them. The printer who had printed "78" is no longer in business, and finding another printer who could do these was proving difficult.

I had a sneaking suspicion that what I wanted to do wasn't going to be possible using RISO; namely the blending quality doesn't lend itself to RISO giving predictable results. A printer in PA told me to either silkscreen it or print it digitally. Digital printing was out of the question, since digital printing as a printmaking art form is a no-go. And, screening something like these, forget it. Blend upon blend upon blend. I could do it and would so it, I just don't have the facilities.

Two paths taken: Line files were created, and a RISO printer who would take the chance was also sought, with success. Meanwhile, the work was submitted to Woman Made Gallery's ROE 2.0 show and accepted. Off to Chicago at the end of January.