New Museum Los Gatos and the California Society of Printmakers was pleased to present Thinking Outside the Frame, an exhibition featuring works that fall outside the realm of traditional printmaking.

Cathy Kimball, executive director and chief curator of San Jose ICA, served as juror for Thinking Outside the Frame. She tells us that “printmaking has often been characterized by its unconventional use of traditional techniques. Thinking Outside the Frame reflects that spirit of innovation in awe-inspiring works that include woven paper, artists’ books, large scale, multi-panel prints and even video. The fourteen artists in this exhibition explore the various permutations of printmaking methods and installation approaches, successfully bending the dynamics of this age-old art form.” 

Artists have continually endeavored to introduce variety and individuality into their prints by exploring the use of different types materials and experimenting with varied printing surfaces. Over the course of the last century, these processes have been adapted and combined with new technology, leading to further experimentation and invention on the part of the printmaker. 

As we see in Thinking Outside the Frame, printmakers continue to push the boundaries of materials and techniques in order to achieve new effects. The finished results don’t fall within conventional categories, and in doing so they illuminate ingenuity and provide fertile ground for future creativity. 

NUMU’s collaborative partner, the California Society of Printmakers (CSP) is an international organization that promotes the practice and appreciation of contemporary fine art printmaking. Their mission is to support the integrity of traditional printmaking while providing a home for artists exploring new directions in contemporary print methods. To that end, the CSP organizes exhibitions of members’ artwork, artist talks, demos, lectures, artist residencies and an annual journal publication. With the exhibition Thinking Outside the Frame, the CSP is excited to provide members with an opportunity to take risks and push the boundaries of printmaking by showcasing large scale works, installations, book arts, printmaking used in three-dimensional work, and the combination of printmaking with other media. The California Society of Printmakers is the oldest printmaking organization in the nation. Originally founded in 1912 as the California Society of Etchers, it reflected a surge of printmaking activity in the West during the early part of the century. In 1968 the California Society of Etchers merged with the Bay Area Printmakers to form the California Society of Printmakers. Currently, the CSP has a membership of approximately 300 artists, and welcomes new members through a juried review each June and December. Though most members live and work in Northern California, membership is open to printmakers throughout the world.

In conjunction with the exhibition Thinking Outside the Frame, NUMU created a printmaking workshop to invite the community to learn about the various methods of printmaking by presenting several live printmaking demonstrations in the Spotlight Gallery. Each artist program spanned approximately one hour in length and demonstrate various printmaking processes. Artwork created at the demos were displayed in the space to further illustrate the creative process and share with museum visitors the product of the printmaking activity.

Printmaking has played a key role in the history of civilization, its impact unparalleled until our current age of technology. Originally used as a form of communication that allowed the production of multiples to be distributed among large numbers of people, printmaking has since become a valued artistic medium.

The traditional technical processes of printmaking can be broken down into four main categories: relief, intaglio, planographic and stencil. As you explore the printmaking workshop you will find information panels that explain each process and discover the tools of the trade that facilitate printmaking techniques.

Beth Fein’s art practice negotiates the crossroads between the conceptual and the material. Whether she is engaged in printmaking, performance or installations, her work investigates the delineation and intersection of boundaries between light and dark, reality and dreams, stillness and movement. Objects, dreams, words, places, and the world around her filter into her work, and reappear in subtle layers. The unpredictability and the necessity of making difficult choices has long been a part of her work in the abstract, while quietly referencing social justice, betrayal and struggle.

Beth Fein is an interdisciplinary artist whose work encompasses installation, printmaking, video, and performance. Fein lives in Berkeley and works in her Oakland studio and at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley. She has taught both printmaking and dance workshops, and has been awarded artist residencies in Spain, Argentina, New York, Vermont and California. Fein’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including: Transmission Gallery, Oakland; the Oakland Museum of California; International Print Center, NY; Triton Museum of Art; Headlands Center for the Arts; Banks Gallery, London; San Francisco International Airport; Santander, Spain; and Kala Art Institute.

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Betty Friedman earned her BFA and MFA in printmaking from California College of the Arts. Her work can be found in museum and corporate collections including: the Oakland Museum of California; Adobe Systems; Apple Computers; Dole Foods; Kaiser Permanente; Fairmont Hotels; Union Bank of Switzerland; and Bank of California.

Friedman reminds us that in printmaking, paper is the vehicle for ink. It affects the color, size, weight, texture and even the longevity of a print. She makes her own handmade paper, which is very strong. It holds up through many passes in the etching press under tremendous pressure and still prints beautifully. For Friedman, her process of papermaking opens up a whole world of possibilities in printmaking. For example, she can combine intensely colored paper with images printed with intaglio in ink. She also makes very large paper for diptychs and triptychs from cotton and abaca, changing the scale of a print from intimate to large scale or life-size.

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Ewa Gavrielov’s inspiration comes from her interest in giving new meaning to everyday objects and materials; transforming the common and discarded into uncommon and precious. Gavrielov has always thought of her work as improvisation, responding to what she has just created with the materials. Her approach to printmaking is a gradual process, elements arising organically out of their interactions with each other, leaving traces even when they are covered by later additions. Experimentation with materials, substances, and techniques and pushing the limits of the medium are integral to Gavrielov’s practice, with the intention of opening the viewer to exploration and to emotionally engage with the art.

Ewa Gavrielov was born in Poland and raised in Israel. She earned a bachelor of Architecture in Israel, and a graphic design diploma from the Art Institute of Boston. She worked as an architect and a designer before becoming a full time artist. Gavrielov works at her home studio in Palo Alto and is an artist-in-residence at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA. Her work has been exhibited in group and community shows around the region and is held in private collections in the Bay Area and Israel.

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Ellie Honl’s artwork is about our human desire to find stability in the unsteady present and the unpredictable future. Informed by psychological theories of coping strategies, her lifelong interests in architecture and the genre of science fiction, her artwork tries to understand why things are the way they are, and strives to find logic in the random. Through a multidisciplinary approach, she creates prints, objects, and moving images that oscillate between rational and irrational, organized and disordered.

Honl lives and works in Morgan Hill, CA. Combining printmaking, time-based media, and alternative photographic processes, her artwork has been exhibited across the United States and is included in many national collections. She recently had solo and two-person exhibitions at the College of Southern Nevada, Las Vegas and Hartnett Gallery, Rochester, NY. Honl has been awarded residencies at Vermont Studio Center and the Kala Art Institute and held academic positions at Indiana University, Arizona State University, and the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point. She received her MFA in Printmaking from the University of Iowa.

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ABOVE:
Ellie Honl
Coping Strategies, 2013
HD stop-animation video made from prints

Courtesy of the Artist

Karen Gallagher Iverson’s landscapes push against the boundaries of printmaking and the act of drawing. Using fabrication machinery she developed a lo-fi printmaking method, creating pochoir screens in plastic, which are used to build up layered pastel monotypes. The results create emotive scenes that play with visual perception, place and time. The Variable Horizon quadriptych investigates a link between a tree line with a medically recorded heart rate. Dominance is given to the heart rhythm and portions of silhouetted trees are fit into the predetermined heart-trace horizon line. An echo of life is depicted, inter-changing time with a constructed place.

Karen Gallagher-Iverson is an experimental printmaker focused on disassembling the traditional format of printmaking into a contemporary experience of documentation and re-composition. Originally a New York native, she currently maintains her studio in Oakland, CA, and has shown her work in local and national exhibitions. She was awarded a 2017-18 Kala Art Institute Artist Parent Award and Residency, and was the 2016 recipient of an International Encaustic Conference Attendee Grant. Gallagher-Iverson’s work can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The State University of New York at Albany Art Museum, and other private collections.

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ABOVE:
Karen Gallagher Iverson
Variable Horizons Echo 1, 2, 3, 4, 2016
Pochior print, drawn colored pastel on wax

Courtesy of the Artist

Inquiry and introspection about the interconnectedness of things drives Kent Manske’s studio practice. This helps him access his own truths and facilitates his understanding of the world in a broader context. Genetic Garden presents invented cells, organisms, membranes, bacteria, genes and cancers in a celebratory landscape. His other works explore a range of topics from imaginary environments of our genome, to social issues relevant to sustainability and our democracy.

Kent Manske creates images and symbols to inquire, process, manage, convey and assign meaning to ideas about human existence. He uses both traditional and digital printmaking, and book publishing processes to create one-of-a-kind and limited-edition works on paper. In 1992 he co-founded PreNeo Press in Redwood City, California. His work can be found in public and private collections including the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums and the Oakland Museum of California.

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As an American from a diverse background, Colombian and Irish, Michelle Murillo has a desire to examine how identity is constructed and negotiated. In seeking more information about her ancestry beyond the stories passed down through generations, she turned to the science of genetics. The resulting work manifests in maps both literal and metaphorical for her shifting identity. Working across printmaking and glass seems befitting of the complex subject of identity for Murillo. The fusion of media is a paradox: glass is ephemeral, yet print is fixed and somehow remains mutable and mysterious like the journey of retrieving the past through DNA.

Michelle Murillo is an artist working across traditional and innovative media. She seeks to expand the vocabulary of print media and the multiple in an interdisciplinary context. Murillo’s work has been exhibited internationally, with recent exhibitions in Cuba and Poland. Her work can be found in the collections of the Fine Art Museum of San Francisco; the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Museum of History, Anthropology and Art, San Juan, Puerto Rico; and the China Print Museum, Shenzhen, China. Murillo is an Associate Professor and Chair of Printmaking at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, California.

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The major focus of Carrie Ann Plank’s work considers reinterpreting and reorganizing visual information systems. She has always been fascinated by the manner in which principal and equation can be visually rendered, and how this translation impacts the comprehension of data; be it obfuscation or clarification. Mapping, numerical sequences, fractals, wave patterns, sound sources, magnetic field variations and other systems of scientific observation, overlay one another to create a pastiche of information visualization. She is interested in the resulting noise of these visual systems, be it organically or theoretically derived, and how they interact. Layers overlap and interfere while creating abstraction from the concrete.

Carrie Ann Plank’s work is included in many private and public collections including the Fine
Art Archives of the Library of Congress; Fine Art Museums of San Francisco; the Guanlan Print Art Museum, China; and the Iraq National Library, Baghdad. Recent solo shows include DZINE Gallery, San Francisco; The Academy of Art University, San Francisco; Bullseye Projects, Portland, OR; and Fourth Wall Gallery, Oakland, CA. Additionally, Plank has had a 20-year teaching career and most recently served as Director of the Printmaking at the Academy of Art University before devoting herself solely to her art practice in 2018.

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ABOVE:
Carrie Ann Plank

Dermaombré , 2016
Laser assisted woodcut with indigo dye on Okawara

Dermaombré Brown Variation Small Version & Dermaombré Blue Variation Small version, 2017
Laser assisted woodcut with indigo dye on Okawara

Courtesy of the Artist

Oakland artist and educator, Ashley Rodriguez Reed works with textiles and mixed media to create installations and prints. Using elements of drawing, printmaking and photography she creates a translation of her experiences in the world that relate to the dynamic feeling of physical space meeting psychological space. Her influences come from a range of material, from different landscapes in nature, to buildings collapsing or decaying. She graduated with her BFA in printmaking at the University of Nebraska, Omaha and earned her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies at Tyler School of Art.

This series of screen-printed and sewn textiles is derived from photographs Ashley Rodriguez Reed takes of trees in the forest. She is particularly drawn to exposed roots and the layers of growth from moss and plants. When she is hiking, she takes note of particular spaces that draw her in. Trees create a sanctuary of root tangles and nooks that call Rodriguez Reed into their space to feel protected. The physicality of these spaces speaks to her as she finds balance between the desire to be wild and free and the desire to also maintain a natural grounding.

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The California landscape and quality of light have informed Luz Marina Ruiz’s early drawings and paintings. She finds herself still drawn to basic organic forms found in nature, seeing them as essential structures nurturing the essence of life. She relies on these simple forms, reminiscent of seeds, pods, or leaves, and intertwines them with dream images and personal experiences. Luz Marina Ruiz likes that these forms are not necessarily specific; that they can easily evoke other references.

Oakland resident, Luz Marina Ruiz is best known for her ability to transform 2D prints (linocuts, collagraphs, etchings, and monotypes) into sculptural artists’ books and installations. Her playful and whimsical work is inspired by the world of dreams and nature. She works in a variety of media: drawing, painting, mixed media, printmaking, book arts and installation. Intrigued by the experimental nature of printmaking, she employs many printmaking approaches to her work: gouging, scratching, collaging and layering pigment to achieve highly textured surfaces. Luz Marina Ruiz currently teaches at California College of the Arts.

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Robynn Smith received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from San Jose State University. Smith teaches at Monterey Peninsula College and is the founder of the MPC Printmakers and International Print Day in May. She has had notable solo exhibitions at the Monterey Museum of Art, the Triton Museum of Art and the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. Smith’s residency fellowships include: the Frans Masereel Centrum; Kala Art Institute, Oakland; Ragdale Foundation; Anderson Ranch Art Center; Villa Montalvo Center for the Arts, Saratoga; Crater Lake National Park; Open Studio Toronto; LARQ, Queenstown, Australia; and Listhús, Ólafsfjörður, Iceland.

Sculptural, sequential and installation work has been part of Robynn Smith’s practice for many years. These works reflect influences from her recent travels to Iceland and Tasmania. Both are places of fierce extremes and ecological diversity with the ability to instill feelings of human insignificance and magnificence at the same time.

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ABOVE:
Robynn Smith
Liminal Terrain, 2015
Linoleum relief print over digital output, 5 panels

Courtesy of the Artist

Ginger Crawford Tolonen is a storyteller and printmaker. Her accordion format artist book contains intaglio and drypoint etchings. Hopscotch Allegories’ theme focuses on belonging somewhere,
of leaving and returning, and how that echo may be heard, felt and then imagined. The work contains an allegory, a symbolic narrative about the hopscotch image; a childhood game, but more than a game, that throughout history has symbolized the search for a higher place or power. Combining these prints into an artist book enabled Tolonen to expand her story within a single structure of multiple prints.

A printmaker, book artist, painter and self-described Westerner, Ginger Crawford Tolonen
loves California, its redwoods, rivers, ocean and mountains. Tolonen clings to her traditions, incorporating her history into her work through symbols and messages. She explains that when her books are opened, you enter her world through her art. Tolonen received a Bachelor of Fine Arts-Pictorial, from San Jose State University in 2001 and a Masters of Fine Arts in Printmaking from California College of The Arts in 2003. She is a Santa Clara Valley native and currently lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

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Katherine Venturelli’s art making has evolved towards integrating two dimensional prints into three dimensional forms, leading to her attraction to artist books as physical objects and containers
of meaning. Accordion fold and Turkish map book structures accommodate her prints and provide many variations of form and experimentation for Venturelli. The technical aspects of her printmaking utilize varieties of etching methods, and eclectic papers. Etched copper plates have also become another primary image object in her working process as they become elements of the book structure or pages of the books themselves.

Katherine Venturelli is recognized for creating the unique artist books and fine prints produced from her Northern California printmaking studio. The power of metaphoric imagery and the elegance of mathematics inspire and inform her work. With a listing of over 300 exhibitions, her works have been shown widely and are held in special collections throughout the U.S., including: the San Francisco Palace of the Legion of Honor; Getty Research Center, Los Angeles; Santa Fe Museum of Fine Arts; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento. Among Venturelli’s noteworthy publications are: 500 Handmade Books (Lark Publishing, 2013) and 100 Santa Fe Etchers, 2008. Her recent work was selected for a 2017 exhibition of book art at the Urawa Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan.

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Donna Day Westerman is a Professor Emeritus at Orange Coast College and has been an exhibiting artist and printmaker since the age fourteen. She moved to Northern California after she retired to marry her childhood friend, Charles Harris. After a long and active affiliation with the Los Angeles Printmaking Society, she has found a new home at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley where she is an ongoing Artist-in-Residence. She maintains a studio in Oakland and continues to exhibit both nationally and internationally.

Westerman is interested in traditional and historical media, in particular, woodcuts, wood engravings and egg tempera, used in a contemporary manner. She points out that abstraction brings one closer to physical structures within nature itself. Because she has always worked from close observation, a kind of erasure of much of the visual abundance she sees around her helps in distilling the essence of the place and assisted her in creating an enhanced understanding of the sublime in nature.

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ABOVE:
Donna Westerman
Generation, 2015
Woodcut-installation

Courtesy of the Artist