The Incomplete Printmaker
Date: Thursday, March 25, 2010
Time: 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm
Location: PAFA, Annenberg Gallery. (Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building, 128 N. Broad St.)

The goal of this Panel will be to examine and discuss, from multiple perspectives, the role and function of the print medium for contemporary MFA candidates.  Many current and recent printmaking graduates reach a point in their work, where the necessity of the print medium is diminished, if not completely dissolved.  The panel will discuss this as both a problem and a progression for the individual and the institution.  The root of this phenomenon relates to many facets of the current MFA experience, including, conceptual fidelity, technical fatigue and time constraints. 

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At Face Value
Date: Thursday, March 25, 2010
Time: 1:00pm - 2:30pm
Location: UArts Arts Bank, Mainstage. (601 South Broad Street)

Digital and web technologies are closing the gap between printshops making the print world a smaller place while at the same time expanding the print community. Panelists will be presenting via Skype from across the globe to discuss their use of these digital tools to provide workshop tours, artists’ talks, and technical demonstrations and their importance for further innovation in the field of printmaking. A live-feed demonstration of the Chine Collé process will be presented to show the possibilities of the virtual demo. The technology is now available to us to create global dialog and collaboration.

Each panelist will explain problems with artistic and cultural interchange and why this use of technology is important to each of their communities.  The panelists represent New York, London, and South Africa. New York is a global center for arts and culture, but can become culturally isolated. The UK has this same similar isolation with it being somewhat financially prohibitive to travel outside the UK. Artists in South Africa have limited direct access to information and the art market. Using technology is a way to see outside the studio walls enlivening our artistic communities.

Panelists participating via Skype:

Phil Sanders will be in Penland, North Carolina at Penland School of Craft. He will give a live Chine Collé demonstration in their new printmaking facility as well as talk about additional opportunities outside of academia for artists to continue to develop.

Jonathan Phillips will present the UK’s printmaking system of integrating technology into both the classroom and professional workshops in order to better share information. He will also demonstrate uses for technology in the gallery space, docent tours, and  promoting artists’ work. 

David Krut, David Krut Print Workshop, Johannesburg, South Africa will discuss his international exchange program with the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, NYC.  He brought Phil Sanders to his workshop to train his team of collaborative printers in the Summer of 2008.  Skype has allowed the two workshops to keep in contact and be able to continue training with live demonstrations.  These printers will talk about how valuable this direct access to technical information has been for them and their artists.

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Resisting the Remarque
Date: Thursday, March 25, 2010
Time: 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Location: UArts Arts Bank, Mainstage. (601 South Broad Street)

With a new administration in office and a country shaken by the failures of our economic establishment, questions of value are at the forefront. Traditional printmaking relies upon the limited edition and the printer’s mark to maintain a high value. Even open edition works have eschewed radical possibility as a consumer culture that increasingly embraces DIY trappings and the accessible screenprint tends toward commodification. How is the democratic multiple functioning in contemporary culture to resist (or in some cases reinforce) this commodification and carve out spaces for alternative values?

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International Panel: Uncertain Boundaries: remarks on contemporary printmaking
Date: Thursday, March 25, 2010
Time: 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Location: PAFA, Annenberg Gallery. (Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building, 128 N. Broad St.)

During recent decades, art has been overwhelmed by new technical and theoretical challenges and science/technology by avant-garde artistic experiments. Many thinkers consider that art has become inseparable from technology and information. At the same time, the intense use of printed images in the mainstream of contemporary art has situated printmaking in a significant transverse position, which blurred its traditional limits. This position, together with the dynamics towards the search of innovative languages, gave birth to new trends concerning the way to produce and exhibit prints or to use printed images in a wider discourse in accordance to the principles of interchange, connection, heterogeneity and multiplicity which contemporary art practices demand. This international panel will bring together mainstream artists whose work include prints and print media in a cutting edge way.

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Student Panel: Regional Print Dialects: Pinning Specific Visual Languages to Location
Date: Thursday, March 25, 2010
Time: 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Location: UArts CBS Auditorium. (Hamilton Hall, 320 S. Broad St.)

Panelists will speak about their own imagery and how that has been affected by change in locale, as well as talk about how that language is informed through collaborative exercises with other students across the country. They will briefly discuss their biography, their current working environment and location, and how the two very important factors of previous and current locale inform their prints.

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Eyewitness News: When Prints were Truth
Date: Friday, March 26, 2010
Time: 1:30 pm - 3:00 pm
Location: Tyler School of Art, Auditorium, B04. (Norris Street between 12th & 13th St.)

The panel brings together two historians concerned with images as documents and an artist/printmaker whose images address out-of-sight actions (and atrocities) in times of modern war. Each will discuss and show examples the relations between verbal testimony and photographic images as source material and the prints that ultimately circulate as embodiments of the information they address. After the presentations are concluded, the participants will discuss common threads that emerge from their disparate studies and take questions from the Chair and audience.

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Memory, Place, Context: Contemporary Printmaking by Eastern European Women
Date: Friday, March 26, 2010
Time: 1:30 pm - 3:00 pm
Location: Moore College of Art & Design, Stewart Auditorium. (20th Street and The Parkway)

If printmaking is a neglected medium in mainstream narratives of art history discussions and texts, Eastern Europe is arguably one of the most understudied geographic locations.  While identity has figured prominently in African and Jewish diaspora studies, this panel will address how locale and gender become manifest in prints by women from Eastern Europe, whether residing abroad or in their home country.  How do memory and nostalgia affect these artists’ choice of subject and/or medium?  How has this search for identity syncretize through exposure to “external” forces?

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fstMdia/sloKnow
Date: Friday, March 26, 2010
Time: 3:30 pm – 5:00 pm
Location: Tyler School of Art, Auditorium, B04. (Norris Street between 12th & 13th St.)

Print culture now occupies a compelling paradigm between fast and slow, from engraving to LED. We have absorbed an ethos that feeds on rapid access to information. But there is a difference between knowledge which fosters understanding and change in our technological landscape and the knowledge that the reveals our actual relationship to one another, to culture and society. Information can be transmitted and expended quickly. Slow knowledge, like slow food, fosters awareness, engages community consciously, and intensively--it isn’t really slow at all. Analog printing is steeped in slow knowledge. Does digital media’s velocity determine the depth of its impact?

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Making it Viral: Remarking on Infectious Pedagogical Practices in Printmaking Programs
Date: Friday, March 26, 2010
Time: 3:30pm - 5:00pm
Location: Moore College of Art & Design, Stewart Auditorium. (20th Street and The Parkway)

This panel will explore the evolving nature of printmaking pedagogy highlighting how it has adopted for 21st century classrooms and students. Educators at different types of institutions from various locations who have recently developed strong print programs will speak about their own endeavors. Conversation will include what has and has not worked for them as they developed the curriculum at their institution.  Ideas to be covered include: blogs, YouTube and social networking sights as an educational tool, extending the classroom: community outreach, the student print club and other extra-curricular activities as a device to serve student interests and develop alternative programs and funding.

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Printmaking or Contemporary Art? A curatorial Perspective
Date: Saturday March 27, 2010
Time: 9:45 - 11:30 am
Location: Loews Hotel, Regency Ballroom. (1200 Market Street)

While there is more and more discussion of contemporary art practice being post-medium specific there are still a number of organizations that, depending on your perspective, celebrate or ghettoize printmaking. This panel will bring together four curators who will offer different perspectives on the success or failure of specific exhibitions of printed works. The panel will be chaired by John Caperton, Curator of The Print Center, which was founded in 1914 to promote printmaking at a time when it was considered a marginalized art form.

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