I was invited by Kristen Bartel, the printmaking professor at the University of Wisconsin at Parkside, to be a visiting artist on April 13 and 15, 2015.
For my time with Kristen and her students, I chose to offer a chipboard relief/collagraph workshop, which we printed with a combination of intaglio and color viscosity inking strategies.
I made shaped plates for my demonstration prints; one is below.
The other plate wasn’t so great, but this one worked out well. It even had the added bonus of not having an ‘up’ or ‘down’.
Kristen also went to the University of Texas at Austin (though well after I did), and learned color viscosity from Lee Chesney, which was entertaining for us to recount, though perhaps less so for the students.
Parkside is well-known for hosting the National Small Print Exhibition every year (I should have applied!), and the opening for it was going to be just a few days after my workshop. Fortunately, the work was installed, and I got to see the exhibition. I was happily surprised to see some screenprints by Lise Drost, a University of Miami professor of printmaking, and my mentor, who was the Chair of the Department of Art and Art History, as well as the head of my Thesis Committee, while I was pursuing my Masters there.
Because they’ve held this exhibition annually since 1987, and there are purchase awards associated with it, Parkside has prints on nearly all the interior walls of the campus. Like, really.
It made me incredibly happy to see so many prints as part of a day-to-day college experience. It’s rewarding to be in a place where an esteem for printmaking is evident.
Unsurprisingly, the Parkside printshop is very nice, and very well maintained!
I had a lot of fun in the Wisconsin overall–mostly thanks to my brother, who is a philosophy professor at Parkside. He took me cool places, like to the Mars Cheese Castle.
It was cool because I like cheese.
My brother took me to other cool places, too, like the headquarters of a personal care products corporation in Racine.
That was cool because I like personal care products. Wait . . . no. Architecture. Because the architecture is cool.
Have you seen Wright’s Johnson building (the Research Tower) at night, by the way?
If I were a certain type of person, I would be easily convinced that the Johnson Wax Headquarters was really an alien base. All your base are belong to Johnson Wax! That was a total non-sequiter.
Another cool place that my brother took me was to the Kenosha History Center.
The Kenosha History Center was cool because I am clearly a giant nerd. Also: Annie Oakley riding a bicycle while taking aim. Not just any bicycle, but a Sterling Bicycle. Built like a watch!
That alone was worth the price of admission. Well. That and the AMC AM VAN prototype.
Speaking of cool, Wisconsin in April is cold (nevermind that 60 degrees sign above–that was the warmest day I was there, and the natives were frolicking in the heat). The landscape is so entirely different from Miami, too.
And speaking of Miami, another cool place my brother took me was to Stevens Point, Wisconsin. [Wait for it!] Stevens Point had a philosophy conference, which was fun, but it also has a sculpture park. Look what I found in the sculpture park:
Work by a pal of mine from Miami. Small, small, small, cool world.