UNM Connections; 207; Tamarind Institute

Hello and welcome to UNM Connections. I'm Valerie Santiannis. One of the top fine art lithography studios in the world is our focus on this episode. Tamer Institute recognized for its crucial role in the development of American print making over the past 40 years offers educational and creative opportunities to students and artists from around the world. Artists from diverse backgrounds collaborate with Tamer and printers to create fine lithographs and exhibitions of these lithographs have been shown in more than 50 countries. Joining me in the studio will be Marge Devon, director of Tamer Institute, Robert Kelly,

an artist currently working at Tamer and Sarah Dudley, a graduate student in Tamer's unique professional printing program. Join me as we learn about the Art of Lethography at Tamer Institute, a division of UNM's College of Fine Arts. All coming up next on UNM Connections. Hi and welcome everyone to the show. Marge, I'd like to start with you. Could you tell us a little bit about the different facets of the program? Yes. Tamer and Ashley has engaged in lots of different kinds of activities.

And as part of the College of Fine Arts, we offer courses for students that have a very specialized focus on the training of master printers, which is something that is unique in the world. This is not done anywhere else in the world. To my knowledge, there is no other program in the world that focuses specifically on the training of fine art printers. Our place is where artists can develop their own particular aesthetic, and that's what the usual focus is in a university art department. But ours is on the relationship between the printer and the artist. And you have professional workshops, I understand. Yes, we do. In addition to the educational program, we have a professional workshop in which we invite artists from all over the world, particularly well-known and important artists from this country, who then come to the workshop and collaborate with our master printers to make lithographs. Robert, you are an artist. What's it like to collaborate with a master printer?

Are there any particular challenges in ensuring your work with somebody? I think one of the main things you're doing right off the bat is you're leaving the boundaries of your personal studio and going into a community, an institution represented by Marge and Tamerin and the printers. And you are taking a personal aesthetic and working in conjunction with other people to, in this case, to make an addition of that. And so I think you extend your personal boundaries into that of a community. And with that, you extend your know-how into that of others. You can use the technical know-how of the printers. You also have to learn to work with other people to try to figure out how you get an image that might be done in a painting through a process, breaking it down and putting it back together once again in conjunction with maybe four other people you're working with. And so a lot of it is just being able to communicate through that network.

The printers you work with are students. And Sarah, what's it like for you as a student to be part of this program? Well, I don't actually get to work directly with any of the artists that come in. When I assist the master printer or the apprentice printers, then I'm somewhat involved in that. Generally, on the student side, we're just an intensive training about the process of lithography and learning everything that we can. And next semester, then we'll collaborate with grad students from the UNM and work in our own collaborative processes then. What's different about doing this kind of print work as compared to other kinds of print work? I mean, compared to etching or silk screen? Well, in this particular environment, have you done an apprenticeship or done printing other kinds of printing before? When I was doing my bachelor's degree, I did a little bit of all the kinds of print making, but I just love litho. There's something really special about it. Back at home in Quebec, where I'm from, we have an expression.

And litho is a plenty cuisine, and that means full of cooking. It refers to the process of lithography and all the different techniques that you can do. And I think it takes, there's something really special about it. This afternoon's schedule is towards the end of the semester here. We still have two projects left. Hello, my name is Rodney Hammond. I'm the education director at Tamron Institute. And today I'm working with my printer training program students. We're going to do a two-color print, one on aluminum plate, and one color on a stone. Here's Erica Adams, one of my students in the printer training program. She was in charge of making homemade lithographic crayons. And now what she wants to do is test it on a stone, and we want to see if the drawing qualities are like, this is a gum arabic, and it's one of the most important parts of lithography. But one thing that gum arabic does is it adheres to the surface of the stone and allows water to stay and adhere to the stone more efficiently.

We have the very beginning of processing and processing is what affixes the image to the stone. And we're brushing rosin across the crayon. And what rosin simply is is just process sap from pine trees. And what it does is it mainly protects the drawing material from the corrosive nature of nitric acid. This is French chalk, or we call it talc, like talcum powder. After the rosin and talc is applied to the drawing material crann in this case, then we put gum arabic on the surface of the stone. We have gum arabic here that has nitric acid added to it, and we need to know how strong it is or how many drops in nitric acid we want to add. So we measure the acidity or the pH level with the litmus papers. This tells us how strong the etch is so that we can now apply it to the crann drawing. This mixture that Sarah is spreading across the stone that we call the etch, it's gum arabic and nitric acid, it's not that we're etching into the stone and making marks down into it.

It's a surface thing, and what it's all about is applying the etch to the top of the stone, and we're trying to separate the grease from the drawing material so that it starts the chemical reaction. Right now I'm just mixing this color that my teacher made. One of the important parts of tamarin is just learning how to mix up ink. And what we try to do is we try to figure out what color is and how to put it together. I gave Ernestine the assignment for mixing up the ink. I gave her a specific color that I wanted her to make, and this is mine. This aluminum plate that we're looking at is what we call a flat. It was made earlier in the day, and it's just simply gum arabic painted around the border, and we painted a big square in the middle. After that we roll it up in black ink, and then later on in the day we can take the black ink out, and we can substitute it with coloring.

What Bargo Eki is using is she's using lithotine. Other people call it barantine, but essentially it's just a turpentine that has been reformulated by the industry to make it safer for printers to use to wash out certain kinds of ink and put in other types of materials. Caleb Wheeler and Dan Penzel are now ready to roll the ink onto the flat. They're washing off the gum arabic borders, and then what Dan is going to do is he's going to sponge the entire plate. When Caleb rolls the ink across the plate, and the ink is only sticking to that large square, we know that we've done a good processing job, because we're containing the ink only where it's supposed to be. The gum arabic is sticking to the plate, and the water sticks to the gum, and the large square that is attracting the ink, we have chemically affixed that to the plate, and the two repel each other. In the very nature of the ink, its tack, or the tackiness of it, it sticks to the square where it's supposed to be, and that's how Dan is able to draw the sponge all the way across without smearing the ink all over.

It's been about an hour now since the etch was first applied to the stone. Marina and Mati have just applied another fresh mask of gum arabic, it's set up. Now Marina is pouring a solvent, lithotine, on top of the image, and what she's doing is she's washing out where she's removing the original crand drawing, and this is going to allow us to roll ink or that original crand drawing. I think that this is the best part in printing, especially master printers. They love to see what the key drawing is going to look like on the color. Now the first color has already been printed, and you have to do that separately. Now it's time to run it through the press, and we get to see what the first impression is going to look like, and it's just a wonderful thing when everything works well. Look at this, check this out.

March, what other kinds of projects have you done, or is the Institute involved in? Well, a large part of our programs in recent years has also been outreach projects, and those have been projects both in our own community, and then internationally as well. We just did a really wonderful project, for example, in which we brought four artists from Africa, who came from Botswana, from a village where there's no running water, no electricity, and they came here to New Mexico, and they share with our native people a story tradition about the trickster. So the Africans went to the Pueblos where they shared stories about the trickster, and then one artist from each of four Pueblos came with the African artist of Tamron, and made images, lithographs, inspired by these stories about the trickster. It was a wonderful project. That is great. Anything else coming up in the near future that people might like to know about?

The funding is getting a little bit harder these days to get, and all of these special projects that we've done are funded by outside grants. So we have to find a way, we get an idea for a project, we have to go find somebody who's interested in this project, and then convince them to give us the money for the project. So the federal agencies are getting a little bit tighter now, and that's been a little bit hard for us. But we've done and continued to work with the City of Albuquerque, we did a project in which we invited a native person from each of the Pueblos in New Mexico, who came and made monotypes. And those monotypes are now on display in the city county building. We've done lots of projects with Albuquerque public schools and high school kids. We just were represented in the most prestigious print biennial in the world. We were the American section, we're prints from Tamarind, and Loubley on us, Slovenia. Now the major component of the institute is the artist printer collaboration. Robert, how has this experience altered or affected your own work?

I think what it often does is have you as an artist confirm perhaps to your own self what's the intention behind your work and perhaps what the content is. You're taking one medium that you're used to doing, in my case painting, and putting it through the process of another medium lithography. So you have to make choices as to what to do. I'm perhaps have been brought to Tamarind twice, but in this case you're only maybe doing four additions on this particular visit. So you're distilling a lot of diverse material and choosing to do a few selections. And so you want to make sure those selections of your imagery represent yourself and to some degree the tradition of lithography as well. I think it's important for our viewers to understand as Robert is talking about this, that he is actually making the drawings on the stones or the plates from which we print the additions.

So he brings his experience as a painter, but expresses his ideas through the specific materials that are available only in the process of lithography. Sarah, why did you want to do this? What do you hope to take away from this program? Well, I've always loved to print. I really want to be a master printer, a master lithographer. When I was doing my bachelor's in Montreal, my professor that I had for three years was a Tamarind printer, Robert Bigelow, and he was known as the Litho legend. So that was a real inspiration to me. And by being here, it's really a privilege to be able to train with master printers at the Tamarind, which has such a history behind it. And I've already been given two job offers from Concordia University back at home to go teach once I have this program under my belt. So you can do a lot with that.

That's great. What actually brought you to Tamarind? Was it the experience with that professor that inspired you to do this or were you already leaning in this direction? I'm not quite sure how it happened, but in 89, when I did my first printmaking course, I just discovered litho and just felt completely head over heels and love with it. And ever since then, I've just wanted to keep on doing that. And when I found out about the Tamarind through my professor and how I would learn everything or my most of what there was to know about litho, I just knew that I wanted to be here. As a grad studies program at any university would teach you how to develop your own aesthetic. And you would learn more about the printmaking medium lithography, but it's snowing near as intense or as well developed, I think, as what I get at the Tamarind. Marge, from my reading, I understood that lithography was almost a dying art. What do students do when they leave the Tamarind Institute?

Well, it was almost a dying art when Tamarind was founded, which was in 1960. So we celebrate our 40th anniversary in the year 2000. But now, Tamarind has trained probably about 100 master printers, and those master printers have gone out, spread themselves throughout the country, and as our founding directors had hoped to have established workshops of their own. So now there are hundreds of workshops in this country alone, where artists can go and work in collaboration with a master printer. So when our students leave the program, many of them go and work in already established shops, some of them will open their own workshops, and others will go to a university situation and teach. Are there any practical applications for, I know that art, of course, is the main byproduct of this process, but are there any practical applications for people who learn these skills? Well, in a way, it's a very practical aspect of dealing with the art world, and most of our students have undergraduate degrees from a university with a special focus in lithography, where they have worked on their personal aesthetic.

But when they finish, they find as many artists do, how am I going to make a living? And that being a master printer often provides for someone who's interested in printmaking, an opportunity to still be involved in the creative process, to contribute to that creative process, because the printer's ideas are often very important to the artist, both in providing appropriate tools, materials, making suggestions, because they're so familiar with the process. So in a way, it's a very practical part of the art world. Another thing about the temperament that's extremely practical, and that I really appreciate, anyway, is that, along with the class that we take in the technique of lithography, we take a business class as well, which is taught by Marge, and it is one of the most valuable things that I've had in all of my post-secondary education, because we're learning the illegal side of how to work for yourself as a master printer, or to start up your own workshop, how to correctly evaluate the costs that you will have to incur, and also how to charge for your work, how to even go about setting up all this stuff in the first place, how to deal with collectors and dealers, and all the stuff that they don't even say a word about during the bachelor's degree, and how to deal with galleries, even just the really simple things that people take for granted.

You know, the one tells us about this, and here we're getting it a lot of it. That is great. Yeah. Marge, how difficult is it, or maybe this is a question that Robert can help answer, how difficult is it to get artists to collaborate with printers? I think we tend to think of artists as people who work in solitude, and who kind of work on their own rhythm, how big a challenge is it? Do you want to answer that? I think it's a delight. It's a delight to break, I think, one's own present at some degree of the studio, and really feel sort of the joy, and I think the esteem that what Sarah was talking about that is part of this workshop of Tamar, and you feel the joy working with the printers. I think you can extend that excitement into the group you're working with. It is a tremendous joy also to allow other people to give you the feedback, whether it's a mixing of the colors, whether it's a commentary, just how you work within that dynamic of a group to make a piece of artwork rather than yourself so directly.

It's an indirect process, and you don't have to be so tyrannical about it. It is a group endeavor. So this is something that can really help an artist to grow, to go beyond where they have already been? Robert Motherwell once made a comment about how important it was to him to make prints, because in his words were something to the effect that it took him away from the marks that he was used to making. You have a paintbrush in your hand, and you have a habit of about the ways that you paint, and yet when he was taken away from that and put into a print studio, he said it took me away from the marks that I'm used to making, and therefore I had to think about things in a different way. So I think there are a lot of really positive things about an artist coming, but I also think, and you can probably answer this better, Robert, but that it's something that's kind of frightening in some respects or to a lot of people.

On these most recent additions that we've achieved, I came into the studio with that really knowing what I wanted to do. So with brief discussion, I was quickly engaged in a process, and once you start a process, and I think that's one of the beauties of making art, you start responding to that process, and the input of having these other people working with you, add to that. And there's a lot of counterintuitive stuff that perhaps Motherwell was talking about, because it's not a direct process. You have to break the complexity of an image into parts, and you need the expertise of the printers to figure out how that works, and so it's an engaging process in a way. What about ownership? Is there ever a conflict over whose work this is, or is that something that is happily shared in this collaborative process? You mean in terms of a personal identity of the piece? Personally, I don't worry about that. I really like the feedback I get from the printers and the suggestion that helps the process, and it makes it a more enjoyable experience when there's no tension in the creation of it.

In fact, it is a collaborative effort, and in the end, I still feel it's very identifiable. As my work, I just got a lot of help getting there. We always acknowledge the contributions of the printer by each one of them has a unique mark that is embossed on every impression of every addition that they print, so that's our acknowledgement. When our prints are exhibited, we always ask that the printer be acknowledged on the wall labels, so we feel it's really important that they do get some of the credit for their participation. Is it ever a possibility that a student like Sarah would work on both sides? Well, actually what happened, the way our program is set up is it's basically broken into two segments. The first year is what Sarah is participating in now, in which she does both technical projects, and then we'll collaborate with graduate students from the Department of Art and Art History at UNM, so they come as the artists and our students work with them as their printers.

The second year is the master printer training program, and during the master printer training program, we invite two of the students in this initial group, which usually is eight students, to work as apprentice printers in the professional workshops. So during that second year, they get very extensive hands-on collaborative experience with the artists who are invited to work in the shop. Are you doing anything special to celebrate your 40th anniversary? We are indeed. We couldn't let it go unnoticed. A major book on Tamron will be published in January or February of this coming year by the University of New Mexico Press on Tamron, and we also have a retrospective exhibition of Tamron lithographs that will be shown first in the University Art Museum, I think opening in June through the summer until September. And we hope that exhibition will travel. Well, it sounds very exciting. Do you see any changes coming up in the future for Tamron?

Oh gosh, that's a hard question. We're faced now with so much technology that it's really difficult to say what is going to happen in the world of prints as in any other world, I guess. The process that we use at Tamron today is still essentially the same process that was used in 1798 when the process was invented by a lawyer, Santa Felder. So who knows, we might have to break down and go with the flow a little bit more, but it's also really important, I think, to maintain a tie to the old tradition that not very many people are still doing. That's part of the charm of lithography for me anyways, that it is such an old process, and it is very different from a lot of the stuff that we're surrounded by today. I'm also a graphic designer, so all that flashy computer stuff is one thing, but there's something that I really like about how old the process is and how hands on you've got the slab of stone, which is very... There's a connection to...

Very tight tie. Yeah, really get to work with your hands. And it's something of the earth, right? Yeah, that is so great. Well, thank you all very much for coming today. It's a fascinating subject, and congratulations on your 40th anniversary, and good luck to all of you. Thank you all very much. Thank you.