#printhouston

Roesch came up with UNIT to sell prints after inheriting a framing business from her late father. More specifically, Roesch inherited the task of generating a market in the US for the modular design frame HALBE. Popular in Europe but widely unknown in America, HALBE frames are front-loading, reusable frames that are suitable for rotating collections. However, it’s hard to make a case for just buying a fancy frame.

Roesch, a cofounder of Skydive Art Space with a Cal Arts master’s degree and experience working in Gallery Sonja Roesch (her mother’s respected Midtown venue), decided to add her art-scene connections and curatorial caché to the framing business. The idea is to sell prints from artists she handpicked along with the frames as a complete unit. (Collectors also have the option of buying unframed prints.)

Because UNIT deals in multiples only, the cost of each object is spread throughout the edition, making original works more accessible to new and first-time collectors. An edition refers to artwork that exists in multiples, and can refer to prints, sculptures, photographs, or any process that can repeat an image. In the fine art world, editioned works retain value through a presumed scarcity, which is preserved by any edition containing a finite number of copies. Generally the mold, matrix, or plate is destroyed or altered after an edition is produced to ensure that no new copies can be created.

UNIT has a set of loose guidelines to ensure all works available are editioned originals, but leaves the language broad enough to include more than prints alone. Everything listed online is editioned between 10 and 100 and must be hand-pulled or hand made in some way. While this decision excludes giclée reproductions and monoprints, UNIT may include small-run books, LPs, cast sculptures, hand-drawn xeroxed zines, and variable editions with one-of-a-kind touches such as found objects.

Nearly all manner of traditional printmaking like relief, intaglio, lithography, and serigraph techniques are included if the print is editioned. Artists interested in being featured in the store can contact Roesch through the website to be considered.

Notwithstanding its online emphasis, UNIT makes occasional forays into the brick-and-mortar gallery scene. Roesch is teaming up with her mother to present What’s in Store, a group exhibition opening July 14 at Gallery Sonja Roesch as part of PrintHouston. The show features everything available on the UNIT website so far this year. Other plans include building the UNIT website into a resource that features an advice blog for starting or maintaining a personal collection and information about editions and printmaking.

O’Malley’s curatorial approach is decidedly open, electing to include nontraditional or challenging processes alongside works with academic appeal. Major standouts include Jenny Hager-Vickery and Emily Arthur’s imposing installation, which features a chariot with a life-sized horse covered in prints, and Sideshow, a 20-foot-long woodcut banner from the Brooklyn-based Cannonball Press (Mike Houston and Martin Mazzora). The banner covers nearly the entire gallery wall and features a sultry carnival theme with sword swallowers, thrill seekers, and other gritty novelties caricatured on a grand scale.

Crucial to printmaking’s revival in the city is an environment that has the right blend of general interest, collaboration between artist-printmakers and artists, accessible studio space, and a market of collectors to help sustain new work. So where is this all coming from, and why are we only hearing about it now?

First, a little history lesson. American printmaking as an art form came to the forefront in the 1960s and 70s with the new Tamarind Institute, (a lithography workshop now located in Albuquerque) churning out its first graduates of highly trained and often collaborative artist-lithographers.  Universal Limited Art Editions in Long Island began attracting up-and-coming artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and others to work in a collaborative print environment — all in the fallout of abstract expressionism.

Between these two institutions and others, printmaking became much more than a means of production and suddenly had a fresh generation of artist-printmakers ready to open their own studios across the country, collaborate with one another, and seduce artists from their primary disciplines into making prints.

The roots of printmaking in Houston as we see it now started with two key individuals: Suzanne Manns and David Folkman. Manns, arguably the godmother of printmaking in Houston, has taught at the Glassell School of Art since the 1970s. She is responsible for introducing a large swathe of Houston artists to printmaking and curated 35 Years of Printmaking at Glassell, on view June 21-July 3 at Tradition Bank Gallery.

Folkman, a Tamarind-trained printmaker, moved his studio, Little Egypt Enterprises, from southern Illinois to Houston in the early 1970s, shortly before Manns arrived in the city.

Houston was accruing that golden combination of skilled printmakers, experimental artists, and accommodating studio space that could edition prints for collectors. A poster child for this ecosystem is Penny Cerling. She developed a penchant for intaglio processes under Manns at the Glassell and further developed Little Egypt’s etching endeavors through the 1980s before starting her own independent studio.

Printmaking blew up in the 1980s with the firm establishment of the Museum of Printing History by a coterie of letterpress printers, effectively bridging the dialogue between the printed page, graphic design, and printmaking as an art form. Little Egypt continued to boom, creating works like the Art Against AIDS portfolio in 1988, the Glassell, and other endeavors, while universities continued to educate new printmakers. Even Southern Graphics Council, the international academic pillar of printmaking, had its traveling conference at Rice University in 1985.

However, by the mid-1990s, the print scene in Houston appeared to be falling to its own inertia. Little Egypt dissolved in the early 90s, and printers generally gravitated to their own presses, yielding a more fractured, insular environment. Perhaps the average Houston art collector developed a predilection for “one of a kind” artworks, not fully recognizing the value retained in the presumed scarcity of a limited edition and the ability to represent a large amount of artists within a collection.

Over the last five years, the environment has become much more amenable for printmaking, thanks to the efforts of bootstrapping artists across the city. PrintMatters, the organization behind PrintHouston, formed as a collective-minded nonprofit composed of printmakers that promotes print processes and print collecting while working to further the professional careers of its members, who include transplants educated outside the region as well as artists trained at the Glassell and other local institutions.

Another key player in the new printmaking ecology is the fledgling studio, Burning Bones Press (BBP). Founded by former Flatbed Press master printer and current University of Houston print professor, Patrick Masterson and graphic designer turned renegade printmaker, Carlos Hernandez, BBP exists as a cooperative studio environment for many printmakers who find themselves orphaned when leaving the academic setting. BBP functions as a petri dish for printmakers in Houston – many of them PrintMatters members – but also editions prints or works in creative projects and serves as the current laboratory for the University of Houston’s new print-editioning program.

Recently, BBP produced mono-prints for the Glassell in a week-long visit with the sculptor, Albert Paley, and produced an Art Car with Dennis McNett for the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art, with more activity on the way.

The currents above just scratch the surface of Houston’s network of private presses and studios. While it’s impossible to fully glimpse the direction of the Houston arts scene, prospects are improving for printmaking. PrintMatters appears to be taking a more public direction and growing.