Working Hand-in-Hand: On L.A.’s History of Collaborative Printmaking

June Wayne working on a stone at Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles (c. 1960). Image courtesy of Tamarind Institute and the Center for Southwest Research, The University of New Mexico.

The first time I sat in Gemini G.E.L. co-founder Sidney Felsen’s office—nestled modestly within the striking Frank Gehry structure on Melrose Avenue—he gave me a gold star. Surrounded by wall-to-wall photographs of artists at work and the most colored pencils I’d seen in one place, Sidney held out his hand, offering me a jumbo-sized cardboard star, and with it, a job. “I think you might be the fourth member of the lithography team at Gemini,” he said. I had recently completed my training at Tamarind Institute—a long-term dream that remains one of the best things I’ve ever done. As I stood in that surreal moment amidst a salon hang of Sidney’s photographs—capturing countless collaborative moments at Gemini—and holding my jumbo star, I felt the intersection of vertices, as if I had entered one corner of a vast web, the silk threads of history unfolding around me.

Over the last 12 months, the fine-art print world has mourned the deaths of three of California’s most distinguished print publishers, Felsen among them. In addition to Felsen, Jean Milant, Master Printer and founder of Cirrus Editions, Los Angeles and Kathan Brown, Master Printer and founder of Crown Point Press, San Francisco have recently passed. This succession of losses constitutes a historic moment within the annals of American graphic arts. The post-war Print Renaissance¹ (within which each of the aforementioned studios were of great consequence) engendered a lasting culture of collaboration in California and brought a newfound visibility to the role of the printer. Nevertheless, the medium of print continues to be siloed within a broader arts discourse—having been left out of predominant narratives of Western art history in the past—while the visibility of labor is modulated by an art world shaped by capital. Today, these legacy workshops endure alongside younger print initiatives, having paved the way for a new type of artist /printer relationship: one that recognizes and celebrates the printer as a critical participant in the realization of an artist’s vision, within a highly relational collaborative process.

In 1957, dissatisfied with a local printshop’s inability to meet her creative demands, artist and printmaker June Wayne travelled to France to execute a series of lithographs with artist Joan Miro’s printer, Marcel Durassier.² Here, she was inspired by the ubiquity of the European print atelier—in comparison, skilled technicians in the United States were scarce. Upon her return, Wayne envisioned an American workshop whose principal goal was the training of Master Printers, and soon enough, Tamarind was formed. Tamarind Institute (formerly Tamarind Lithography Workshop) was founded in Los Angeles in 1960 and quickly became one of the foremost exponents of the Print Renaissance on the West Coast. At a time when fine-art print publishing was nascent on the cultural map of America, the convergence of a boom economy with advances in technology gave rise to a broadening middle class and an artistic climate characterized by a spirit of possibility. “Hollywood is a giant craft preserve where every sort of creator, technician, and supplier lives and works,” Wayne articulated. “Dreaming, making, and hoping are a way of life here… Collaboration is so normal in Hollywood that it goes unnoticed.”³

Robert Bechtle with Kathan Brown in the Crown Point studio (1983). Image courtesy of Crown Point Press. Photo: Colin McRae.

Judy Pfaff in the Crown Point studio (1987). Image courtesy of Crown Point Press.

Although printers had been working in collaboration with artists for centuries in both Europe and the US, the role of the printer had historically remained invisible.⁴ How often do we hear about Roger Lacourière or Fernand Mourlot, two vital collaborative printers of Pablo Picasso’s work?] It was workshops such as Tamarind, followed shortly after by Crown Point Press (founded in 1962), Gemini G.E.L. (founded in 1966), and Cirrus Editions (founded in 1970), that subverted the insular guildship model inherited from Europe, whose criterion for artistry was for the printer to be traceless—a quality that was, in turn, conflated with insignificance. Forming a new, distinctly American paradigm, these Californian workshops saw printer-cum-publishers placing identifying printer marks (or chops)⁵ on the editions they printed, thus distinguishing their unique work as craftspeople.⁶ Kenneth Tyler, Gemini G.E.L.’s first Master Printer, was known for his dynamic personality to the extent that it shaped the workshop’s image in its early years. Clinton Adams, director of Tamarind Institute for over a decade, set Ken Tyler in the canon with his statement that “no other printer has so directly affected the work that has come from his studio.”⁷ Similarly, in a conversation with now-retired curator Ruth Fine 1984 Gemini G.E.L. attested to Tyler’s influence, sharing that “everything pretty much depended on his personal wizardry.”⁸ Like so, the identity of these key American work- shops became inextricably linked to the printers and the people who led them, and the relationships built therein.

Attuned to this, Gemini co-founder Sidney Felsen took photographs documenting the printshop’s projects, creating a vast archive that observes artists, printers, and historic moments of process-based innovation. The archive, amounting to over 70,000 photographs, is a collection whose impact on the understanding of—and respect for—collaborative printmaking cannot be underestimated. Felsen’s photographs encourage the viewer to consider print in ways that move beyond its replicative function, focusing instead on the processes of making and the human relationships that form around that process. In his book of photographs, The Artist Observed, Felsen writes, “The spirit of Gemini is best captured by the word ‘collaboration.’ It’s about artists and printers working hand-in-hand to create works of art.”⁹

One contemporary artist whose work is both complemented and amplified by the poetics of the print process is Analia Saban, an artist who has a longstanding collaborative relationship with Gemini G.E.L. While the vehement material inquiry that preoccupies much of Saban’s work well predates her indoctrination into the cult of print, the resonance she discovered there propelled the artist into collaboration with some of Los Angeles’s most renowned printshops, including Mixografia and El Nopal Press. Saban’s practice of deconstructing and reconstructing art materials afforded her a natural affinity with the language of printmaking, since the conception of any print begins with deconstruction into layers and into a sequence of processes. Her experimental print-projects have worked to reimagine the bounds of the printing process itself, taking router bits directly to printing plates or using dried and bonded cotton paper fibers to create sculptural, high-relief replicas of domestic hand towels, all the while working with Master Printers to help push against established technical boundaries. Regarding his experience collaborating with Saban, Gemini Master Printer Case Hudson shared, “When Analia first showed up, all she wanted to do was watch us work… She was looking at the materials we were using, the equipment, the way we were physically moving—all these things. It was a satisfying way of building a relationship with an artist.”¹⁰

While the intermedial practice of an artist like Analia Saban lends itself perfectly to print collaboration, it remains the printer’s duty to bring well-honored, innovative approaches to any artist’s work in a material language that can often feel foreign to them. This posture is typified by Master Printer and publisher Jacob Samuel, yet another West Coast print luminary who, alongside Kathan Brown of Crown Point, can be thanked for the revival of etching as a medium of serious art-making in America.¹¹ In an interview discussing his 48-year career, Samuel reflected on his philosophy: “My goal is to leave no fingerprints,” he says. “All you see is the artist’s work… to do that and be completely spontaneous, I trust the materials.”¹² This radical invisibility of the human hand can be traced all the way back in time to relics such as Claude Mellan’s The Sudarium of Saint Veronica (1649). Engraved with a single unbroken line, this portrait of Christ is considered acheiropoietic—translating literally to “made without hands.”¹³ The implications of this belief are profound, as they acknowledge the transfer of human perception to their materials with such finesse that human involvement is deemed impossible. While the invisibility of fingerprints may be something that many printers strive for, it is vital that the makers behind the process are visible, credited for their hand in realizing the artist’s work in print.

Jean Milant at Cirrus Gallery (c. 1970). Image courtesy of Cirrus Editions.

A contemporary example of such sublime conception is Susan York’s Achromatopsia 1 (yellow) (orange) (red), published by Tamarind Institute in 2015. As an artist working primarily in values of grey and black, York is greatly interested in the experience of people affected by achromatopsia (a condition of total color blindness). Working with several monochromats, York had the individuals match colored ink samples with shades of grey in which they saw no discernable difference. These greys were then printed on the face of the print, with the corresponding color printed on the back. Floated against their bright white matting, a subtle glow from the edges of each float-mounted print offers a suggestion of their color-printed backs. Through a mastery of materials, Master Printer Bill Lagattuta’s translation of ideas illustrates a deep imbrication of the technical within the conceptual, allowing the duality of perception that so interested York to manifest within a single artwork.

This tension between visibility and invisibility within printmaking exists on multiple planes and is difficult to reconcile. Over the last few years, several galleries including David Zwirner, François Ghebaly, and most recently Marta L.A. have established in-house publishing programs for fine-art prints. By investing in production, these galleries support the tradition of collaborative printmaking and the Master Printers behind the work. Since independent printers are often dependent on contract work to sustain their own ventures, this kind of alliance is essential. Having said this, these gigs hold the potential to create an awkward double-bind where printers functioning in both capacities (as contract printers and print publishers) become own competitors, producing prints for galleries whose reach is much broader than their own. It is here that the matter of credit becomes essential in order to prevent a relapse into the kind of invisibility that the California print movement has been so instrumental in upending.

One place where this standard is being set is Problems Printing, a fine-art silkscreen studio and print publisher located in South El Monte, Los Angeles. Founded just last year, Problems works with both emerging and established artists to produce and publish editions in collaboration with Lead Printmaker Tom Kracauer, a former printer at Cirrus Editions. Since each project requires many hands, Kracauer makes a point of crediting every person involved intentionally, and conspicuously. This kind of visibility is one of the privileges inherited by the current generation of fine art printers, the observance of which remains vital to our livelihood.

Sidney Felsen, Jean Milant, and Kathan Brown (alongside other allies such as June Wayne, Ken Tyler, and the Remba family of Mixografia) understood that fine art print publishing—and the collaboration with artists that ensues—is a performance sport. The dynamism of these individuals was, without a doubt, essential to the growth and recognition of printmaking in California, and to the disruption of hidden labor trends that dominate the trade’s history. They established a degree of attention on prints and their makers, affording us the chance to clarify the collective role of printmakers as so much more than skilled fabricators: We are listeners, mediators, counselors, technicians—the artist’s envoy—out of sight, and utterly essential.

Robert Rauschenberg with Sidney B. Felsen and Stanley Grinstein at Gemini G.E.L. during Rauschenberg’s Tibetan Keys and Locks project (1986). Image courtesy of Gemini G.E.L.

Serge Lozingot and Anthony Zepeda at Gemini G.E.L. working on a woodblock for Roy Lichtenstein’s Head from the Expressionist Woodcuts series (c. 1980). © 1980 Sidney B. Felsen. Image courtesy of Gemini G.E.L. Photo: Sidney B. Felsen.

Sarah Plummer is a collaborative lithographer, maker, and writer, lately of Australia and more recently of California. She has produced fine-art prints at Wingate Studio, Tamarind Institute, Gemini G.E.L., and for The Met. Sarah is captivated by the alchemic expanse of lithography and loves things that seem impossible. Her work leads an investigation into land, memory, material, grief, and love.

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