New Printmaking Course at RISD Taps Digital Technologies Redefining the Art Form

“There’s no mistaking the handmade quality of these animated prints,” said faculty member Judy Hecker at a recent interim crit in RISD’s Memorial Hall. “Think about scale as you work on these projects and keep in mind that they can take on multiple formats.”

Hecker, former executive director of Print Center New York, is coteaching a new Printmaking course at RISD with Department Head Megan Foster 00 PR called Performance and Print. The course challenges students to learn conceptual and technical aspects of printmaking and then apply such techniques as serialization, layering, animation, and performance to the work. It was inspired by the interdisciplinary compositions contemporary artists like Kakyoung Lee, William Kentridge, David Hammons, Ana Mendieta, and Kiki Smith are making as well as seminal art by late masters such as John Cage, Jasper Johns, and Henri de Toulouse Lautrec.

As the semester progresses, the class will explore making prints with their bodies and work inspired by social practice such as actions, interventions, and printed posters. The ultimate goal is to investigate the historical overlaps between prints, printed matter, and live action in order to understand how modern artists iterated on these traditions and expanded cross-disciplinary discovery.

“Technology has always been a driver in printmaking, dating back to how the offset press revolutionized lithography in the late 19th century,” says Hecker. “Over the past four decades, digital technologies such as Photoshop, large-format printers, and the iPhone have radically enhanced the artform.”

The semester began with a project focused on destructive animation, a form of stop-motion animation in which each new print in the sequence “destroys” the ones it follows, leaving remains of the earlier images in the frame. Students pulled a minimum of 12 subtly changing prints using the drypoint technique, in which a metal plate is etched and then inked. They then scanned the images and used Photoshop to turn them into animated shorts.

“The students in the class are juniors, seniors, and graduate students coming from many different majors with a wide range of skill sets,” says Foster. “It’s exciting to see their individual approaches.”

Celynn Kim MID 27, a grad student in the Industrial Design department, appreciates the opportunity to draw (as opposed to working digitally). “I like having time to quietly think about each scene as I’m working,” she says. She’s creating a piece based on her experience of going to the park for a little peace and quiet and being inundated by other park-goers and the chaos of a crowd.

Grad student Dominique Greene MFA 27 PR used powdered indigo ink with a transparent base to make a piece reflecting on an 18th-century indigo plantation she visited last summer. The frames show enslaved people who once labored there attempting to run away in the dark of night. She is considering adding text about the historical project using hand-set type. Hecker described the work as “effective and timeless” and felt that the large margins Greene used allowed the images to breathe.

Illustration grad student Jiawen Wang MFA 27 IL created a more stream-of-consciousness piece using varying textures and After Effects to blend the frames together. Foster described the narrative as “magical” and wondered if he would consider ending the looping series with a simple image, perhaps the chair that appeared earlier in the piece. “It would be like the last line of a poem that makes the rest of the poem make sense,” one student commented.

During the crit, Foster asked each student if there was a favorite print or moment in their narrative and if they had a title for their piece, perhaps something that could preface the content for viewers. Grad student Jeff Smith MFA 28 PR, for example, went with Counting by Twos and Gaia Liu 27 FAV with Mo Can’t Cartwheel.

“Titles can be tricky,” Hecker countered. “They can be helpful in setting the tone for a piece, but sometimes it’s better to be ambiguous and leave the work untitled.”