In the late ’90s, Alex Valentine, a recent high school graduate, discovered an emerging underground punk scene in the post-industrial warehouses of Providence, Rhode Island. He met artists barely older than himself living in a “lineage of punk houses,” dedicating their time to exploring the intersection of art, music, and street fashion.
Among this crowd, “screen printing was this big thing,” Valentine recalled. Bands made their own merch with barely legible screen-printed posters. Concertgoers altered thrifted clothes, adding patchwork, quilt work, and hand-printed designs.
Until this encounter, Valentine hadn’t envisioned himself as a visual artist. But soon after, he moved to Philadelphia and set up his own silkscreen printing studio, where he started to take printmaking seriously. Two years later he enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which had a dedicated print media program. Valentine dove into the world of self-publishing and bookbinding, creating zines and small-press publications. His investment in print culture and artist-run initiatives stems from his philosophy of print media as a way to “bypass cultural gatekeepers.” A self-publishing printmaker can disseminate their own art through channels that are “more democratized,” reaching people outside a mainstream audience. With some artist friends, Valentine launched a circuit of art book fairs and opened a collective studio. The studio, a “half-community print shop and half-retail environment,” created and sold handmade prints and clothing.
In communal print studios and DIY artist spaces, printmaking can take on many different forms. A multi-step, multi-layered process, printmaking involves the transfer of a design from one surface—such as wood or metal—to another surface, usually paper. But each mark-making technique, whether intaglio, lithography, or screen printing, comes with its own steps and tools.
Alex Valentine is now the Printshop Coordinator at the Yale School of Art, where he teaches classes on screen printing and arts publishing, leads public workshops, and runs the printshop—an open-air studio space in the basement of the MFA building. Everything in the printshop is exposed, from the gray industrial beams to the artists’ workstations. The space can feel intimidating. There are signs about the hazards of printmaking, a reminder to avoid accidents like getting acid in your eyes, dropping a lithography stone on your foot, or slicing a finger with the heavy-duty, sheet metal cutter (aptly named the guillotine). It’s also a space where you need to get your hands dirty, and it’s okay to make a mess. Inside the acid room, an Intro Printmaking student slips on a face shield and a double layer of gloves before she dips her copper plate into the sludge-green acid bath. Her professor, Maria de Los Angeles, helps another student with their print by cranking the wheel of the press.
Printmaking is not an easy form of artmaking. It requires trial and error. It’s time-consuming. Even when you do all the right things, there is no guarantee that your print will come out the way you expected. For printmakers, the process is the main reason they fell in love with this medium. It’s the feeling of working with your hands—handling the physical materials of paper, carving into a woodblock, straining ink through mesh. Despite its analog nature, printmaking continues to attract new generations of artists, along with non-visual artists and performers like musicians and skaters.
The art form itself is democratic. Jonathan Herrera Soto, a second-year MFA student at the Yale School of Art, pointed out that “you can make many versions of a poster, or many editions of a print. People who are into DIY culture get really into printmaking. It’s an accessible way to make creative things and make lots of them.”
For people who are not inherently adept at using the computer, “exploring techniques through the analog can be really exciting,” Herrera Soto said. And for people who enjoy mixing other media with printmaking, this combination can achieve a wide range of graphic expression.
One such printmaker who combines printmaking techniques with other media is Rob Sato. An LA-based artist, Sato creates hybrid prints, blending together screen printing and lithography—a process that involves etching on a flat stone—with watercolor and colored pencil. Full of vibrant and absurd images like toppled cars at a picnic, mushrooms sprouting out of fingertips, and gardens of colorful mazes, Sato’s work makes you feel like you’re in a dream that you wouldn’t mind exploring for a while longer. In printmaking, Sato finds something magical in the tactile experience of books and paper. He admires how lithography can transfer the brittle texture of a graphite drawing. This technique both manipulates the original image and heightens its beauty. “It’s a perfect imperfection,” he said. “There’s a tension there where you’re trying to get it as perfect as possible but it’ll never be. And that’s super fun to me.”
Sato is part of the Giant Robot universe, an Asian and Asian-American collective of visual artists and art lovers. Founded by Eric Nakamura in 1994, Giant Robot started off as a “punk-minded,” stapled zine. Nakamura eventually launched the Giant Robot Store in the Sawtelle district of Los Angeles, a historically Japanese-American neighborhood. The second Giant Robot Store is a gallery space, where Sato had his first solo exhibition in 2009.
“[Printmaking] used to be a very industrial and practical process,” Sato said. Recently, he has seen more experimentation with printmaking. With the proliferation of new, mainly digital technology that has replaced more analog traditions of handling production and distribution, printmaking has become an “almost entirely art practice.” In some cases, the printmaking tradition is passed on from older generations of printmakers to younger artists. He described how Tiny Splendor, a printing collective in Oakland, just obtained a huge industrial press. Tiny Splendor inherited the press from an “old printer in San Francisco” who told the collective that “as long as you can get this out of here, you can have it for free.” Sato has been seeing “a lot of these stories happening across the country, where these old litho stones are sitting in warehouses. But some old printer is saying, ‘please, somebody take care of this.’ And there are a few cases where young people are like, yeah I’m gonna take responsibility for this material and practice and carry it forward into the future.”
Despite the slow pace and lack of instant gratification that comes with analog technology, younger artists continue to invest their time experimenting with printmaking mediums. Sato sees this resurgence as a clear reaction to the “over-digitization of the world.”
“There’s a tradition in [my] age group of making things yourself,” said Sonya Sagan-Dworsky ’26, an Intro Printmaking student. She grew up in a small town in Vermont with a mom who is both an artist and an architect. In the summers of her childhood, she would visit her mother’s printmaking studio in rural Vermont, where her mother kept tubs of acid in the backyard. She remembers experimenting with her first monotype print when she was seven years old, constructing collages out of scavenged wildflowers, thistles, and dandelions. With printmaking, Sonya has noticed that “you can’t really take away a mistake.” But she sees the benefit in making slip-ups. “It causes me to grow as an artist. I explore how to incorporate that [mistake] into the final design.”
Some younger artists use screen printing to give “new life” to thrifted and vintage clothes. Charlotte Silverman, a senior at Brown University, prints original drawings on surfaces like canvas tote bags, workwear pants, and tank tops. She also enjoys using clothes that are supposed to be “fancy,” such as button-ups or long skirts, and turning them into something funky and warped.
Silverman’s daily ritual of drawing began in high school. Intimidated by the technicality of observational drawing, she was more interested in portraying “distorted versions of reality.” During her first year in college, she took a water-based silkscreen class at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she worked for the first time with fabric screens and fabric ink. Screen printing was “a natural transition from drawing.” After that class ended, she decided to pursue screen printing on her own. She would work from her home in Los Angeles, printing out of her closet and washing screens in her shower. The result was Fargo Street, Silverman’s DIY clothing line that features hand-printed drawings. Fargo Street is a culmination of her two loves: drawing and fashion. Her drawings are surreal and playful, whether it’s a wrestling match between ants or human(ish) figures with balloon-shaped heads spinning turntables and dancing around speakers. Her style is characterized by clean linework and meticulous dotwork, evoking the graininess of sandpaper or television screen static.
This past summer, Silverman organized and curated a weekly pop-up showroom in Los Angeles, featuring 18 artists and designers whose pieces she displayed in conversation with one another. She finds something special in meeting people through her art and seeing how people interact with her clothes. For Silverman, the best feeling is when someone expresses that “that [piece of clothing] is them.” Once Silverman graduates in the spring, she hopes to pursue more sustainable ways of sourcing the clothing, such as hand-sewing clothes using vintage fabrics.
Reflecting on the evolution of Fargo Street, Silverman said that “the hands-on experience and all the little things that are tedious make it worthwhile.”
Along with printmaking, analog art forms such as film photography have experienced a comeback in recent years. Like printmaking, film photography is a tedious artmaking process that does not always yield immediate results. From friends taking photos of each other on disposable cameras to students exploring how to develop photos in the darkroom, young artists are engaging with film photography in the same way that their parents or grandparents did.
The value of older photo technology is that “the photos become timeless,” said Alan Lin ’24. Lin is the head of the photo department for WYBC Yale Radio, the student-run radio station. He recently documented WYBC’s annual homecoming event, shooting on a 35mm film camera to capture the crowd dancing and radio members posing. While most event photographers would opt to use digital cameras, Lin prefers the analog format. He likes the intentionality behind using film, where every single photo feels like a moment of decision. In comparison to digital photos, he finds the aesthetic of film photos more pleasing and organic, and he embraces their imperfections. Why are people still drawn to analog technology, when there are more streamlined ways to make art? Lin noted that the artist’s satisfaction should take precedence over the end product. Young people, said Lin, are “searching for a more intimate connection with music and fashion and artmaking.”
Image: “The Mask Collector” — three-color Risograph print by Rob Sato