Artful Impressions

Visitors drifted into the Print Palace, blinked the bright afternoon sunshine out of their eyes, and joined the bustling movement inside.

In one corner, lively conversation rose from the group clustered around a table spread with the hors d’oeuvres requisite for any art opening. In another, a quieter handful watched a student demonstrate the process of making an artistic print. But the center of the room showed the most activity as guests lined up in front of a long table to view the object of this particular opening: A University Dedicated, a series of 13 photogravure prints depicting classic images of the Rice University campus. However, this was not just any art opening, which generally signifies an end—a finishing of a discreet group of works or the conclusion of an artistic phase. Like commencement, which was just weeks away, this art opening was a beginning, as well as a summation.

Karin Broker, chair of the Department of Visual Arts, has taught printmaking at Rice since 1980. Knowing that there is far more to artistic printmaking than simply running copies off a press, she wanted to give students a feel for the entire process. Her idea was a new class titled Collaborative Printmaking. “But I couldn’t just stand up there and talk about how to do it,” she explains. “The students actually had to go through all the steps involved in printmaking, from inception through marketing. The idea is to give them an opportunity to actually work collaboratively in a profession.”

The facilities of the Print Palace—the Rice printmaking classroom—were easily up to the task. “We have an amazing room here,” Broker says, waving around at the presses and other equipment. “It was made to do production printing. You couldn’t do that at a lot of places.” The real problem was funding because the expense of creating a commercially viable series of prints was beyond the normal budget for a regular printmaking class.

Broker applied for and received a teaching grant through the Brown Foundation and funds from the Jerome J. Segal Endowment in the Department of Art and Art History, which has since divided into the Department of Visual Arts and the Department of Art History. “We had $4,300 to start,” Broker says, “but we knew we wouldn’t have outside support after this first class.” The only way that Broker could make the class an ongoing endeavor was to sell the prints to raise money to continue. She decided to use images of the Rice campus because there would be a ready collectors’ market for those images within the Rice community.

Six students signed up for the class: Angel Askins, a junior majoring in studio art; Sarah Bethea, a sophomore double majoring in arts and anthropology; Janica Day, a senior majoring in religious studies; Gretchen Raff, a senior double majoring in mathematics and computer and applied mathematics; Leslie Sage, a junior double majoring in arts and cognitive sciences; and Josef Sifuentes, a junior triple majoring in arts, mathematics, and computer and applied mathematics. Broker was assisted by adjunct lecturer Heather Logan. Their task during the course of the spring semester would be to collaboratively create a series of prints and market them by semester’s end. It would be a challenge because not all the students were art majors, and only Askins and Sage had experience in printmaking.

“First, we had to organize the class in such a way that the students could take over and it would be their project,” Logan says. “Then we had to show them technically how to produce it.”

The students began by deciding to name their press the Rice University Print Palace Press. They also did research on print shops around the country. Early in the semester, Broker brought in several guest speakers, including Carolyn Chadwick, an expert in hand bookbinding, and Texas artist Luis Jimenez. “Luis has done a lot of prints,” says Sifuentes, “and he talked about the print process from an artist’s standpoint. Then we went to Flatbed Press, a commercial printmaking company in Austin, and they talked about it from the printmaker’s standpoint, so we could see both sides of the same process.”

“Studying the economics of printmaking was an eye-opener,” says Askins, who has worked with Broker for four semesters and plans to become a master printer. “Flatbed Press said they ran in the red for the first 10 years that they were open, and I began to wonder what was I getting into.”

Next, the students selected the images they would print. Because they wanted to work from high-quality images of the campus, they contacted university photographer Tommy LaVergne, who provided them with about 200 photographs. “We didn’t want to do Tommy the Rice University photographer,” Broker insists. “We wanted to do Tommy the artist.”

LaVergne came in a couple of times a week during the selection process. “We often had a whole series of images that were very similar,” he says, “like four different sets of the fronts of buildings or buildings with trees or some with students. We decided not to use students because we wanted the prints to be timeless. There are certain images, like the column with the spires in the background, that could be nowhere else but Rice. But the students did a very good job of selecting, and that was the hard part. I pretty much let them go with what they wanted. I never told them which ones were my favorites.”

After choosing a 1913 photograph of Lovett Hall by E. W. Irish as a starting place, the students then selected an additional 12 photographs by LaVergne. “Any image with a lot of detail lends itself to photogravure,” Broker says. “We went after things that were dramatic—shots that you wouldn’t typically find somewhere else. Some were really easy to decide on, like the one of Lovett Hall, but others weren’t so clear-cut, and the students had to vote.” After they settled on the 13 images, they named the series A University Dedicated. “They called it that,” Broker says, “because those were the words on the invitations to people from all over the world to attend the Rice dedication ceremony in 1912.”

Then it was time to produce the prints. The photogravure process, which dates to the 1850s, initially enabled publishers to reproduce photographs in books, magazines, and newspapers. A printing press—artistic or commercial—cannot print the continuous blending and shading of tones found in a photograph, so for printing purposes, a photographic image is exposed onto the printing plate through a fine screen, breaking the image into thousands of tiny dots of varying size. The resulting image is called a halftone. Look at any printed photograph through a magnifying glass, and you will see the highly regular pattern of dots.

The tonal qualities inherent in photogravure also lend themselves to reproduction of photographic images for artistic purposes. But while the artistic photogravure process remains traditional, some of its elements have experienced technological advances through the years. Originally, photogravure images were etched with acid into copper printing plates. Today, photosensitive emulsions allow a completely photographic process in creating the plates.

The class also took advantage of innovations in digital imaging to create the film positives that were used to expose the printing plates. Gil Daoust of Digital Printmaking Solutions scanned the images to create digital halftones of much higher resolution than are possible when using traditional photographic methods. Also, the tiny dots in the digital images are randomized rather than ranked in regular rows, allowing more precise control over the tonal values of the reproduced image.

“The really neat part about this process from a photographer’s standpoint,” LaVergne says, “is that a lot of these shots are very difficult to print. You’d have to spend the entire day dodging and burning to get on paper exactly what’s on the negative. But here, what’s on the negative is what you get, and that’s really amazing.”

Once the plates were made, the printing process itself was a busy time. “We spent about four weeks coming in at eight o’clock in the morning and working right through noon,” says press operator Askins. “But once you get rolling on prints, you don’t notice the time.”

“Angel and Leslie had taken printmaking before, so they worked with Heather and me on the actual printing,” says Broker. “The other students had no prior knowledge, but there were so many other jobs to be done. We actually printed about 350 sheets of paper, and it had to be cut to 16" x 20" from larger sheets. Also, we needed thousands and thousands of sheets of newsprint to dry the prints. That’s a lot of paper to cut. Everybody had jobs.”

“I became a paper handling specialist,” says Day. “You’d be amazed at how many little jobs there are that have to be performed exactly right to make the process work. When we printed, my major job was soaking and drying paper. Each sheet costs $3.00, so you can’t afford too many mistakes. You had to be on your A-game every day.”

Another aspect the students had to deal with was packaging. They constructed the gift boxes and portfolios. “Getting the fabric right was a job in itself,” Broker says. “We went to the bookstore to match the Rice gray and blue, and we had to order the ribbon to tie the portfolios from Japan.” The students even chose the typography and designed the little chop mark, or signature brand, impressed on the prints.

No one quite remembers how John Boles got involved in writing the introduction, but it was probably inevitable—Boles is not only the William Pettus Hobby Professor of Southern History but the premier authority on the history of Rice University. One version goes like this: The students were discussing who might be the best person to write the introduction, and LaVergne suggested Boles. “I can get him,” Day piped up, and indeed, she had a direct line to Boles because she is engaged to his son, Matt.

“I came over and talked to the students about Lovett and the opening of Rice,” Boles says. “We looked through all the photographs and wrote down the themes that jumped out. The students wanted just enough for just one page, so I had to work to capture those themes in such a short space.”

In the end, the students had produced a total of 20 copies of each print. Seven sets were put into the handmade gift boxes, seven sets were bound in portfolios, and the rest of the prints were to be sold individually. One boxed set was given to the university and one to LaVergne, Boles received prints, and all the students earned proof prints.

“It took the students a while to get a grip on what they were doing,” says Logan, “but when we finished, they were really proud. I think it was a little unusual in that they aren’t normally asked to shoulder this kind of responsibility. If one of them didn’t show up during the production, someone else had to take up the slack. Or sometimes, they’d go in and call them and tell them, ‘Get here!’ It was fun to watch how they handled all that.”

The collaborative print making class, left to right: Josef Sifuentes, Leslie Sage, Tommy LaVergne, Sarah Bethea, Janica Day, Karin Broker, Heather Logan, Gretchen Raff, Angel Askins, and John Boles.

To prepare for selling the prints, the class listened to Sally Reynolds talk about meeting people, writing letters, and other aspects of marketing art. Reynolds, an instructor and promotion coordinator for Rice’s Cain Project in Engineering and Professional Communications, spent 22 years as an art dealer, consultant, and curator before coming to Rice.

Day and Sifuentes agreed to handle the marketing. “Suddenly it was all on Josef’s and my shoulders to take it out there and actually make the sell,” Day says. “Sally recommended various people we should go talk to to presell prints before the opening. We presented our project and gave our little pitch, and we were really successful. We sold all but one box ahead of time. But people work is what I enjoy, and since I’m not an art major, I felt I could handle taking it out and doing that kind of work. We all found our niche.”

One of Day and Sifuentes’s most daunting sales calls was a presentation to the Rice Board of Trustees, but that didn’t faze Sifuentes. “I wasn’t worried because the product is gorgeous,” Sifuentes says. “As soon as we opened up the portfolio, it did all the talking for us. If people had questions, we could answer, because we learned the process as we went through it. And there was no falsity there, because we were really proud of it. We’d never done anything like this before. In fact, no one in the nation had ever done anything like this before at the undergraduate level. We’re the only undergraduate print shop in the nation. It just came through naturally when we showed people, and then they got very excited just seeing it.”

The individual prints are priced at $150, the portfolios at $1,700, and the boxed sets at $2,500. “We’ve already made $10,000 from the presold four box sets,” says Broker. “We’ll continue to sell the prints at our annual print sale. We set up a special fund just for this class, and all the money from this goes into our next project.”

“This class will continue,” Sifuentes says confidently. “Even if we don’t sell any more prints, the next class will be starting with more than twice the funding that we started with.”

The sales of the prints ensure that the Collaborative Printmaking class will continue beyond this year. Broker envisions a session every other semester. She’d also like to increase the number of students from six to eight to help spread out the workload.

“We’re learning as we go,” Broker says. “There are programs like this elsewhere for graduate students but not for undergraduates, and you can see why. It’s a lot of work—but I’ve always felt that Rice students could do it.”

The next class will work with photos by well-known photographer and Rice professor of visual art Geoff Winningham. After that, Broker may get a photographer from off campus. “We always want the subject to be Rice,” she says. “Since this was the first class, we kept it classic Rice, but we’ll want a different take every time.”

—Christopher Dow