Process Logs: Prints, Plates, and Sketches from Navigation Press at Mason

May 8 – August 11, 2017

Navigation Press is a master printmaking residency within the School of Art (SOA) at George Mason University, established in 2006 by Helen Frederick and Harold Linton. Each year, a visiting artist spends a week in the print studio with students and a master printmaker to complete a limited-edition print, while also participating in lectures, workshops, and critiques. While many are master printmakers themselves, the visiting artists of Navigation Press have represented a variety of artistic backgrounds and media, including painting, sculpture, book art, and zines.

“Process Logs” highlights five Navigation Press artists and their completed prints, as well as the often-invisible practices behind the finished work. The exhibition also introduces the many behind-the-scenes printmaking collaborators who made these works possible.

Participating artists

Beauvais Lyons
Enriqué Chagoya
William T. Wiley
Renée Stout
Louis Schmidt

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The artistic process is often perceived as a solitary act, with an artist independently researching, developing, and executing their ideas. However, the studio or atelier model is a longstanding tradition in the history of printmaking. Students learn from working alongside contemporary masters, gaining hands-on experience in the production of large editions. Meanwhile, the master printmaker supports the artists in translating their artwork and ideas into prints, which may include screen printing, lithography, digital printing, and etching.

Visitors will have an opportunity to see the artifacts of various stages of the printmaking process, including original printing plates, multi-layered transparencies, and preparatory sketches.

“Process Logs: Prints, Plates, and Sketches from Navigation Press at Mason” will be on exhibition in the Fenwick Gallery of George Mason University from May 8 through August 11, 2017. The gallery is located on the first floor of Fenwick Library on Mason’s Fairfax campus. Visitors may find nearby parking in the Rappahannock Deck.

Beauvais Lyons

Process:
Lithography
Ball-grained aluminum plate (1), Photolithographic plates (4); Handschy lithographic inks; Somerset Velvet Antique White paper

For over thirty years, Beauvais Lyons has created academic parody in a variety of mediums, fabricating and documenting imaginary cultures. More recently, his interests have expanded to biography, folk art, medicine, zoology and circuses. Lyons’ lithographs are influenced by plates from old encyclopedias, the novellas of Jorge Luis Borges, 18th-century science, 19th-century printing, natural history museums, mirrors and lenses, anthrospheres, wunderkammers, and various forms of neglected scholarship.

“I prize the vernacular history of art. I prefer the facsimile to the original, and the imaginary to the real. I believe history is a work of fiction.”

Lyons is the self-appointed Director of the Hokes Archives and has taught at the University of Tennessee since 1985. His one-person exhibitions have been presented at over 80 galleries and museums across the United States. His work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Nelson-Atkins Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others. He was awarded the Southeastern College Art Conference Award for Creative Achievement (1994), a Southern Art Federation/National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1988) and a Fulbright Fellowship to teach at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznañ, Poland (2002). Lyons previously served as the President of the Southern Graphics Council International (1994-96).

Master Printer: Fleming Jeffries
Print Assistants: Morgan Barber, Suzanne deSaix, Chelsea Dobert-Kehn, Nancy Mitchell, Nahid Navab, Betsy Patten, Michelle Rowe, Steven Skowron

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Enriqué Chagoya

Process:
Etching
Copper Plates (2); Graphic Chemical Intense Black, Yellow Ochre, Cobalt Blue, Green and Red inks; BFK Rives paper

Drawing from his experiences living on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border in the late 70’s, and also in Europe in the late 90’s, Enrique Chagoya juxtaposes secular, popular, and religious symbols in order to address the ongoing cultural clash between the United States, Latin America and the world as well. Recently, his work has addressed issues of immigration and the economic recession.

Chagoya earned a BFA in 1984 from the San Francisco Art Institute, and his MA and MFA at the University of California, Berkeley in 1987. In the fall of 2007 the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa launched a 25 year survey exhibition of his work that traveled in 2008 to the Berkeley Art Museum, and the Palm Springs Museum in California. His work has been included at the 17th Sydney Biennial of Contemporary Art, at the “Drawing Mythologies in Modern Times” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and “Re-Imagining Orozco” at The New School of Design/Parsons, both in New York City, and solo exhibitions at The Bing/Stanford gallery in Washington, and the Galeria de la Raza in San Francisco.

Chagoya is currently a Full Professor at Stanford University’s Department of Art and Art History. His work can be found in many public collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Metropolitan Museum; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Master Printer: Susan Goldman
Print Assistants: Erwin Thamm, Pat Sargent, Meaghan Busch, Marti Patchell, Betsy Patten, Nancy Mitchell, Rebecca Chase, Ann Burdell, Laura Foltz, Kelli Sincock, Suzanne deSaix, Kannan Congro, Elsabe Dixon

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William T. Wiley

Process:
Etching
Copper plate (1); Graphic Chemical Intense Black ink; Van Gogh Talor watercolors; BFK Rives paper

William T. Wiley is an American artist, born in Indiana in 1937. He earned his BFA in 1961 and MFA in 1962 from the San Francisco Art Institute, and served as Associate Professor at the University of California at Davis until 1973. Wiley’s work is held in national and international public museums and private collections, including the Seattle Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Sedelijk van Abbemuseum at Eindhoven in the Netherlands. He has been an active participant in group exhibitions for over 50 years, including the Venice Biennale.

For over 50 years, Wiley has distinguished himself as an artist who challenges the precepts of mainstream art. His work is not readily classifiable into any movement or stylistic trend. Combining humble materials, found objects, personal symbols, enigmatic texts, and references to art history, popular culture, and current events, he has developed a distinctive style that allows for variety, invention, and subtlety. Wiley’s practices range from drawing, painting in watercolor and acrylic, sculpture, and printmaking to film and performance. One of the defining hallmarks of his work are the texts and wordplay that accompany virtually every piece he makes. These range from stream-of-consciousness rambles to pointed opinions and critiques, accompanied by inflections of humor through the use of puns, sarcasm, malapropisms, and double entendres. Joann Moser, curator of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, writes “Wiley has created a body of work that anticipated such important developments as installation art, audience participation, a revival of interest in drawing, as well as the use of humor and language as significant aspects of contemporary art.”

Master Printer: Susan Goldman
Print assistants: Erwin Thamm, Ann Burdell, Richard Wenrich, Vina Sananikone, Nancy Thompson, Rebecca Chase, Kannan Cangro, Jane Dicicco, Liz Edwards, Pat Sargent, Susan Serafin, Betsy Patten

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Renée Stout

Process:
Screen print

Renée Stout was the first Navigation Press resident artist. “Waiting for Jimi” serves to create a memory of the blues, and also as homage to Jimi Hendrix, Sam Cooke and the other musicians whose names are seen inscribed on the “House of Obai” in the print. Using pencil, tusche (a black liquid used in lithography) and ink, Renee hand-drew many separate layers of images on Mylar, which were then printed sequentially. These layers achieve rich browns and a golden sky, laid over a background of green and red.

“Students still mention how much they loved meeting Renee and how much they learned about art, printing and life in working with her.”

Stout is a Washington, D.C., artist whose paintings and sculptures have earned her international recognition. Stout’s assemblages incorporate found objects, African symbols, remnants of stories and letters, and vintage photographs. A 1980 graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, her career began with photo-realist paintings of everyday urban neighborhoods. Soon, she developed mystical interests, delving into ancient African traditions, magic, and her vivid imagination. A dark edge of her artwork followed her move to D.C., where she witnessed sordid truths behind urban decay and city life. Rampant drug use and racial stereotyping are among the issues Stout directly confronts in mixed-media works. Fictional narratives with imaginary characters derived from the artist’s alter ego trace her personal history and spiritual journey as a woman and artist.

Stout’s prints, drawings, photographs, and mixed media installations have been exhibited in solo and group shows throughout the U.S., England, Russia, and the Netherlands, including a solo exhibition at the National Museum of African Art. Her work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. The artist, in collaboration with poet Carol Beane, won the National Museum for Women in the Arts Library Fellows Artist’s Book Award in 2008 for their work The Streets of Used to Be.

Master Printer: Susan Goldman

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Louis Schmidt

Louis Schmidt was the Nagivation Press artist for 2017 during the production of “Process Logs.”

Master Printer: Anne Smith

Master Binder: Christopher Kardambikis