The Tamarind Institute, a division of UNM's College of Fine Arts, is considered by many artists around the world to be the premiere studio and workspace for an art form that could be called the most popular medium of the 20th century.
The institute is dedicated to the mission of reviving the extremely popular, yet often misunderstood, art of lithography. Tamarind has housed countless foreign, resident and apprentice artists and printmakers during its 40-year history - with 32 of those years being associated with UNM.
Through collaborative printmaking, diversity in artists and printers and a balance between traditional and contemporary materials, techniques and styles, Tamarind has been able to attract some of the world's most popular printers and artists.
Despite its international acclaim and ability to bring in talented artists, the institute remains largely unknown within the UNM community.
"Sometimes I think we are more popular throughout the world than we are in our own community," said Marjorie Devon, the institute's director.
Housed in a plain building directly behind the Frontier Restaurant, in an area that literally has hundreds of people walk by every day, lies an institution where an emphasis is placed on work and education rather than public relations and snobby art dealers.
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These factors, including the complexity of lithography, have all contributed to a mystery several at UNM have yet to solve.
The Tamarind Mystery
Tamarind was established in Los Angeles in 1960. In fact, the institute actually was named after the street it was located on in the City of Angels. At the time, Tamarind was the only institute in the country dedicated solely to reviving lithography. Now, several hundred workshops, public workspaces and institutes in the United States house the bulky and expensive equipment required to produce lithographs.
Under the direction of former Tamarind director Clinton Adams, who also is a former dean of the College of Fine Arts, Tamarind eventually moved to Albuquerque.
UNM provides about a third of the funding required to maintain Tamarind, but owns and exhibits the Tamarind archive, a collection of prints and lithographs produced by artists and printmakers throughout the institute's history.
Tamarind accepts students into its program, but it also regularly invites artists from around the world to work alongside students for a two-week period.
Unlike some other units within colleges at UNM, students who complete apprenticeships and residencies are only offered credit toward a master's degree, or they receive certification as a master printmaker.
The institute also participates in a variety of community-based programs aimed at popularizing lithography. Public programs such as ArtStreet and Arttext bring the art form to the masses instead of containing an exhibit within gallery walls. Tamarind also recently received the 2002 Bravos Award for Excellence in Visual Arts, awarded by the Albuquerque Arts Alliance.
Not only does Tamarind house multitudes of equipment and thousands of square feet of workspace, it also contains a small gallery space used to exhibit five or six shows a year featuring recent works by students and visiting artisans.
Tamarind's reputation, gallery space and first-rate workshop facilities work together to help make UNM's College of Fine Arts one of the most varied and contemporary places to study art in the nation.
"It's one of the strengths of the College of Fine Arts' extraordinarily deep and rich tradition," said Christopher Mead, interim dean of the College.
Lithography and Printmaking
A portion of the mystery surrounding the institute may be due, in part, to the somewhat complicated process of lithography. Many think lithography is just a way to produce posters and pictures in mass numbers. This perception does have some truth behind it, but it also completely ignores the art form's validity. Lithography can be used to produce images such as movie posters, en mass, but it also can be, and most usually is, used to produce originals and small editions that can be changed as easily as dragging a brush across a blank canvas.
Lithography uses a press to transfer an image onto a piece of paper from a metal, rubber or stone plate. Artists and printers, the people who advise artists how to use the complicated process of printing to achieve their final image, use inks, chemicals and the basic technique of repelling grease and water to produce a limitless variety of one color and multicolor print editions.
An edition is a limited number of prints that are exactly the same. This is why some people think lithographs are not originals, the common argument being that something cannot be original with an exact duplicate right next to it. However, that is exactly what the art of lithography can be about - the ability to produce identical images multiple times.
At Tamarind, artists will personally sign and number each piece in the edition and afterward each piece also will be embossed with the institute's chops, the alchemists' symbol for stone. The chops guarantee authenticity. To ensure edition integrity, each edition's plate is destroyed after the edition is printed.
Perhaps one of the institute's most important components, and one of the hardest concepts to completely understand, is the role the artists and printers play in creating prints.
Artists and Printers
"I think that all printers have an obsessive compulsiveness to them," said Tamarind apprentice printer Erin Maurelli. "Each project is a new challenge. You never know what's going to manifest itself."
At the Tamarind Institute, artists work in a collaborative environment. Artists are assisted by printers, individuals who understand the complexity of presswork, or materials used in the piece, the properties of the paper being used and the nature of image transfer.
Essentially, artists have ideas, and the printers help them achieve their final pieces. Since many print makers are not actually lithographers by training and may not understand how to do exactly what they want, they use the printers' knowledge to arrive at their final masterpieces.
The collaborative process at Tamarind has helped not only produce some of the world's finest lithographs, it also has helped educate students and as professionals about lithography's finer aspects.
To learn more about the nonprofit Tamarind Institute, visit the organization's Web site at http://www.unm.edu/~tamarind or visit the Tamarind gallery at 108-110 Cornell Drive SE.
