The blueprint to leaving a world impression starts in St. Louis — if the UNM Print Club can get there.
To do so, the club is hosting a student print sale to fund a trip to the Southern Graphics Council International conference in March.
Shaurya Kumar, assistant professor in the printmaking program, said the craft is about creating long-lasting relationships, which students will make at the conference.
“Printmaking is a very community-oriented activity,” he said. “We have the same studio where everyone uses the same press. They have to work very collaboratively and help each other out, so it already has a very communal aspect.”
The sale starts Thursday at the Fine Arts Building and features beginning and advanced work, as well as graduate students’ projects. The club will give demonstrations ranging from intaglio, a style involving metal plate incisions, to alternative T-shirt printing, monotype and alternative digital printing.
Already, the UNM Print Club has given students an outlet to develop relationships, student Chelsea Wrightson said, but the conference will give them a chance to share portfolios with national and international professional printmakers.
“Recently, I feel like it’s been more productive and proactive, just with the start of this community of printmakers building,” she said. “It’s really exciting to see all the students come together.”
UNM Print Club President Elena Lopez said submitted, to-be-sold prints weren’t subject to a preliminary selection process. She said, as a result, there is a variety of featured printmaking techniques, including drawing, sculptural, painterly and photographic processes.
“People’s taste varies greatly, so what I think is atrocious someone else may love, and vice versa,” she said. “So we don’t want to make any judgments in that sense, and we also want all the students to have that experience of selling work.”
Kumar said the demonstrations will give the public an idea about how much work goes into each piece.
“Printmaking is a very technical medium and goes through a series of complicated processes in order to make one image,” he said. “So in order to sensitize or to educate people who are not familiar with that, we thought we should do demonstrations.”
Still in its infant stage, Kumar said, the club has developed into a tight-knit community, a pivotal point that students will rely on in the future.
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“Once they graduate, this is the group they will be connected to professionally and personally,” he said. “It opens a lot of professional possibilities for them to collaborate in the future or participate in different projects — things like that.”
*Student Print Sale
Thursday, Friday, Saturday
9 a.m.-5 p.m.
Fine Arts Building
Room 142*
