CCA News
2x2: A Collaborative Portfolio: Prints and Writing
Posted on Thursday, September 24, 2009, by Lindsey Westbrook
For the first time ever in spring 2009, undergraduates in Printmaking collaborated with students in the MFA Program in Writing for a formal project, under the auspices of faculty member Thomas Wojak. The result, 2x2, will be the focus of a celebratory evening on Friday, October 2, from 5:30 to 7 p.m.
The party will be a rare opportunity for the public not only to view and handle the portfolio, but also to tour CCA's recently acquired Writers Studio on the San Francisco campus, with its beautiful, Asian-inspired courtyard garden.
2x2 is a limited-edition portfolio of 16 writings and 16 prints. At the outset of the semester, eight students enrolled in Advanced Screenprinting paired off with eight Writing students. They met for an initial in-depth discussion, settling on two short stories or poems, which the printmakers then used as jumping-off points for two new prints. "The idea was for the prints to be creative responses to the writings, not literal illustrations of them," remarks Wojak.
"The experience enabled two different programs, one undergrad and one grad, to connect in a cross-disciplinary way, and it prompted the printmakers to engage visually with the written word—to delve deeply into the spirit of a text. It also presented them with a real-world experience that they might face in their professional lives, after graduation."
All of the screenprints were produced by the students; the course was intensive not only artistically and conceptually, but also in terms of the technical skills involved in printmaking, editioning, and the digital production of film positives. In the end, each participating student and each program office received a copy of the editioned collection.
Click the image at right to view a slideshow of all 16 images in the portfolio.
Visit Thomas Wojak's website.