As an artist mentor at New Urban Arts, I've spent two years working with high school students on screen printing and other projects, and I collaborated on designing & building the silkscreen studio there. More recently I've been teaching advanced silkscreen classes and workshops, in New Orleans and in Providence, on making color separations by hand using rubylith film — a technique that's basically obsolete as a commercial method, but really interesting and fruitful as an artistic method.
If you're interested in information about future classes or teaching, get in touch!
One of the students I worked with at NUA, drawing the transparencies for her final silkscreen project
A NUA staff member sent out the question to mentors & former mentors:
"What makes you most proud to be part of New Urban Arts?"
This is what I wrote:
New Urban Arts is a place where I learned how to be part of a community — with all its compromises and disappointments as well as awesome triumphs — and how to let myself fail, be messy, and make terrible mistakes. Being part of the studio was and is crucial in my (continuing!) learning process about how to be a responsible person and a seeking artist, how to make meaningful work and be a member of a true community.
I don't know if I can say I'm "proud of" the studio as much as I would say that I am in awe of what it taught and continues to teach me, in an everyday and matter-of-fact way, mostly through simple interactions with other humans, and always with me realizing (usually a little after the fact) that I've just been winked at sideways by a little glimpse of insight....
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Workshop on hand-made color separations:
working on the rubylith transparencies (that's the red stencil film stuff!)
clockwise from top left: exploratory work by learners Emmy Bright, Jori Ketten, Melissa Mendes, and Walker Mettling.