Installation view of Pyramid Atlantic Art Center’s 40th anniversary exhibition, “Reflecting Back to the Future.” (Carlo Pizarro/Pyramid Atlantic Art Center)
We typically view art in sterile, tidy galleries — far from the studios and workshops where it’s made. But that is not the case at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, a hub for print-, paper- and bookmaking that is celebrating its 40th anniversary with the exhibition “Reflecting Back to the Future.” To get to the show, which is on the second floor of the Hyattsville building, you have to weave your way through a labyrinth of bulky, ink-splattered equipment: long tables crowned with clunky rollers; a massive wheel that looks straight off the Oregon Trail; a frightening book-cutting machine, nicknamed “the guillotine.”
An appreciation for the involved practice of printmaking does not necessarily come naturally to those of us better acquainted with images on a screen and printers of the desktop variety. But after passing the humming and hawing machines that create them, the prints on view, curated by Pyramid Atlantic founder and former director Helen Frederick, seem more tangible, more complex — louder, even — than they would if stumbled upon in a white cube gallery.
REFLECTING BACK TO THE FUTURE Through November 14 at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, 4318 Gallatin St., Hyattsville.
