CURRENT EXHIBITION
Mesh
A Juried National Exhibition of Screenprinted Works
On View: March 15–April 28, 2024
Opening Reception: Friday, March 15, 6-8 pm
From the brightly colored to the naturally muted, Mesh offers a wide range of art that celebrates the possibilities of screenprinting. Thirty-four works and the same number of artists are featured in this exhibition. Selected from nearly 300 submissions, included artworks showcase both conventional and unconventional applications of the art practice.
Pyramid is pleased to partner with The Washington Print Club and The Washington Print Foundation for Mesh. Through these partnerships, three $1,000 awards are offered to recognize excellence among the entries: Best Overall Entry, Best Work on Paper, and Most Innovative Entry.
Mesh asked artists to consider the history of screenprinting, its technical contexts, and its diverse applications when submitting their work. The fine art of screenprinting has primitive antecedents as evidenced in the stenciled imagery on prehistoric cave walls. In modern times, artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein used stencil material attached to or embedded in a mesh of fiber, metal, or synthetic plastic filaments. The process has been applied in decorative arts, textile printing, advertising posters, street and political art, among other areas. Today, screenprinting has a widespread current presence in commercial signage, t-shirts, ceramics, furniture, and packaging.
Mesh Exhibiting Artists
Chloe Alexander (GA), Byron Ashley (TX), Aaron Bass (NM), Wes Beeler (IL), Andrew Blanchard (SC), Myles Calvert (SC), Casey Connelly (PA), Stephanie Damoff (NY), Lori Gann-Smith (TN), Kate Goodvin (IA), Jay Howley (MD), Imar Hutchins (DC), Lauren Jackson (MD), Grace Johnson (IN), Sue Johnson (VA), Nilou Kazemzadeh (PA), Selene LaMarca (DC), Cynthis Lollis/ETC Press (GA), Clay McGlamory (VA), Terence Nicholson (DC), Renato Paucar (MD), Serena Perrone (GA), Trinity Pote (MO), Philippe Ricard (MD), Henry Rosenberg (NY), K Sarrantonio (NY), Adi Segal (DC), Heather Swenson (PA), R.L. Tillman (MD), Varvara Tokareva (MD), Chadwick Tolley (GA), Cornelia Walworth (ME), and Connie Wolfe (IL).
About the Jurors:
Joshua Gamma
Curator and Designer
Exhibition Juror and Award Co-Juror for “Best Overall Entry” Award
Joshua is a curator and designer based in Baltimore. He has curated over 20 exhibitions and developed over 60 public programs, recently curating Keep A-Knockin’ at VisArts in Rockville, MD, as their Emerging Curator in Residence. Joshua is currently the Gallery Director at BlackRock Center for the Arts in Germantown, MD. Joshua holds a BFA in Design and a BA in Studio Art from The University of Texas at Austin and an MFA in Curatorial Practice from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Baltimore.
Michael Hagan
Artist
Exhibition Juror and Award Juror for “Most Innovative Entry” Award
Michael is a D.C. screenprinter and holds a Certificate in Printmaking from the Corcoran School of Art and Design. He is a former longtime member, President, then Treasurer of Washington Printmakers Gallery. He is currently on The Washington Print Club Executive Board. He’s had a number of solo exhibits and he continues to participate in local printmaking projects, many for local, national, and international philanthropic organizations.
Zoma Wallace
Artist, Curator, and Writer
Exhibition Juror and Award Co-Juror for “Best Overall Entry” Award
Zoma is an independent curator, writer, and artist based in her hometown of Washington, D.C. Since 2008, she has charted a unique curatorial path, collaborating with artists, writing, consulting, and teaching. She holds a BA from Spelman College, an MFA in painting from Howard University, and is a Ph.D. candidate in Art Theory & Philosophy at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA).
LuLen Walker
Curator
Award Juror for “Best Work on Paper” Award
LuLen is the Art Curator at Georgetown University. She is responsible for acquisitions, curates exhibitions, and collaborates with faculty in teaching various subjects using artwork from the collection. Her most recent exhibition was Art of Homage: Translation, Interpretation & Appropriation (2023). Prior to Georgetown LuLen worked in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the National Portrait Gallery and a commercial art gallery in Georgetown. She is a member of Print Council of America, a long time board member of the Washington Print Club, and occasionally contributes to the WPC’s journal, On Paper.
The Awardees:
Best Work on Paper
Fury by Lauren Jackson
In her accordion folded, oversized artist’s book Fury, artist and educator Lauren Jackson effectively employs the graphic potential of the silkscreen medium, with its origins in commercial sign printing and advertising posters, to boldly challenge and confront the viewer. Fury belongs to a body of work based on oral histories the artist conducted about the Black women educators in her family. She sees the works as “emphasizing the value of education in Black communities.” In a series of paired monochromatic scenes that unfold in a visual dialogue across ten pages, Jackson addresses issues of gender inequality, Black identity and climate change.
The book plays with flattened form and positive/ negative imagery in increasingly disturbing, photographic images combined with stenciled shapes. The stark, black and white views begin with water drops falling into a turbulent ocean followed by cloud formations. They are layered behind a scrim of halftone dots which plays conceptually with the silkscreen medium itself. This mesh effect transforms in the following pages into a menacing white net which surrounds the silhouetted figure of a child. A pair of disembodied hands beside the net appear to have released the child alone into the world. She is seen running and growing larger in the following pages. There, a young woman’s head in silhouette faces a delineated “page” dated 2012 to 2016 with the words “The essence of proving yourself for the sake of education is deafening and demoralizing.” These words are accompanied by a crouching, headless body superimposed over the ocean, titled “With all her FURY.” The final pages show a close-up, cropped view of a car crash and the repeated profile head against ocean waves, which ends the narrative where it began, implying a relentless cycle of repetition.
This oversized book with black and white silkscreen photographs resonant with newspaper imagery, silhouettes and bold graphics, engages viewers in its scale and immediacy. The black forms against a monochromatic range of halftone images convey the threatening forces of nature together with a narrative of race and identity through the accomplished interplay of repetition, juxtaposition, and technique.
-LuLen Walker
Most Innovative
Untitled (chestfeeding in silver) by K Sarrantonio
The entry precisely nailed the MESH theme by using screenprinting intersecting with other special media, e.g., tile and metallic foil. The work creatively moves a generic context of ‘art about art’ to a specific exhibition context of ‘printmaking about printmaking’. E.g., it uses a full range of halftones, clearly signaling the special (often necessary and pragmatic) process used in the graphic art of printmaking. The work also references ‘ink’ with tattoos on skin. And, it presents a printed and repeated pattern on a textile (the blanket). Finally, the work implicitly invites a viewer’s participation: Metallic foil and ceramic tile literally reflects the viewer, with light and dark areas rapidly changing as she/he/they move around the large image. The work — its ideas, its materials — all interact (i.e., mesh) with the viewer experience. And, the artists themselves are figuratively ‘in’ the work — with both material productivity and maternal reproductivity openly displayed.
-Mike Hagan
Best Overall
Adam in His Room by Kate Goodvin
Although there were such strong works in this competition, Adam in His Room stood out to me as an incredible piece. In person, it radiates in joyful color and envelops the viewer in scale. The work offers a complexity of techniques and detailed visual information that keeps you in a mode of exploration and discovery when you stand before it. Adam’s room becomes an optical playground, impressively marrying quilted textile substrates with an interesting combination of different printmaking processes.
-Zoma Wallace
Exhibition Gallery: