INDIGO
June 9, 2009

SMITHS hosted Indigo Girls, a craft-action dye happening and social sculpture by Brooklyn-based artist Travis Boyer. Participants were invited to come and dye whatever they liked in a natural fermentation indigo dye vat: clothes, objects, materials, etc. Boyer writes, “Indigo Girls is a party about auto-fashion empowerment, creativity, identity, pedagogy, and camaraderie…The process of dying marks the dyers; it stains our hands and costumes but also facilitates profound illumination.” Indigo Girls was a satellite event organized in conjunction with the Queer Cultural Center’s 2009 National Queer Arts Festival and the exhibition Threads, curated by Tirza True Latimer, Rudy Lemcke, Matt McKinley,  Pamela Peniston, Allison Smith, and Tina Takemoto.

September 11-13, 2009

SMITHS hosted a series of hands-on indigo workshops with local practitioners and students at CCA, SF State, UC Berkeley, and SFAI. These were accompanied by video screenings, readings, and discussions about indigo in early U.S. history and across cultures to the present day.

BECOMING COMMONS
September 24, 2009, Headlands Center for the Arts

Becoming Commons was a clustering/swarming/gathering of people entangled in the complexities of everyday living and working together. Looking to historical models of communes, collectives, homesteads, experimental outposts, and other forms of collective barn raising, participants were invited to share their stories and ideas in an intimate exchange at the Headlands Center for the Arts. This town hall-style program was collaboratively conceived by interdisciplinary artist co-founder of Mildred’s Lane J. Morgan Puett (Headlands AIR ’09), artist Allison Smith, curator Erin Elder and artist Brian Conley. Additional remarks were made by Headlands pioneer Mark Thompson and Linda Fleming, founder of the utopian commune Libre. Dinner was prepared by Headlands chef Keith Mercovich, whose meals demonstrate a commitment to innovative and locally sourced cuisine. This event was followed by a weekend retreat in Bolinas led by Erin Elder.

BEEKEEPING
October 2-4, 2009

SMITHS hosted a series of events on beekeeping ranging in topic from its revival as contemporary practice given the politics of Colony Collapse Disorder, to Hardt and Negri’s writings on swarm intelligence and other social metaphors. Artists J. Morgan Puett and Mark Thompson skyped with Garnet Puett, artist and 4th generation beekeeper in Hawaii, whose beekeeping operation is currently one of the largest in the world. Max Goldfarb’s Sonic B sound installation played in the foyer while participants made dozens of hand-dipped beeswwax candles for a candlelit communal meal over which excerpts from Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on bees were read. Many bee-themed films were screened, including Richard Knox Robinson’s award-winning film The Beekeepers and the Bay Area debut of Mark Thompson’s film Immersion, in the making for nearly forty years and recently shown at the Guggenheim to critical acclaim.

LETTERPRESS BROADSIDES & BEERCRAFT
November 6-9, 2009

This series of events investigated the history of revolutionary broadsides and included a visit to the Presidio to tour M & H Type, the oldest and largest lead type foundry producing hot metal type for letterpress printers in the United States, and Arion Press, whose publication program matches prominent contemporary artists with the literature of the past and present in books that are beautifully designed and produced. SMITHS hosted a small-scale Letterpress Fair and Print Exchange featuring a roundtable discussion with Betsy Davids (CCA Professor Emerita), founder of Rebis Press and co-founder of the Pacific Center for the Book Arts, John McBride, publisher of Invisible City and Red Hill Press, and Beau Beausoleil, poet, bookseller, and coordinator of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Broadside Project, which rallies artists and poets in response to the 2007 bombing of the historic heart of bookselling in Baghdad. Refreshments included home-brewed Smith’s Beer presented by critic and writer Patricia Maloney, her partner artist Smitty Weygant, and their friend artist Brian Andrew, who together demonstrated the basics of beer brewing. Participants received a letterpress broadside printed by CCA grad students at Kala Art Institute under the guidance of fellow student Nicholas Hurd.

ART WORKERS
December 4-6, 2009

This cluster of events examined socially engaged ceramics practices and the theme of small-scale mass-production, from Josiah Wedgwood’s pro-revolution, anti-slavery gestures to several ongoing CCA student projects presented in Super Pop-Up Shop, an experimental course taught by writer/curator Glen Helfand that took up temporary residence in an Alameda shopping center. We toured Heath Ceramics in Sausalito, the slow food movement’s pottery of choice and pride of the Bay Area. It is one of the few remaining mid-century American potteries still in existence, and there we spoke to factory workers about how they see themselves in relation to contemporary art and craft debates. The weekend culminated with a lecture by critic and scholar Julia Bryan-Wilson on her new book Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era. In the first book to examine this movement, Bryan-Wilson shows how a polemical redefinition of artistic labor played a central role in minimalism, process art, feminist criticism, and conceptualism. In her close examination of four seminal figures of the period—Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Hans Haacke (artists), and Lucy Lippard (art critic)—she frames an engrossing new argument around the double entendre that “art works.” She traces the divergent ways in which these four artists and writers rallied around the “art worker” identity, including participating in the Art Workers’ Coalition—a short-lived organization founded in 1969 to protest the war and agitate for artists’ rights—and the New York Art Strike. By connecting social art history and theories of labor, this book illuminates the artworks and protest actions that were central to this pivotal era in both American art and politics.

FANCY WORK
January 15-17, 2010, SFMOMA

Throughout the spring of 2010, SFMOMA serves as an outpost and alternate platform for SMITHS. For the museum’s 75th Anniversary weekend celebration, Allison Smith worked with a host of local makers to create Fancy Work, a satellite project that looks back to an exuberant early-nineteenth-century decorative arts movement known as American Fancy to trace an alternate lineage for psychedelia, modernist abstraction, and experimental light and sound works. Consisting of a monumental quilt positioned opposite a colonial wall sconce projecting light back across to it, Smith engaged the space between with a series of lectures and discussions. Sumpter Priddy III spoke to his definitive history American Fancy: Exuberance in the Arts 1790-1840, the touchstone study for the installation, while media arts scholar Robin Oppenheimer presented her research on West Coast light shows as an underappreciated folk art form. Oppenheimer was joined in conversation by legendary light show pioneer Bill Ham. Quilt historian Roderick Kirakofe presented selections from his eccentric quilt collection, while Cleve Jones discussed the impetus behind his founding of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. Smith led museum visitors in a crazy quilting activity using scraps from the Fancy Work quilt, while several different musicians played the musical saw.

ARTS & SKILLS SERVICE
January 18, 2010, SFMOMA

Arts & Skills Service considers the museum’s original location in the War Memorial Veterans Building and its development of the Red Cross Arts and Skills Service, which enlisted artists to teach some fourteen different art and craft skills to GIs recovering in military hospitals during World War II. This project was launched with a day of discussions including curator Christina Linden and Allison Smith on their research into this program at SFMOMA and San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery director Meg Shiffler on her research on artists with military backgrounds. Shiffler was joined on conversation by artists Ehren Tool and Jason Hanasik.

ARTS & SKILLS SERVICE: ON THE HOMEFRONT: WAR EFFORTS, WILDCRAFTING, MENDING
February 25-26, 2010, SFMOMA

SMITHS hosted a series of events that explored tactile activities of making “on the homefront.” In a roundtable discussion at SFMOMA, Allison Smith presented her research on the museum’s World War II-era Red Cross Arts and Skills Service. Poet and novelist Summer Brenner discussed community projects in Richmond that reveal how deeply the Bay Area was impacted by this war. Artist Amy Franceschini presented her Victory Garden project and the ideas that led to its ultimate realization at City Hall. Art historian Elissa Auther responded to these historical accounts with remarks about the use of craft as a lynchpin for bringing people together around issues of political importance. The following day, western herbal medicine practitioner Joshua Muscat and his partner and assistant Adriane Bovone led a six-hour workshop on the practice of  wildcrafting and its connection to wartime healing. Emphasis was given to remedies for anxiety, stress, and sleeplessness. They demonstrated how to make a fresh plant tincture, a dried plant tincture, and a salve, which participants could then take home for their own use.

February 27, 2010

SMITHS hosted a day of mending and making-do at the storefront with street tailor Michael Swaine, who brought a century-old treadle sewing machine. At dinnertime, artist Jay Dion introduced a generosity project in which he’s made hundreds of porcelain “tin cans,” exchanging them for food donations to the Alameda County Community Food Bank. Hot vegetable and chicken soups were served out of the cans while art historian Elissa Auther discussed her new book String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art, which presents an unconventional history of the American art world, chronicling the advance of thread, rope, string, felt, and fabric from the “low” world of craft to the “high” world of art in the 1960s and 1970s and the emergence today of a craft counterculture. An engaging discussion ensued regarding current art/craft divides, issues of visibility in the art market, the creation of alternative economies, the impact of digital technology, and emerging discourses in the fields of social practice and material culture.

CRAFT LAB + EXTREME SCULPTURE

Participants in SMITHS include students at California College of the Arts, through the graduate seminar Craft Lab and the undergraduate course Extreme Sculpture, part of ENGAGE at CCA, a project-based learning initiative. In addition to participating in SMITHS: Arts & Skills Service events, Craft Lab students work independently in their studios to develop their work in relation to issues such as labor, community, cultural identity, textile histories, sustainability, and war. The motto for Extreme Sculpture is “All Demo All the Time,” and for this class Allison Smith hosts weekly hands-on workshops with community partners from CCA and the larger Bay Area, including crazy quilting, wartime embroidery, revited battleships, political bobbin lace, digital printing on fabric, laminating and bending wood, a sculpture photo clinic, the art of gaman, wildcrafting, mending, weaving on a digital jacquard loom, wood carving, wheat weaving, metal chasing and repoussé, and blanket making, among others. In each of these demos, forms of physical making and material manipulation are directly connected to various social histories, current events, theoretical discourses and conceptual metaphors.

ARTS & SKILLS SERVICE: ON THE FRONT LINES: QUAKER GUNS, RAZZLE DAZZLE, CAMO BLANKETS, LOVE ARMOR
March 25, 2010, SFMOMA

At the museum, SMITHS hosted an evening of discussion on tactile acts of wartime creativity. Sanjit Sethi discussed examples of undeniable creativity within the military sphere, from Civil War “quaker guns” to World War I “razzle dazzle” camouflage, presenting us with an opportunity to explore connections between the military industrial complex and the artistic avant-garde. Julia Bryan-Wilson discussed wartime textiles and “love armor” (from knitted mittens to tank cosies and more). Allison Smith presented her research on wartime blanket-giving traditions.

March 26-27, 2010

SMITHS hosted a two-day workshop that engaged with contemporary practices of blanket-giving to deployed U.S. troops and wounded veterans as well as to members of local communities in Iraq and Afghanistan.

ARTS & SKILLS SERVICE: ON AMMUNITION & ORNAMENT: TRENCH ART, FLOWER ARRANGING, SWORDS TO PLOWSHARES
April 29-30, 2010, SFMOMA

SMITHS hosted leading trench art scholar Jane Kimball, whose seminal book “Trench Art: An Illustrated History” highlights her research into a dazzling array of exquisite objects made by soldiers from battlefield debris such as expended bombshells, shrapnel, and other war materiel. On Friday, Allison Smith’s California College of the Arts classes “Extreme Sculpture” and “Craft Lab” culminated at SFMOMA as students presented their work in response to semester-long investigations into a variety of wartime craft traditions.

May 1, 2010

On Saturday at SMITHS, Allison Smith shared her own trench art collection of some 35 artillery shells that were transformed into flower vases by soldiers during World War I. Afternoon activities included polishing the vases and filling them with fresh flower arrangements, in homage to nearly forty years of flower arranging programs hosted by SFMOMA from the 1930s onward.  Berkeley-based wheat weaver Nan Rohan demonstrated ornamental strawcraft, an ancient tradition performed by prisoners-of-war in the Napoleonic era. Participants enjoyed a communal meal together, and capped off the evening with Tia Christopher of the non-partisan veterans’ support organization Swords to Plowshares discussing issues facing veterans today, especially women, and the ways art has enriched and informed her own and others’ healing.

ARTS & SKILLS SERVICE
May 29, 2010

Allison Smith’s residency at SFMOMA culminated with an active re-staging of the WWII-era Red Cross Arts & Skills Service at the museum’s original location, the War Memorial Veterans Building at San Francisco City Hall. Smith enlisted a volunteer corps of artists and craftspeople to teach hands-on workshops to veterans and their families and to engage in the healing process through creative skill-shares. At this public gathering, the research, resources, ideas and questions occasioned by the project were presented. Participants shared their skills in mending, millinery, weaving, crochet, natural dyes, woodworking, ceramic repair, digital video and blogs, interviewing for radio, and more.

TED PURVES & SUSANNE COCKRELL: COMMUNITY ROOT CELLAR
October 16, 2010

SMITHS invited the community to a “putting up” party and PICKLE IT workshop hosted by Susanne Cockrell and Ted Purves, who proposed starting a community root cellar at SMITHS, wherein homemade jams, honey, pickles, sauces, vinegars, beer, kraut, beets, and more are collected along with stories about food, labor, family, land, economy, and love. These will be served up at public events throughout the year and we hope this will be the beginning of an annual event for replenishing the pantry.

ALISON PEBWORTH: BEAUTIFUL POSSIBILITY
January 22, 2011

SMITHS hosted Bay Area artist Alison Pebworth, back from a five-month tour with the Beautiful Possibility Project, who shared stories, images and other ephemera collected from her journey across the Northern United States and Southern Canada. Beautiful Possibility is a traveling exhibition and research project created in the spirit of a 19th Century traveling show that explores American history and culture through direct interactions with diverse regional audiences.  The Show & Tell was presented in conjunction with an elixir tasting made from ingredients collected from Pebworth’s travels. Map, tour venues, exhibition images and travel journal for the Beautiful Possibility project may be viewed at http://www.beautifulpossibilitytour.com

SARAH FILLEY: SURVIVE THIS!
March 19, 2011

SMITHS hosted Oakland-based artist Sarah Filley, who explores the fallacy of lone survival, so popular in contemporary culture, as operating on the tension between paranoia and preparedness.  This tension underscores the real need for community discussions and participatory urbanism. Survive This! is a body of work that came out of research which charts the aesthetics of survivalist gear on a bell curve: the Do-It-Yourself “woodsy isolationist” defines one extreme, and ultra-militaristic executive gadgets define another.  At the top of the curve lies populist/yuppie R.E.I. activity-based day kits. Filley has created something for the rest of us, and maybe for all of us together.

As the host of a Survivalist Tupperware-style Party she acted as friendly ambassador creating awareness of our interdependence and local resources. The discussion started with the kits served as a platform for examining fears, ideas, practical tips, and resources in a climate of Code-Orange Level Alert Status.

FRAU FIBER: USE IT UP, MAKE IT WORK, MAKE IT DO!
October 8, 2011

SMITHS hosted a Politics of Mending Workshop led by textile worker and activist Carole Francis Lung (a.k.a. Frau Fiber) whose project The Sewing Rebellion encourages our emancipation from the global garment industry by learning how to alter, mend and make our own garments and accessories. Frau Fiber and regional chapter organizers distribute their knowledge of the garment industry, pattern making and sewing, encouraging the reuse, renovation and recycling of existing garments and textiles in the creation of unique items tailored to individual tastes and body shapes. For more info visit her http://sewingrebellion.wordpress.com.

To join the SMITHS mailing list, email smithsgeneral (at) gmail (dot) com.

A SONG FOR OCCUPATIONS

A song for occupations!
In the labor of engines and trades and the labor of fields I find
the developments,
And find the eternal meanings.

Workmen and Workwomen!
Were all educations practical and ornamental well display’d out
of me, what would it amount to?
Were I as the head teacher, charitable proprietor, wise statesman,
what would it amount to?
Were I to you as the boss employing and paying you, would that
satisfy you?

The learn’d, virtuous, benevolent, and the usual terms,
A man like me and never the usual terms.

Neither a servant nor a master I,
I take no sooner a large price than a small price, I will have my
own whoever enjoys me,
I will be even with you and you shall be even with me.

If you stand at work in a shop I stand as nigh as the nighest in
the same shop,
If you bestow gifts on your brother or dearest friend I demand as
good as your brother or dearest friend,
If your lover, husband, wife, is welcome by day or night, I must
be personally as welcome,
If you become degraded, criminal, ill, then I become so for your
sake,
If you remember your foolish and outlaw’d deeds, do you think
I cannot remember my own foolish and outlaw’d deeds?
If you carouse at the table I carouse at the opposite side of the
table,
If you meet some stranger in the streets and love him or her, why
I often meet strangers in the street and love them.

Why what have you thought of yourself?
Is it you then that thought yourself less?
Is it you that thought the President greater than you?
Or the rich better off than you? or the educated wiser than you?

(Because you are greasy or pimpled, or were once drunk, or a
thief,
Or that you are diseas’d, or rheumatic, or a prostitute,
Or from frivolity or impotence, or that you are no scholar and
never saw your name in print,
Do you give in that you are any less immortal?)

2

Souls of men and women! it is not you I call unseen, unheard,
untouchable and untouching,
It is not you I go argue pro and con about, and to settle whether
you are alive or no,
I own publicly who you are, if nobody else owns.

Grown, half-grown and babe, of this country and every country, in-
doors and out-doors, one just as much as the other, I see,
And all else behind or through them.

The wife, and she is not one jot less than the husband,
The daughter, and she is just as good as the son,
The mother, and she is every bit as much as the father.

Offspring of ignorant and poor, boys apprenticed to trades,
Young fellows working on farms and old fellows working on farms,
Sailor-men, merchant-men, coasters, immigrants,

… read the full text at the Walt Whitman Archive

Indigo Workshop

This indigo workshop was the first event we organized as a class.  I would say this experience brought all of us closer together. We shared time, space, and a wonderful experience. We all are individual, unique characters just like the things we brought to dye in indigo. This indigo experience left each of us something really strong and magical we’ll never forget. Now we are one team just like all the items hanging in the SMITH’S studio in one color -Indigo.  It was great to learn about the physical nature of the dye.  The videos we saw of the different cultures using this dye was mesmerizing.  Seeing the workers in India standing in the living vat of indigo showed a literal connection to the people and the process.  This is a connection that both producers and consumers in industrialized nations have largely lost.  This problem is one that a return localized crafts production can begin to address.

Beekeeping

This weekend was different than my expectations for the beekeeping workshop.  I was hoping to learn more about the practice of beekeeping in the context of an urban environment.  And although there was a very interesting discussion between J. Morgan Puett and her brother who is a fourth generation beekeeper with an apiary in Hawaii, this was more about his efforts in spite of the colony collapse disorder.  I was hoping to learn about the equipment and practice of beekeepers as it has been one of my dreams to keep bees myself one day.  This being said, I really enjoyed Mark Thompson’s lecture on his life and artwork involving bees.  It was beautiful to learn of his projects involving the bee backpack and the handcrafted objects he made in order to do them.  The footage of him walking alongside rivers and rice fields in Japan was incredible.  What struck me the most in this work was the notion of time.  Mark along with the water and plants and people of this countryside move slowly.  The only thing moving quickly were the bees, and yet in order for the bees to maintain a sense of “home” Mark was required to move very slowly.  The pace of this work was in sharp contrast to the dizzying effect of the film that he showed titled “Immersion.”  This contrast, for me, showed Marks remarkable understanding of the complex relationship we have with bees and the bees relationship to their environment.

Letterpress

Our class took a trip to Arion Press/ M & H Type.  This was my first time visiting a letterpress studio. My favorite moment was when I saw two generations of people working next to each other in the same room on the same project.  There was a girl, probably in her mid-twenties, book binding by hand.  Next to the girl there was a man in his sixties printing book covers.  It was a really beautiful sight- two workers from different generations sharing the same passion and creating beautiful books together. At that point I realized that beauty is  ageless and never out of style. Good crafts can live forever. Thank you, Arion Press/ M & H Type.  I enjoyed the tour very much.

Ceramics

As a female maker, I admire businesses founded by females.  Heath Ceramics was established in mid-1940s by Edith Heath.   After the tour, I thought that Heath Ceramics is a good example of a company that possesses a good balance of handcrafting and manufacturing.  They also have a great system to distribute good handcrafted products to the consumer. They are particular about how they want their business run.  I saw pride in every person that worked there.

This project weekend was a wonderful way to see the potential that these workshop events at the Smiths Storefront can have.  We began the first day by diving directly into the process of indigo dying.  The vat of indigo was prepared ahead of time and was waiting, warm and alive with a dark, dense, oily surface.  The dying process is one that cannot be rushed, and life of the vat and quality of the dye benefits from cooperation.  The oily film needs to be parted, exposing a surprising nuclear green liquid below.  Once the item is fully submerged, great care is taken to ensure little or no air bubbles escape into the indigo.  Indigo, unlike synthetic dyes, is done through a natural fermentation process, this process relies on a form of “reduction” meaning it is necessary not to introduce oxygen into the process until it is removed from the vat.  The Item is “massaged” underneath the surface of the indigo ensuring that the entire surface has been in sufficient contact with the live agents of the indigo.  A few minutes was enough time to allow the indigo to penetrate the fibers of the fabric, although in a workshop vat like the one that we were using, all of us beginners, it was inevitable that some air was introduced therefore lowering the potency and hence requiring some more time in the vat.  Again, care was taken to part the oily surface on the removal of the item being dyed.  This is the real magical moment of indigo dying.  The item emerges from the vat a bright neon green color, and as it has been “reducing” in the vat, the exposure to air quickly “oxidizes” with exposure to the air in the room.  This oxidation takes only a minute or so and we were able to see the  fruits of our effort and care.  The room quickly filled with items of all sorts, from shirts to books and all fibrous materials in between, all a beautiful rich indigo color.

With the room filled with shades of indigo clothing drying on lines, and our noses burning with the urine smell that powers the vat, we sat and together and talked about the process.  For many of us, this was the first time we had experienced indigo dying and therefore we were drawing comparisons with other processes.  For me, the process of reduction and oxidation provided a link to the ceramic process.  Removing the item from the vat and seeing the result felt as familiar as  opening a kiln after a firing.

On the second day of the workshop we opened the doors to the public.  This day was the most inspiring.  After the potential of the dye had been revealed to us, the potential of using indigo to create community became apparent.  We, after only one day of instruction and participation, were now teaching the public how to use and carefully maintain the vat.  We witnessed not only the strength of the indigo in its ability to breath new life into fabric, but its strength in bringing people together around a craft.

Beekeeping

This weekend provided an amazing look into the life and work of artist Mark Thompson.  Now a 40 year beekeeper, Mark’s practice has involved bees throughout in some very interesting and inspiring ways.  Together in conversation with J. Morgan Puett he discussed his various projects with an honesty and candidness that demonstrated his love and respect for the life of the honeybee.  The guests to the storefront were then treated to the west coast premiere of his 30 minute film “Immersion” in which Thompson’s head is entirely covered with bees.  The discussion following was dynamic and by request of the artist critiqued both the physical and social aspects of the work.

Letterpress

The letterpress event found us at M&H Foundry and Arion Press.  The foundry, located in the Preisidio in San Francisco, is the oldest and largest type foundry in the United States.  This is really a remarkable place!  To enter the foundry you must first walk down a long hallway lined with shelves filled top to bottom with boxes of type in stock or ready to be shipped out.  This gave us a sense of the production scale of this place.  the foundry itself consisted of about 12 or so stations and although none of the stations were running, a worker ran us through the process.  After a tour of the press itself and the bookmaking department, we moved on to the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley where artist and fellow CCA graduate student Nicholas Hurd guided us through setting our own type for a broadside to be used at the storefront.  We comprised a list of makers; shopkeeper, tailor, homemaker etc, and then began to set the type.  Nicholas helped us place the type on the press and prepare the ink and the paper.  Once everything was set up, the printing went quite quickly on the Vandercook Press. For those of us who have never used a press like this, the experience was very satisfying.

Revolutionary Ceramics

For this response, I would like to offer a brief description of my work which was included in the exhibition “Super Pop-Up Shop” at the Alameda Towne Centere which along with a tour of Heath Ceramics was part of our workshop weekend.  I slip-cast over 500 porcelain cups made from a mold of an aluminum can of food.  These cups were lined up in 16 rows of 32 on a freestanding wall in the gallery space.  Visitors were asked to bring in a can of food to donate and in return were presented with a gift of one of the cups.  All of the food generated was donated to the Alameda County Community Food Bank in Oakland.  Cans donated by the public replaced one of the ceramic cups on the wall, allowing the visual component of the work to evolve over the course of the exhibition, and I spoke to each and every participant asking them to use the cup as a reminder of this act of generosity on both of our parts.  This work encourages us to look upon each and every member of our community as someone with whom which we have an opportunity to interact openly and honestly.  I have made a concerted effort to use generosity to locate this interaction.

Indigo.

As our first project, Indigo dying set the sights for where this class was to go, we followed it in to new worlds of shared experience.  As we placed our hand in to the dark waters we could only imagine what was going on under the surface. The millions of tiny living organisms reacted with the objects we gently placed inside, and when they were withdrawn a magical experience took place, as the air touched the surface the colors slowly shifted from a pale green to that of indigo. It took me back to the 80′s when hyper-color t-shirts were popular, they reacted the wearers body heat to create psychedelic patterns. The indigo experience was much more enticing know that it was a natural chemical change that is centuries old, rather than some dudes sweaty back.

Beekeeping.

We followed our second project with the preparation of bees wax candles for a communal dinner. The low light led to an intimate experience with talks from Mark Thompson and J. Morgan Puett. Both talked on the influence of bees in their lives and that of their art work. One of the most interesting moments was when Morgan’s brother skyped in from his bee farm in Hawaii. He filled us with knowledge of the actual workings of harvesting not only honey, but queen bees, and his struggle with the disappointing reality of colony collapse syndrome, that is destroying massive amounts of the bee population.

Letterpress.

This project was by far the most hands on. We started our day with a tour of M&H type foundry, they showed us the process of of making lead type that they ship around the world. The machines were quite fascinating, and they turned one on to show us how they worked. They ran by a printed paper ribbon similar to the ones in player pianos, and would print a line of type in seconds. What was more amazing were the ages of the machines some were around  100 years and still pumping. After we had a demo at Kala Art Institute in Berkley by fellow CCA graduate student Nicholas Hurd on the letterpress they have functioning there. We all took our own rolls as typesetters and printers as we produced a class broadside. The learning experience we shared in these demos made this a favorite project all around the class.

Ceramics.

For this project we toured heath ceramics facilities in Sausalito, and learned about their use of turning utilitarian objects into highly valued craft pieces. This brought up many different conflicts in our own minds about the purpose of craft as a work of art verses its functional value. We also took a class trip to visit Pop Up Shop, a show put on by many of our fellow CCA classmates, where they transformed a vacant mall store space in the Alameda Towne Center into a new venue for exhibiting art. The work was quite interesting, placing each artists interests inside of a space usually reserved for consumption. The show brought on many on lookers that are normally absent from viewing contemporary art, and allowed it inline their everyday tasks.

Handling the type to create these words was perhaps more satisfying for me than the actual printing and final product. It necessitated thinking upside down and backwards, finding the type amidst a foreign system of organization, and eventually transferring one line after the other in preparation for printing. In pairs, we handled the type, searched for letters and punctuation, putting together a list of craftsman and fellow makers. My fingers quickly adjusted to the repetition and pattern, as I instinctively reached for letters in oblong cubbies, finding what I needed quickly and efficiently. After some time, my fingertips were coated in a dust of metal, and I found myself in some odd way akin to the process and material. What I have always loved about every aspect of printmaking, no matter the process or the materials used, is that there is room for a rigid technicality, but also for a meditative trance. Once familiarized with the practice, the body seems to usurp the mind, and the flow of actions helps to create a product somehow in tune with all the work that came before, but also completely unique on its own. Whether carving a woodblock, etching copper in ferric, or setting type, there is a wonderful relationship that occurs between the presence of the maker, and the opportunity in the printing process.

I still have images of bees bustling in my mind, clinging to one another, in a vestige of harmony and unison, in a skilled manor of compensation and cooperation. A united goal, an innate force of responsibility and constant motion, keep the hive in order, and maintain a life of controlled existence. And yet, even in the dedication and prescribed roles, I find the system akin to our own functions within society, within our smaller circles of engagement, and especially within our personal and private worlds of family and loved ones. Bees are creatures of nurture, instinct, community and love. They form chains to hold on to one another. Where the honeybees seem to be driven by an instinctive pattern and character, we seem to strive for the very harmony they naturally create and live by.

Mark Thompson’s film produced a lengthy, internal reaction—his beard of bees was a culmination of cooperation, stability, transference and love. There can be no existing moment of loneliness, as separate entities become one, and those identities are blurred and reformed. In constant motion, no moment is ever the same.

I found myself lingering on these thoughts and ideas, watching bees with a new appreciation, and imagining where the bee-line might be headed next.

Perhaps the first thing to affect me was the smell—a burning, pungent smell that I felt slipping to the back of my throat. My eyes stung a bit, watering only when I lingered above the vat of indigo, but I was left seeing blue and smelling urine for days. The smell wasn’t enough, though, to curb curiosity or weaken enthusiasm, because the vat itself was inviting. The iridescent surface of the indigo, slightly shifting, frothy and speckled with residue, hid the liquid beneath. Parting the surface was akin to removing a veil—yet the face, the true characteristics of the dye, remained beyond comprehension still.

The first time, I used gloves when I dipped my hands and cloth into the vat. The pressure against the gloves, the warmth of the indigo, and the completely obscured process led me to shed the second skin. I wanted to feel it. As opaque as the indigo remained, when I touched with bare hands, experiencing the heat and fluidity of the liquid against my skin, nudity awarded a moment of harmony. Naked skin gave the gift of sight amid the shadowy indigo.

The “birthing bucket” lingered above the surface of the indigo womb, catching the newly transformed cloth as it emerged from the liquid, a startling, acid green that slowly became a tender, rich vein of beating blue. A quiet chorus of cloth, shirts, dresses, strings and ribbons, hang about the room in an opus of indigo blue, a testament to the living dye, the process that fosters motherly associations, and the beauty of transformation.