Arts Speak

FINE PRINT

By Bryan A. Hollerbach Photos courtesy of craft alliance

Craft Alliance, the metro area nonprofit art center that self-defines as “dedicated to empowering and enriching communities through craft,” plans to expand this summer with a 750-square-foot studio devoted to print and paper art.

The center, which occupies St. Louis’ Central West End neighborhood, already offers classes and workshops in ceramics, digital design, fiber, glass, metals and wood.

Funding the expansion, according to a January press release, is a $66,150 grant from the Little Rock, Arkansas-based Windgate Foundation, whose website states it seeks “to advance contemporary craft and strengthen visual arts education in the United States.”

“Our desire is to create a print and paper arts studio that allows us to provide educational experiences and workshops exploring printmaking, papermaking and book arts,” the press release quotes Mark Witzling, the center’s executive director, as saying.

Potential additions include a pair of presses for teaching classes in relief (printing involving raised surfaces), intaglio (printing involving incised surfaces) and alternative lithographic processes, among others, the press release states.

Grant Benoit, the center’s director of education programs, expands on that statement. “The new studio allows community artists the ability to learn and participate in printmaking classes that are usually out of reach outside of a university studio,” he says. “The presses at Craft Alliance will be able to tackle print techniques that are familiar, like relief carving, but also allow students to experience intaglio – etching metal with an acid to create an image or an engraving.

“The convertible press allows the press to print lithography-based work. Craft Alliance will forgo the traditional limestones used in lithography for aluminum and polyester plates.” (Benoit helpfully defines lithography as “a form of printmaking that, unlike a relief carving or etching, can create tonal values like a drawing.”)

As noted, the new space will allow Craft Alliance to teach papermaking and book arts, as well as something called paper craft, the press release further states. Here again, Benoit explains terms and concepts perhaps unfamiliar to laypersons, starting with a Dutch device invented in the 17th century.

“Craft Alliance will receive a Mark Lander [Little] Critter from New Zealand: a Hollanderstyle paper beater that’s able to process 2 pounds of dry material – cotton, mulberry, fibrous plants – into fine pulp to make sheets of specialty paper,” he says.

“The new paper studio will expand courses in paper craft – classes that deal with paper sculpture, paper marbling, pulp painting and more. Book arts allow students to combine these paper techniques into artist books with different decorative bindings.”

This forthcoming expansion by Craft Alliance (now approaching its 60th anniversary) marks the center’s second bold physical move in roughly two years.

In October 2020, it relocated from University City to its current space in the burgeoning Delmar Maker District overlapping the CWE and St. Louis’ Academy neighborhood. The 2020 relocation nearly doubled Craft Alliance’s area, from 8,000 to 14,300 square feet.

Craft Alliance, 5080 Delmar Blvd., St. Louis, 314-725-1177, craftalliance.org