feed your soul : workshop one

In, Out, and All Around

This class will be a jam-packed exploration of digital and traditional means of creating, editing, printing and disseminating printed matter.  Moving fluidly between MECA's extensive printmaking studio overlooking Portland Harbor and a Macintosh-equipped digital lab, the class will learn numerous methods by which to revise and reproduce images from one's own visual vocabulary, appropriate popular or obscure culture and make it your own, or hybridize the two.  Media to be covered include:  basic image creation and editing using Adobe Photoshop; photo-woodcut; oil- and water-based drypoint; chine collé with ink-jet prints and other means of layering and/or appropriating imagery; Print Gocco™; silkscreen (drawing-based and photo-based); and paper and polymer lithography.

Lectures will expose students to the work of a broad range of contemporary artists using multiplicative media.  After viewing a bounty of prints from exchange portfolios generated around the world, participants will create an edition of prints to trade with other members of the class.  Hands on study of the instructor's vast personal collection of Artist's Books, 'zines, mail art, and other forms of multiples will form the basis of discussion of old, new, and yet to be invented methods of delivering art to a broad audience guaranteed to appeal to today's art teachers and their students.  Participants will identify a target audience and custom-make a second edition of prints to distribute far and wide for maximum impact.  Zealous students will make even more editions utilizing the quick and dirty methods to be revealed in this funshop masquerading as a workshop.

Instructor: Adriane Herman, Printmaking Faculty at Maine College of Art

Adriane Herman references the culture of consumption in the imagery she utilizes and the presentation concepts she has employed to deliver objects ranging from the archival to the edible and in other ways ephemeral. Her 2007 solo exhibition at Center for Maine Contemporary Art monumentalized evidence of human intention toward action as manifested in to do and grocery lists. In 2005, Herman presented Mixed Baggage at Western Exhibitions in Chicago, examining what we consume unwittingly and work to jettison, namely physical and psychological baggage. Herman’s1999 solo exhibition at Adam Baumgold Gallery in New York, entitled á la carte, was described in The New Yorker as “appetizing silliness.”

Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions at Adam Baumgold Gallery, NY; H&R Block Artspace, Kansas City, MO; Bryce’s Barbershop, Olympia, WA.; The Dalarnas Museum, in Falun, Sweden; the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME.; and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, NY. Herman’s work is featured in the upcoming Ingestation: What Art Eats, and the recently released books: Printmaking At The Edge  and The Imprint of Place: Maine Printmaking 1800-2005. 

Her Limited Edition Cookies were included in the 2001 exhibition Digital: Printmaking Now at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.  Herman's higher fiber work is held by public collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Progressive Corporation, and The Walker Art Center.  In addition to her Level II Certificate in the Wilton Method of Cake Decoration, Herman earned a B.A. from Smith College in English literature and art history, and an M.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Herman’s independent efforts to normalize consumption of fine art dovetail with her collaborative undertakings such as SlopArt.Com and “Long Overdue: Book Renewal,” a collaboration between MECA and The Portland Public Library that yielded 186 circulating artworks patrons can collect temporarily.  She led an interdisciplinary print media program at Kansas City Art Institute at the turn of the Century, and has collaboratively explored content in context with BFA and MFA students at MECA since 2002.