SCREEN TO THE PAST
Back in 1935, with millions out of work in the throes of the Great Depression, desperate to make ends meet, the outlook for a career as an artist was bleak.
In May of that year, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the Works Progress Administration, or WPA. Through an executive order, it aimed to alleviate mass unemployment, and in some facets of the program, to utilize the talents of American artists for the greater good of the nation, and to help those individuals help themselves.
Vallejo artist, master printer, and professor emeritus at California College of the Arts Thomas Wojak will focus on some of this history during “Printmaking and the WPA,” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Thursday evening. The talk is part of their larger exhibition “A Living For Us All: Artists and the WPA.”
“The WPA had a section called the Federal Art Project, FAP. And that put artists to work, and a big chunk of them were making prints and they have a show of 55 of these prints right now,” says Wojak.
“The images are very cool. The reason I've been interested in them so long is because screen printing really blossomed during that six- or sevenyear period. I've always called it the poor stepsister of printmaking because people looked upon it as a commercial thing, not a real fine art like etching or lithography. The artists developed it into an art form during that period.”
Wojak, who opened his screen printing studio the W.O.R.K.S in San Francisco in 1972, and then moved to downtown Vallejo in 2002, specializes in limited edition works for local, national, and international artists. He has worked with the estate of Jerry Garcia, Frances Ford Coppola's winery, SF MOMA, and many, many more.
“I worked for a commercial screen printer in San Francisco,” remembers Wojak. “Even though I had been to art school, I learned all my chops of screen printing from this guy who had learned screen printing in the WPA — that's how I learned really what I needed to know to start this business.”
The curators of the current exhibit invited Wojak to come and talk about the nuts and
bolts of the printmaking process, along with the imagery behind the works.
“It's a two-pronged event,” says Wojak. “We're going to talk with the curators and have a conversation about the prints on the wall, and then we're going to move and show them materials and how the stuff was done.”
“So there's this continuum that I see from the WPA through to me — that's what really turned me on to screen printing. When I saw what you could do with it, I thought I can make a business out of this!”
This program will meet at the entrance to the exhibition on Floor 2 at 6 p.m., then move to the Koret Education Center at approximately 6:30 p.m.