THE FINE PRINT
THE SHOW MUST GO ON FOR THIS INAUGURAL EVENT’S ARTISTS
The venues were booked. The artists were committed.
And then the inaugural Print Santa Fe event was thrown a curveball.
Miranda K. Metcalf, director of Print Santa Fe, says she was momentarily shaken when the three-day event’s host, the Center for Contemporary Arts, announced it would shut down due to lack of funding on April 6.
It was just three weeks before Print Santa Fe was to begin, but she soon received some better news that the event could largely go on as planned.
“It was really wild,” Metcalf says of the flurry of news. “CCA reached out and said, ‘We’re closing down and cancelling all future programming.’ And I was like, ‘But I’m a future program.’ Then the chair, David Muck, followed up in an email and said, ‘As long as you don’t need the cinemas, we’d love to host you.’”
The centerpiece of Print Santa Fe is Fistful of Prints,a three-day art fair in the CCA galleries featuring more than 30 prominent printmakers.
St. Louis-based woodcut artist Tom Huck, who has pieces in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, is one of the artists who will be participating. Metcalf also singled out Francisco Delgado, Julia Curran, and Annalise Natasha Gratovich among the dozens of talented artists whose work will be available.
“We went with a tabletop setup so it has more of a casual feel,” Metcalf says. “A lot of the artists are friends. They know each other; they’re already in community. I think it’s going to be really accessible where people can walk around and talk to the artists about what they made and how they made it.”
Fistful of Prints begins with an opening night artist meetand-greet on Friday, April 28. And there are a few other events happening concurrently.
Zane Bennett Contemporary Art is hosting two events in conjunction with Print Santa Fe; it has woodcut artist and former Santa Fean Enrique Figueredo’s Sigue Pasando Por Aquí exhibit (see Maker’s mark, Page 24) and 5 X 5, which features the work of five contemporary printmakers next to each other. Figueredo’s work includes a giant zoetrope with woodcut scenes of Venezuelan landscapes inside, along with a series of carved woodblocks depicting famous New Mexico churches and missions.
A few blocks away, Container is hosting a pair of events on Saturday, April 29. Marwin Begaye is staging an interactive performance in which dancers will transfer ink to paper
with their feet, and Dennis “Wolfbat” Mcnett is leading a mask-wearing procession through the Railyard after that. Mcnett spent four days earlier in the week teaching a mask-making workshop.
It’s those kinds of ancillary events, says Metcalf, that break the barrier between artist and audience and give Print Santa Fe a chance to succeed year over year.
“We want to break the misconceptions people might have that art is a rectangle that sits on the wall, and you’re not allowed to touch it,” Metcalf says. “When you’ve got someone like Marwin challenging how a print is made and Dennis doing this truly communal experience, I would love to continue that tradition.”
Metcalf, who holds a master’s degree in art history from the University of Arizona, says printmaking has been a democratic medium for centuries in that it has enabled everyday people to afford art in their home that was previously unaffordable.
“I’m not a wealthy merchant,” she says. “I’m not a duke. I can’t get Jan van Eyck to do an oil painting that takes three years of me, my family, and my mistress hiding in the bushes. But I can get a woodcut.”
And that’s still true today; some of the art at Fistful of Prints can be purchased for $20. But with affordability, Metcalf says, has come some misconceptions.
“People say, ‘I don’t want a print. I want an original,’” she says. “They’re original multiples in the same way a cast bronze piece is an original multiple. For the artist, it shakes out that they can sell 20 at $50 instead of one at $4,000 or whatever. … People can collect and have work that genuinely improves the quality of their life because they can see something they love and look at it every day.”