“We like, at the end of the year in December every year, to show what we've done during the year,” says Katherine Brimberry, the founder and director of the Flatbed Center for Contemporary Printmaking. “And this year's been a particularly productive year, and I'm really proud of it and glad to kind of give it the name Finale, like the end of a fireworks show, you know?”
Finale, on display now at Flatbed, is a collection of many of Brimberry’s favorite 2024 works. “We've worked with ten different artists – and actually worked more with more than ten, but we're showing ten different artists’ projects that were created at Flatbed,” she says. “And by projects, I mean the artists have come in and we've created editions with them or monotypes with them.
“The first artist is Suzi Davidoff, who's from El Paso, who created a beautiful suite of etchings,” Brimberry says. “And David Everett, who a lot of people must know from here in Austin, [is] a well-known sculptor. He also creates many prints that are woodcuts, and this year we created a color woodcut called Raven. We just finished it, [and] he signed it two weeks ago.
"Annalise Gratovich has been working on a series of large woodcuts. I mean, they're 71 inches high and [are] very totemistic type of images. This is the seventh one that we've done with her. It's called The Healer, and we have one more to do before that series is finished.
"Hollis Hammonds – who is a well-known artist and sculptor here in town – we did a very large lithograph with her.
"And Billy Hassell, a large lithograph with him. Very colorful one.
"Matt Magee was a new artist for us, and he lives in… Phoenix, Arizona. He has worked with many print shops across the country and he was drawn to Flatbed because of Alyssa Ebinger, our master printer. And he created a very beautiful abstraction that is about… optical color illusion at Flatbed for this year.
"Pecus Pryor did Some of a Million. He proposed a project to me about a year and a half ago of wanting to come to Flatbed and create a project that, when it was printed, would show a million marks. He's interested in repetition, he's interested in kind of recording repetitive movements in all kinds of ways across his life, but he wanted to create an edge plate that would hold 50,000 marks – and distinct marks – that when we printed it, if we printed an addition of 20, that would add up to being a million, and it would be really fun to just look at what a million marks might look like. And then when we printed it, we printed it in all kinds of varied ways with color and chine collé methods, which is a way of printing with collage, and came up with a group of prints that now are mounted and hung showing 1 million marks.
"Sherry Owens created an etching which is called Tying the Days, and it was our Kollowitz Circle print for this year.
"Jenny Robinson… came all the way from Australia to work with us this year and she had been to Austin before in 2015… so I invited her to come back, and she created a very large lithograph with us and also had an exhibition of her work at Flatbed back in August is when we were working with her. So that's a brand-new print just hot off the press.
"Shawn Smith, who has never made prints before and is a sculptor here in town, [an] incredibly gifted sculptor. I love inviting sculptors like Shawn because he came and wanted to not necessarily make a flat print. We printed his design onto linen, which was afterwards cut with laser cutting to be very lace-like, and now it's assembled to be a ruff collar, a color like you might have seen in the 1600s. So it's a three dimensional printed object. I love it when artists come and pitch us ideas and we try things we've never tried before.”
'Finale' is on display through January 18 at Flatbed Center for Contemporary Printmaking.
