Factory: Reconsidered
Leni Fried |
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Now, I go to the studio to make prints. Printmaking is tactile and physical compared to writing. My plates are made from recycled materials, bits of paper, vinyl wallpaper, fabric, string, foil, anything flat and textured. These remnants are cut, torn, glued and inked. The ribbed section of wallpaper becomes the side of a building. The crumpled sheet of foil is flattened and turns into a section of asphalt on a side street in Somerville. Art is about transformation of materials into images, and about a transformation and definition of the human spirit through making and looking at images.
Once the plate is made, there is the inking process. The thick, gummy ink is diluted with oil until it clings, streams and drips from the palette knife. Shade after shade is produced through adding small increments of pigment until the imagined color appears. There is the sensual blending of colors when the ink is rolled onto the glass palette. Best of all is the smell of a new print, the ink still tacky on the paper as it is peeled back from the plate and exposed for the first time.
These are moments when I feel extremely alive. They are quite private,
but the paradox of the studio is that what is conceived while alone,
in the mind's eye becomes public, something physical: a print!
Education: B.F.A., Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, 1980. Collections: Georgetown University, Washington, DC; National Museum of American History, Smithsonian; National Library of Arts, Washington, DC; Frick Fine Arts Library, Washington, DC; Hofstra University Book Archives, Washington, DC; Wallace Memorial Library, Rochester, NY; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Nat'l Museum of Women in the Arts, Wash., DC; Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Franklin Furnace Archives, NYC; New York Public Library, NYC; Guggenheim Museum Library, NYC; Metropolitan Museum Print Archives, NYC; Whitney Museum Print Archives, NYC; Info Data Software, Leesburg, VA; Bethesda Naval Hospital, Wash., DC; Nat'l Institutes of Health, Wash., DC; Library of Congress, Wash., DC; Cigna Art Collection, Hartford, CT; Phillip Morris Corp., NYC: Selected Group Exhibitions: Brickbottom Gallery, Somerville, MA; Cambridge Coop, Cambridge, NY; Womens Studio Workshop, Rosendale, NY; Brandeis 3rd, 4th, 5th Annual, Bethesda, MD; Zaner Gallery National, Rochester, NY; Charlotte Printmakers, Charlotte, NC; Boston Printmakers, Fitchburg, MA; National Academy of Design, NYC. Selected Solo Exhibitions: Baystate Medical Ctr., East Longmeadow, MA; Bella Luna Gallery, Boston, MA; Scarborough Gallery, Chappaqua, NY; Cambridge Artist's Coop, Cambridge, MA; Children's Museum, Boston, MA; Susi's, Cambridge, MA; National Institutes of Health, Washington, DC.
