Shinique Smith - Works from the Lower East Side Printshop Archives New York Tuesday, April 16, 2024 | Phillips
  • “People brought linoleum from abandoned rolls or loosened bits from kitchen floors. We found rolls of paper here and there. A local ink company gave us cans of drying ink. We had a few old rollers. We learned to use sharp knives pointed away from our own hands and fingers and away from other people. We ranged in age from 5 to maybe 70 or more. We worked together and taught one another. Oh we were dangerous! We were PRESS!”
    —Eleanor Magid, Lower East Side Printshop Founder

    Founded in 1968, the Lower East Side Printshop began as an open access art and community center led by Eleanor Magid in the wake of New York City’s two month-long teachers’ strike. Magid, a local parent and printmaker who had studied under Universal Limited Art Editions master printer Robert Blackburn, transcended the typical art education curriculum by showing her daughter’s classmates and neighbors the ropes of printmaking through the creation of books, stories, and illustrations on a press in her home. Once teachers reached a resolution and schools restarted, Magid kept her studio open for collaborative printmaking. The homegrown operation quickly expanded beyond Magid’s space, moving to the East Village, where the operation soon became part of the alternative spaces movement of the 1970s, offering groundbreaking 24-hour studio use nestled in the buzzing artistic and cultural hub of East 4th Street.

     

    Lower East Side Printshop at its old location on East 4th Street, 1980s. Courtesy of Lower East Side Printshop.

    Expanding their space yet again, in 2005 the organization relocated from the East Village to a facility five times larger in Midtown Manhattan, and the DIY spirit that inspired the start of the Printshop continued to prosper. Over its nearly 70-year history, the Printshop has become a premier non-profit New York City printmaking studio and resource that supports contemporary artists of all career stages and artistic backgrounds. Through the Printshop’s residency programs – which have hosted the likes of Derrick Adams, Jeffrey Gibson, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Dread Scott, Kara Walker, James Siena, and Hank Willis Thomas, among others – artist’s receive support through access to facilities, time, stipends, and technical assistance.

     

     

    In 2006, the Printshop was awarded Primary Organization status by the New York State Council on the Arts. This status is reserved for organizations that are, by the quality of their services and their stature, particularly vital to the cultural life of the state. Such designation is a testament to the important work of the Lower East Side Printshop, providing valuable resources that strengthen the artistic community of New York and promote the growth of the printmaking discipline.

     

    Lower East Side Printshop logo, with their ink roller chopmark.

     

    • Artist Biography

      Shinique Smith

      American • 1971

      In 2005, Shinique Amie Smith was among the 35 artists chosen for The Studio Museum in Harlem’s Frequency, an exhibition that continued the tradition of identifying a new generation of black artists that the museum had initiated nearly five years earlier with the groundbreaking show Freestyle. Exhibited next to the work of other emerging artists such as Nick Cave, Xaviera Simmons and Hank Willis Thomas, Shinique’s bale sculpture composed of second-hand clothing gained her critical attention. Ever since, she has made installations incorporating materials collected from communities and thrift shops, notably clothes, but also toys and other ephemera.

      Smith was inspired to make sculpture from clothing after reading an article of how a shirt given by a woman in Manhattan to a local thrift store, made its way to a bale of used clothing and eventually was bought in Africa. While retaining the associations, Smith subsumes the material into a composition by tying the textiles together in cubes, bundles and dense assemblages.

       Exploring the connections and values we ascribe to objects, Smith addresses questions of abstraction, all the while probing how her material has both personal meaning, as well as social and cultural significance.

      View More Works

Property from the Lower East Side Printshop Archives

64

Double Dahlia

2008
Screenprint and archival inkjet print in colors with paper, fabric and aluminum beer can collage, on Rives BFK paper, with full margins.
I. 21 5/8 x 18 in. (54.9 x 45.7 cm)
S. 30 1/8 x 22 1/2 in. (76.5 x 57.2 cm)

Signed, titled, dated and annotated 'archive' in pencil (an archive proof, there were also 2 artist's proofs), published by the Lower East Side Printshop, Inc., New York. (with their blindstamp), unframed.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$1,000 - 2,000 

Sold for $1,778

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editions@phillips.com
212-940-1220

Works from the Lower East Side Printshop Archives

New York Auction 16 April 2024