Antwoine Washington - Work in Progress
Exhibition Reception: Friday, August 2, 5-8pm
Open house: Friday, September 6, 5-8
Collaborator's Talk: Tuesday, September 24, 6pm
at the Deep End then move to Waterloo Arts Cafe (across street)
Gallery Hours: by appointment through September 28, 2024
Click here to inquire
As the Summer 2024 Resident Artist at Deep Dive Art Projects, Antwoine Washington has been on an incredible journey down the printmaking rabbit hole. The result is Work in Progress, an exhibition of prints created in collaboration with DDAP owner Bellamy Printz and Ben Levy, independent curator and Case Western Reserve University PhD candidate. The exhibition will run through Saturday, September 28th at the Deep End's Viewing Room in the Waterloo Arts District.
Washington started his residency at the Deep End workshop in May, 2024 at a time when he was starting to develop paintings that explored the abstraction of his figurative and allegorical themes. The timing was perfect. Both Printz and Levy had approached the artist separately about printmaking and agreed to work together to assist Washington in creating his first prints. Each printmaker had their own ideas of how to approach the project. Levy, a printer trained at several major collaborative printshops, was prepared to develop a specific type of matrix for Washington to work with, crossing his painting style with traditional printmaking techniques. Printz, whose own print practice is based in experimentation, hoped to develop monoprints that pushed Washington's mark making in new directions. The results show work in progress, exposing the transitions that exist within the act of printmaking, revealing the progression of images and ideas that take place at the press.
Using different materials and methods, Washington's images are at once unrestricted and refined. Washington and Levy worked together to create a jigsaw woodblock print, produced at the Sears Think[box] at the CWRU campus. The multiple block matrix allows for infinite variations, only a few of which are included here. Working with Printz, Washington cut up his own paintings and used them as surfaces to print from, looking at layers and the unplanned effects on ink and paper that can occur in the printing process. The energy that grew between the collaborators was palpable and made for a really fantastic set of results and experience for all three.
Antwoine Washington was born in Pontiac, Michigan, a small city located outside of Detroit. Washington received his BA in Studio Art from Southern University and A&M College, Baton Rouge, LA. While at Southern, Washington learned more about black history and art in America, further inspiring him to continue the legacy of Harlem Renaissance artists like Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, and Jacob Lawrence. After college he moved to Cleveland and began working as a U.S. Postal Service mail carrier. Washington suffered a stroke in November of 2018 and found that his art-making assisted in his his recovery, helping him to get through panic attacks and the numbness that he was experiencing on the right side of his body. Since surviving the stroke he continues to take advantage of all opportunities that are presented to him, including exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art in Cleveland, OH, moCa Cleveland and Cincinnati Art Museum, among others, as well as a mural commission in Cleveland Public Square through Land Studios. He is a 2019 recipient of the Cleveland Arts Prize Verge Fellowship Award. In 2020 Washington co-founded a non-profit organization called the Museum of Creative Human Art (MOCHA) with Michael Russell, where he teaches graphic design and creates programming and partnerships with other Cleveland institutions. He currently works and lives in Cleveland with his wife Carlise and they have two children, Grayson and Luca.
Benjamin Levy is a PhD Candidate specializing in the history of printmaking and photography in the joint program between Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Museum of Art. His research explores the materiality and meaning-making potential of process and technique, from 19th-century photomechanical technologies to contemporary artistic practice. Levy has held curatorial positions at the John and Mildred Putnam Collection, the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. He curated the 2022 exhibition "Photographs in Ink" at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Levy is a member of the 2022 Summer Institute for Technical Studies in Art cohort at the Harvard Art Museums and serves on the National Advisory Board for the Tamarind Institute. A graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art, Levy studied printmaking and photography. He trained to be a collaborative printer in Baltimore and New York at Dolphin Press & Print in Baltimore, Harlan and Weaver, and Dieu Donné.