Los Angeles, US
Mixografía is a Los Angeles-based fine arts printer and publisher that collaborates with artists to produce unique, limited edition prints with three-dimensionality and texture.
Mixografía was originally founded as Taller de Gráfica Mexicana by Luis and Lea Remba in Mexico City in 1969. The Rembas developed a printing program inviting artists to collaborate in print editions while also providing them with studio space to explore their creative ideas. Mixografía would eventually collaborate alongside Rufino Tamayo to create the first Mixografia® prints: object-like prints in deep relief with reproducible textures.
In 1983, Taller de Gráfica Mexicana relocated to Los Angeles and began operating as Mixografía. With greater access to a larger print facility and materials, Mixografía expanded its collaboration projects with established artists and maintained a mission to expand contemporary, non-traditional printmaking.
Today, under the direction by Shaye Remba, Mixografía continues to operate as a three-generation, family-owned printing enterprise and to attract major national and international artists. It remains committed and dedicated to set new standards in graphic art.
After 50 plus years of production, Mixografía has collaborated with more than 90 of the world’s most distinguished artists in a diverse array of projects and has published more than 700 editions.
Image:
Master Printer José Jimenez preparing the colored pulp for a Polly Apfelbaum print. Photo courtesy of Mixografía.
Mixografía is proud to announce their latest collaborations with artists Polly Apfelbaum and Alison Saar.
Polly Apfelbaum is a multidisciplinary artist that works in various media from painting, sculpture to ceramics. Apfelbaum creates colorful and patterned installations that challenge the traditional hierarchies between the various genres of art, especially the gendered constructions of craft and folk-art practices.
For the last decade, ceramics have played an integral part of Apfelbaum’s artistic production resulting in a prolific oeuvre of colorful and heavily glazed abstract tiles. Their patterns, based on designs commonly used in rugs, quilts and board games, are now the cornerstone for the new print editions made in collaboration with Mixografía. The print project focuses on translating the material process of ceramics, with all its unintended imperfections and accidents, into print, which is typically more controlled, neat and precise. However, in these editions, the printing and paper-making has been allowed to materialize less perfectly.
Mixografía is also proud to announce their latest collaboration with Alison Saar.
The two new editions focus on commonplace objects that carry greater cultural significance that belie their ubiquity: the cast-iron skillet and the hot comb. While at first their relation seems disparate, the skillet and hot comb have significant cultural value for the African-American household, all the while, activating the kitchen as a site for community, tradition and beauty ritual.
Mirror, Mirror (2003) depicts a mask-like face set on a deep relief print of a cast-iron skillet. For many African-Americans, the skillet is more than a mundane cooking tool. It represents an object that was essential during the Great (Northward) Migration, when Black Southerners relocated to northern and mid-western U.S. cities from the 1910s until the 1940s. Only being able to take what they could physically carry, the cast-iron skillet was essential for most Southern migrants, allowing them to bring their food traditions with them and maintaining a Southern way of cooking.
Hot Comb Haint: Mona (2003) portrays a gilded hot comb with a wooden handle shaped into a female figure. The hot comb is a tool and technology that allowed African-American woman to conform to the complicated and (the ever-) problematic beauty standards in America. Beauty, then as now, is defined in relation to the predominant aesthetics of white, European styles. The hot comb was a tool that allowed African-American women to re-create these styles for themselves, essentially allowing them to be “presentable” in society, reclaiming agency from a beauty stand point.
Together, these objects are symbolic of community, tradition, and ritual. Both these objects share the kitchen as their primary site of activity. Whether coming together for a meal prepared in the traditional manner of the South or women coming together to “better” themselves for themselves and society, these objects speak to their greater cultural significance beyond their ordinary use.
Mixografía master printers at work. Photo courtesy of Mixografía.
