Friday Arts Editions

About Friday Arts Editions

In keeping with our artist conversations, Laura Kleger and Justin Schwarz, Founders and Directors of Friday Arts, interviewed each other about Friday Arts Editions on the occasion of publishing their inaugural print editions.

Friday Arts is known for showing original works from living artists and creating content that goes deeper into the ideas, stories, and process behind the work. What inspired you to branch out into limited editions?

From Friday Arts' inception, we've been thinking about how to make art more accessible and bring more people into the tent, so to speak. From Dürer to Warhol, prints have had a long history of democratizing art. For many people—including us—a print or other editioned work is their entrance into becoming an art collector. So when we start working with artists, we always talk about whether there is work that would translate well into edition.

We launched our publishing arm, Friday Arts Editions, to address instances where we were so taken by a non-editioned work, we wanted to collaborate with the artist and a talented printer to realize it in a size, multiple, and price point that made it accessible to more collectors. Grace Hager's Mirage is a great example of that—we fell in love with the painting when we saw it in an exhibition at the Wassaic Project in upstate New York, but it was already sold. This painting has a lot of fans!

With Sophy Naess, we got the idea for an edition during our very first studio visit with her in Queens. She was finishing two identical 15x 9 foot paintings on silk inspired by her visit to a Korean spa with a friend. The work was breathtaking, but we knew more people would fall in love with it than could fit a monumental mural on their wall. That work, The Bathers at Palisades Park (King Spa), is an exploration of art history, leisure, and labor that re-imagines the bather motif through a feminist perspective. We made a short film about her process and how the work fits into her tradition of making prints and multiples.

For The Bathers print, we worked with Gabe Greenberg of Greenberg Editions, a premier fine-art printing and imaging studio in Manhattan. Gabe has produced prints for celebrated photographers and artists across a range of substrates and processes that have shown in museums and galleries worldwide. His sensitivity to rendering Naess's luminous, Matisse-like palette in a different medium was important to realizing the end result, which is smaller in size but retains the vibrancy, joy, and detail of the original work. Gabe applied that same elevated aesthetic vision to creating Hager's electric color rendering of her Mirage painting.

In many ways, the project of producing this print exemplifies what we set out to do with Friday Arts: making the transformative experience of living with art accessible to collectors across a range of budgets. When you purchase a Friday Arts edition, you're supporting an ecosystem of creative expertise that includes the artists, printers, and technologies both old and new. We think buying art by living artists is a vote for a certain kind of world, where generative thinking, possibility, and imagination are valued. It's the world we want to live in so it's how we spend our days.

You're offering prints in variety of media, can you explain the difference between giclée prints, monoprints, and lithographs?

It's about matchmaking the artist's vision, the printer's talents, Friday Arts' instincts, and the beauty of all those things coming together.

Friday Arts worked with Greenberg Editions to produce Sophy Naess and Grace Hager's editions for The Bathers and Mirage. Both prints, along with several editions from Stephen Hendee, use the giclée process—which in French means, "to spray." The giclée process uses specialized large-format printers that spray microscopic pigment-based ink on archival fine art paper to create museum-quality prints. Giclée prints will last hundreds of years and are known for preserving the nuance, texture, and vibrancy of the source material more closely than traditional analog techniques.

Sophy teaches printmaking at Yale and she's has had a long tradition of working with prints and multiples going back to her first works as an artist. We're pleased to be offering two monoprints created in collaboration with Master Printer Marina Ancona at 10 Grand Press. Sophy used a woven material to carry ink through the press and onto the paper, connecting her interests in painting, weaving, and the picture plane. Monoprints are unique, unlike other print techniques, meaning each one is a little bit different.

Grace DeGennaro's rhythmic Unfolding diptych lithograph, which explores her signature sacred geometries, was made in collaboration with the renowned Tamarind Institute in New Mexico. Lithography is a direct printmaking process dating back to the late 1700s where the artist draws on a plate or stone, which is etched with chemicals. Oil-based ink adheres to the positive part of the image, and a press transfers the image to paper.

Stephen Hendee has several prints available on Friday Arts, as well as some editioned sculptures. How do these works relate to his broader practice?

Stephen has been making large-scale architectural installations in museums and galleries for decades. Alluding to early virtual spaces and the nascent days of the Internet, the work invites consideration of humanity's relationship to technology past, present, and future. Because of the temporal nature and monumental scale of his installations, he has historically had to destroy a lot of his work post-exhibition. In response, he started making works on paper and smaller-scale sculptural work that continue his exploration of material potential.

Stephen's Black Ice embodies his signature vector-based aesthetic language that mines virtual space. Working from documentation of a large-scale installation he created in 2000 at the North Carolina Museum of Art, the work is emblematic of what would become his pioneering, low-fi, polyhedral vernacular. Approaching Ascension is a five color screen print that similarly employs the visual language he's developing in the larger-scale installations that allude to the architectures of digital and virtual worlds.

His New Hydra print, based on a massive process drawings of the same name, is rooted in topography and alludes to industrialization around port cities. Bloodbath was a part of the same series of drawings originally made with rapidograph ink on museum board and similarly explores themes of human intervention into the landscape.

Can you speak about some of Hendee's editioned sculptures? And what exactly is an editioned sculpture?

Sculpture has a long history of being made in multiples— from Rodin's bronze work made from cast molds to contemporary high tech 3D printing.

A skilled technician, Stephen has been inspired by material potential. His editioned sculptural work explores different media— from re-imagining old pinball machines to giclée prints and silkscreens, to laser-cut metal objects and 3D prints.

Heavy Punch is a series of laser cut copper cards that are a callback to early paper punch cards used in computers' mainframes. Copper is durable, but also becomes slowly polished over time with handling, and the piece speaks to the transition we're in with physical currency eroding (especially with the death of the penny) in favor of digital currencies.

Plateau employs a similar laser cut process using stainless steel. There are several different shapes that were part of a large-scale public project and Stephen used the vector files and scaled them down to create a utilitarian object that could be used as a trivet or coaster in a domestic space.

Stephen's always been fascinated with emerging technologies as tools in his practice. His experiments with 3D printers early on led to him setting up a 3D print lab in a university setting, and he has since adopted the medium as a regular part of his practice. Facet Bowl One and Warning Bell 2024: Beryl, Helene, Milton are both editioned sculptures made from PLA, which is a bioplastic produced from plant starches, rather than fossil fuels like most plastic. PLA will last as long as bronze, which ties into his allusions to artifacts from ancient civilizations.