As a BFA candidate in Printmaking, I took special interest in the prints we included in the show, especially Amze Emmons' Street Life. Emmons (MFA 2002) is currently an Assistant Professor at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania and was kind enough to take time to answer some of my questions about the piece, as well as about his experiences at the University of Iowa.
I'm interested in exploring your experiences in the Printmaking program at the University of Iowa. How would you describe your time there?
My time at Iowa was very fruitful and important to my development as an artist. I look back on the years I spent in Iowa City very fondly. I really enjoyed the wisdom and experience the faculty brought to their teaching and the wide range of talent and personalities my fellow graduate students brought to our community. I also think the relative isolation of Iowa City was important too. I see students of mine who are now in grad school at Hunter, with gallery owners coming through their studios, it horrifies me. My work couldn't have grown in those conditions.
Your experiences and interactions with the SAAH?
I had some interactions with the SAAH administration as a student, most of them positive. But in full disclosure I should say that I was invited back to teach at Iowa as a visiting Professor in '04-05 and in that role I was able to get a more
priviledged view of the inner workings of the SAAH and the school's role within the larger University. It seemed that the studio art program felt very besieged and under resourced. You'd hear things about budgets hadn't been increased since the 80's. And they seemed to be losing faculty lines when folks retired or at the very least not getting any new lines. This was especially true in the Print program. Here you had this top nationally ranked program with a lot of graduate students, but very limited funding, very limited space and no new faculty to help with the ever increasing service load.
This seems to be a major difference between the Academy and the private sector, if U of Iowa were a private company and the Print division was selling a highly acclaimed nationally recognized product they would get more funding to maintain market share and brand dominace, but instead they get slowly squeezed off, only hiring new faculty when they absolutely have to. Of course, the private sector probably wouldn't have supported the arts to start with....
But I hope this is starting to change, the new building, the renovations to the old facilities and some recent high profile hires seem to indicate a renewed support.
Can you talk about the high ranking of the Printmaking program and how you felt about being a student in it?
I never came to Iowa because of it's rank. At the time, in addition to it's rank, Iowa was known to have very little grad funding and shantytown grad studio space. Almost by chance I came for a visit and found the community very welcoming and I was
really impressed with the range and depth of the student work. I think the rank helps some with job applications but I have noticed a bit of a 'market correction' in recent years as other schools have invested heavily in their print programs. There are now a number of schools as well regarded as Iowa, regardless of rank.
How did your work develop and change during your time in iowa City?
It changed totally. I came to graduate school with a good deal of baggage about art and that was totally stripped away during my three years. I also gained a great deal of knowledge about how to live in the world as a professional artist.
I'm interested in hearing about Street Life and the thought process in making it.
I was fortunate enough to work with a number of graduate students who were very interested in Situational Aesthetics, namely Robert Tillman, John Freyer and Adam Wolpa. Their work really opened up some doors for me conceptually. The seed for this work came from an interest in making this kind of Marxist critique of advertising in public space. I was awarded a grant from the university to fund the project and with it I rented this billboard space for a month. I had been scoping out this billboard for a while, it was a perfectly weird residential street with this large billboard in
front of a house. I drew the street as it would look without the advertising, using simple pencil lines to negate the 'loud' vocabulary of the printed billboard. Then I had the drawing scanned, printed commercially and posted on the billboard. It was a well received at the time. This work proposed some ideas about art and print that I still make room for in my studio practice.
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