Zea Mays Printmaking presents Green to the Extreme, an exhibition featuring multimedia printmaking works by 38 member artists about the environmental, political, social and personal issues related to natural resource exploitation – its forms and its consequences, including its effect on art making and human life.
Artwork Details & Artist Statements
Green to the Extreme is associated with a pan-global art project, Extraction: Art on the Edge of the Abyss, a multimedia, multi-venue, cross-border art intervention that challenges artists, writers, curators and cultural workers to raise a ruckus about the suicidal consumption of our planet’s natural resources.
Since its inception in 2000, the core mission of Zea Mays Printmaking (ZMP) is to facilitate the creation of artwork that utilizes methods that focus on environmental sustainability and non-toxic materials. The membership of ZMP is a community of working artists united around a common commitment to create substantive art while attempting to rectify the toxicity of printmaking materials that are most often pillaged from our environment.
We challenged our community of artists to make artworks employing materials that were repurposed, plundered, rescued, recycled, upcycled, traded, appropriated, or found. To facilitate this concept, Zea Mays Printmaking launched Unlikely Materials Swaps held in September 2019 and February 2020. Members descended on our Studio (Florence, MA) with used materials ranging from scrap papers to used copper and zinc plates that could be sanded down. There were half tubes of ink, wood scraps, plastic pieces, drawing tools and more. One person’s trash became another’s inspiration.
Zea Mays Printmaking has placed a bull’s eye on the unconscious violence of waste and overconsumption in daily routines. Artists have a responsibility to acknowledge their contribution to the degradation of the earth and the social repercussions that result. Every new tube of cadmium red, every recently purchased copper and zinc plate, every newly acquired toxic medium contributes to this irreversible calamity. Through mindful examination of habits and routines day in and day out the capacity to change is inevitably possible. Day to day practices = best practices = social practices. Using our platform as artists, raising a rukus to save our planet and prevent apocalyptic disasters seems to be the least we can do.
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On view in person at APE Gallery, Northampton, MA October 3- November 1, 2020
Many of the works are for sale – inquire here
Artwork Details & Artist Statements