[smooth, rhythmic swishing] [accompanied by a gentle, soft thumping] [music and tapping] Washington, D.C.

has a rich history of black owned printmaking workshops where artists thrived and formed community Before the 1970s, blacks had little chance to own their own studios and showcase their art Before, when African-American artists could not get in the white galleries We created places for us to sell our art I always say, you know, black, black artists in those days just sold art out of the trunk of their car And it was always home sales And I was literally ou of the trunk of your car because that's how people sold work I didn't have a press You had to have a pres and everything else will follow It's kind of like if you build it they will come and they did I couldn't believe it It's something that I dreamed of as a kid, that if I built something, a whole lot of people will come and we could have fun Percy Martin and Michael Platts story is part of a larger history In 1933, during the depression, President Roosevelt's New Deal program, the Works Progress Administration, gave relief to thousands of unemployed artists The WPA encouraged them to create murals, easel paintings, sculpture, posters and more than 300,000 fine prints More important, it included black artists for the first time The Harlem Artists Guild pressured the WPA to hire black artists By 1937, the Harlem Community Art Center opened with Augusta Savage as its first director Here, a generation of black artists, including Norman Lewis and Robert Blackburn, learned to make prints There were very few black owned print shops in the United States before the 1960s Then new shops were modeled after the Robert Blackburn Workshop in New York, established in 1947 So I think this is beautiful parts of it that we do have our place open to anyone who comes in the door, if they're an artist or creator I feel that they belong here And so we just take them in and they become one of the family The Civil Rights Act of 1964 expanded the number of black owned businesses In Washington, D.C.

in 1969, master printer Lou Stovall opened the DuPont Center and later Workshop Incorporated Allan Edmunds started Brandywine Printmaking Workshop in 1972, in Philadelphia Percy Martin founded WD Printmaking Workshop in 1972 and Michael Platt established Platt Studios in 1989 These East Coast workshops were places where black artists could make prints A synergy was in the air!

As a result of the civil rights and social unrest affirmative action expanded enrollment to Black and Hispanic students in colleges Percy got a scholarship from the Corcoran College of Art and Design, and Michael got a grant from Columbus College of Art in Ohio I would have never been able to go to the Corcoran Washington, D.C.

at that time with segregated I really didn't know what a portfolio was, but my teacher knew what it was So she compiled a group at my work and took it over there My Aunt and my Grandmother, and my Mother said some guy had come here in a limousine, and he had your portfolio, and he said that you had been accepted at the Corcoran Michael had a different art teacher who took a big interest in him and who helped him to apply to college It was interesting because Michael always talked about his art school as it really changed him to do technique So he said, the first yea you're doing your drawing class and you have the model there, the model was always a young white woman, and that's what you drew And so you can imagine my surprise when I took one of the painting I knew it was an old piece, probably 24 by 24, painted on wood with a frame I turned it over, It's called Moon Man I turned it over to see the price And then I looked more at the back of the piece, and there was a young white model So I said, here, this is this is, you know, in the flesh, so to speak This is that story that he had been telling all along of his experience at art school Percy took his first printmaking class in his junior year at the Corcoran Painter and printmaker Jack Perlmutter taught woodcut That's a relief process knives and other tools carve a design into the surface of a wooden block When I first started printmaking the Corcoran was just doing woodblock and they decided to open up a new discipline, which was etching and I went in ther like on the ground floor of that Etching or intaglio, is a technique where the artist engraves an image into the face of a copper plate, ink is applied to the scratched then printed through a press The reverse image is transferred onto paper Since I was a scholarship student I got to the job of helping So what you had to do was find an empty room and take the press, the trays, and everything to that room, put the press together do the printing, take the press down and move it out of there And I fell in love with that I deeply fell in love with printmaking In 1966, Topper Carew, an architect who was committed to affordable housing, arts education and community engagement, opened the New Thing Art and Architecture Center in Washington The New Thing really kind of was born after the riots That neighborhood where the New Thing was, 18th Street, Belmont was at one point a very chic chic, upper middle class white neighborhood I mean, you had florists you had antique stores, but by the time the New Thing came along, the riots had come through, people had left, things ha been burned out and all of that So it was a very different neighborhood from what it had been So the New Thing was there at that right time to kind of foster and help develo that amongst younger black kids After Michael and Percy graduated, Topper hired them, designing community posters for protests, musical concerts, dance performances and exhibitions I was really taking Lou Stovall and Lloyd McNeill's place Lloyd went to New York and Lou was starting and his own workshop, so they needed someone to make the posters And things I was hired as a designer to do posters, brochures in the graphic design department At one point we had about five people, maybe six people working in the advertising part, ‘cause we were doing that much advertising around the city I came into a diverse atmosphere It was an artists atmosphere It was wild!

It was crazy!

It was Adams Morgan was hot pants, shorts I mean, people were doing a little bit of everything Down the street from our two buildings was the Black Panthers office And I got to meet the art director of the Black Panthers magazine Topper Carew, ran a community school at 18th and Columbia Road At that time it was a whole lot of kids there and they got out of school instead of wandering around the neighborhood, they could come to New Thing And during the summer and when they had breaks in school, they would spend the whole day with us So I was kind of like the kid wrangler, and it's a bunch of little kids, neighborhood kids who would come and get artistic lessons with Michael or Francine We had a guy who took karate, and we had Melvin Deal, who taught the drumming and the dancing That was also the year McDonald's on the corner was built, you would slip to McDonald's to get lunch and you're ordering your lunch And all of the sudden, and I want one, too, that little kids would be beside you The New Thing launched the early DC Murals Project, which continues to this day Finally, after years of dreaming and saving, Percy bought his own printing press Topper helped Percy rent a building in Adams Morgan to start the WD Printmaking Workshop The sub-basement studio was tough to manage It was dark, cavernous Not an easy place for creating art So Percy and his wife Alice, a painter, finally moved the workshop into the basement of their new home on Lamont Street in Mount Pleasant That's when things really took off At first, Michael came Billy came Then after a while, people just showed up and there were people who would come different countries WD opened me up about organization in reference to artists coming together, artists sharing ideas Weekends were at Percy Martin's workshop and people who came through there, people whom I met there, Bill Harris and Big Al was, you know, this amazing presence Percy was putting in a wet darkroom Jarvis Grant and I came out of Howard University together I knew Jarvis when I was in school, and he taught me how to use the wet darkroom But I also learned intaglio printing Those Saturday mornings, I would somehow get to turn the you know, for the big press He was just so intense And at the same time, he explained, even though, you know, I didn't know anything really much about printmaking, you can tell when people go into a special zone that you're outside of but you see them going, kind of going in there and swimming easily like seals in the water or something Every weekend we were there there were many others that came and went but we, we were like the nucleus and man, it was wonderful In the New York area, artists made prints with Bob Blackburn, a graphic studio at the forefront of innovative printing techniques Percy was invited to New York to meet Blackburn and learn about these new techniques, and how Blackburn set up his studio I found that you can get richness from all over You can get richness from Chinese who come there, from Koreans who come there from Vietnamese who come there, from Irish who come there from English who come there And when they come there, they feel they can talk to each other I tried to keep that as a foundation stone for what we were trying to do But I did get to see Bob quite a few times after that, and every time I'd go up there, I would always see him and talk to him So his idea and I talked to people who had gone to his workshop, his idea of how a workshop should work was what finally gelled So I was never thinking about, I'm going to do this and this would bring in money It never di and I was never looking for it But what it did bring in was a lot of really talented people with all kinds of ideas that would have taken me years and years to get to that were just right there and I loved it Michael and Percy embraced the magic of the computer revolution It became compulsory for Percy and Michael to convert to computers when they were teachers Percy at Sidwell Friends, Michael at Howard University and NOVA (Northern Virginia Community College) in Virginia With software programs like Photoshop and digital printers, printmaking became easier and safer The scale of their artwork increased and their styles flourished Percy uses traditional intagli with computer generated images to create large scale etchings of the Bushman Through his personal narrative of science fiction combined with African mythologies, Percy invents a fantastic world that exists in the past, present, and future I used to do, reinterpret African legends and legends and myths of the world Then, one of the things that I found out is that they all were pretty much the same They changed the names and the locations change, bu the storyline was about the same You could find a Snow White story in Africa There's no snow in Africa But the story was there, and it was just as old as the one that they were telling One day I just decided I'd make my own myth and the stories about the Bushman, how that at one point they had gotten to a very high level and they did something really stupid And with the help of Saint Mar and elders, they brought themselves back from the brink of destruction They can go into the future and they can go back, and then they can do something that I guess that I always would love to do I would love to be able to go back and talk to my grandparents I would love to talk to the ones who came to Jamestown as shipwrights Michael, was one of the first black artists to exhibit at the Franz Bader Gallery His subject matter focused on the criminal justice system, slavery, Hurricane Katrina and genocide Michael was showing with Franz Bader And that's a really big deal in Washington, because I can tell you hardly any black artists got the show anywhere Sam (Gilliam) and them werent really showing here at that time Some of his early works, and you all might not have know were really, really political I mean, the type of so political that it would scare you It needed to be said at that time Michael and I used to talk, as men do, about very personal things I mean, we laughed together We cried together I mean, we were so close Michael one night became so upset That brought him to tears It was because he witnessed what he called the “drug dealer” the “candy man”, who would come into the alley behind his house periodically and would distribute his goods to the neighborhood kids And Michael was obsessed with trying to figure out how to lure the kids out of the to bring them more into his fold He would open his house up He would communicate with these kids on his block And he got very attached And, Michael, this one particular night, the conversation became very, very dark And Michael and I began to cry And hollering and screaming It was like rage He was just angry about what he and how this particular one person could affect so many young lives in that neighborhood He would always find some back page filler story that somebody had managed to sneak in, and the newspaper mentioned the story of one little girl, named Peaches, who had died In a daycare center in Florida, somebody who was off his head on crack or something had gone to the daycare center and shot up and there were a number of children who died So, Michael, did this big four by six foot painting called Peaches Most of the canvas is occupied by her face And she's holding a big peach The article said this is the little girl's best friend, talking about her friend Peaches, who was killed And the little girl said that she didn't worry about Peaches because she knew that Peaches was with God And they were having fried chicken and Coca-Cola or iced tea or something You just have to think about it now And I get very emotional Michael began exploring digital processes to layer images at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Hyattsville, Maryland And I started out that way in Xerox Image You can transfer that image to a plate or a stone That means I can do a photo-litho or etching I've just been a lot more intrigued with the whole digital process Michael started to create large scale prints and began the first collaborative artist book with his wife, poet Carol Beane Before we got married when were still kind of trying to figure out how we could best see each other I had done a book of some poems, and so I remember bringing it down and showing it to Michael So Michael said, you know, we're do a book and it's going to be different Its going to be your words and my images And that's what we did Carol and Michaels travel to Ghana and Australia intensified their collaboration When I think about the ways in which Michael and I collaborated, when it came to the AU (American University Museum) show Id just see an imag and I would be moved to write Together, they blended image and text to create large scale installations centered on ritual and transformation of the human spirit Michael and Carol are great cooks Their home is known as the “Do Drop In” A gathering place for Sunday dinners, where artists, students, friends could always count on great foo and rich conversations about art Percy and Michael provided inspiratio and congenial spaces to practice traditional forms and also experiment with contemporary techniques They built a community where artists thrived, knowledge was shared and artistic visions supported Where, if you can dream it, you can print it One more order of neck bones [clapping and harmonica] Don't forget the to slap on some of that greasy gravy too [clapping and harmonica] Put on Jimmy Reed [clapping and harmonica] That's the way I feels when I'm blue [clapping and harmonica] Me missing you [clapping and harmonica] More in the morning [clapping and harmonica] Aaaaaaaaaaaaall the way [clapping and harmonica] From Memphis to Mississippi [clapping and harmonica] Play for me, baby [clapping and harmonica] Kiss me, maybe [instrumental music]