By Matt Martinez, The Berkshire Eagle | Mar 14, 2025
NORTH ADAMS — A rail-mounted cannon carves through sparse desert, eventually confronting a reflection of itself and the mountains behind it. That’s the scene printed on Gary Lichtenstein’s first-ever silkscreen edition — an image by his teacher, the late artist Robert Fried. The print hangs by the door at Gary Lichtenstein Editions, his studio in Building 13 at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts, where it opened in June 2023.
On any given day, Lichtenstein and his team are working on an array of silkscreen prints for artists enlisting his services. It’s relatively simple, he said — artists come with the idea, and he makes it happen using a medium that’s arcane to beginners. Some stick around and work alongside him, exploring the possibilities that come with the form.
It’s a practice built on trust — the artists place their faith in Lichtenstein to execute the design. He likens his role to a sound engineer in a recording studio; the artists bring the proverbial music, but he experiments until it’s refined.
Over five decades, Lichtenstein has done a little bit of everything — he transformed iconic frames of classic rock icons into prints with legendary photographer Bob Gruen; he printed on the bark of ash trees for artist Jessica Stockholder; he even helped Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro fall in love with the medium as a means for getting out his visual art.
The thrill of Lichtenstein’s career, he said, is sharing the process with artists who understand it and watching them “explode” once they’ve gotten the hang of it.
“The quality of other people’s creative lives has been filtered through this studio,” Lichtenstein said.
The ebb and flow of work coming in leaves him time to pursue his own artwork, though — Lichtenstein is an avid painter who experiments with color to conjure ethereal environments. His original works can be found all over the studio.
One of those prints depicts a pyramid of screen printing ink cans with cascading drips suggesting their frequent use; that's where visitors can find Lichtenstein himself most days.
LAYER BY LAYER
It was Fried’s tutelage in the silkscreen method that hooked Lichtenstein on the process for life. The pair met in the early 1970s in San Francisco — Fried was an established poster-maker for the city’s sprawling psychedelic rock scene, while Lichtenstein was a student at the San Francisco Art Institute. By the time they began working together, Fried was focusing on painting and fine art prints.
The art of screenprinting is a matter of “taking things apart and putting them back together,” Lichtenstein said. The process begins with the deconstruction of an image into a series of stencils that are lled in layer-by-layer onto a sheet of paper. Each color adds a layer, he said, and the process begins anew for every hue.
It's a lot like building a house, he said — he works on different facets one at a time, and improvises depending on the result.
“When you’re layering color a lot of times, you can’t tell what your next steps are until you print some of the first steps,” Lichtenstein said.
The stencils are placed on the silkscreen against a photosensitive emulsion — a light-sensitive coating that retains the design after it’s exposed to ultraviolet light. The designs are then washed out of the emulsion using a hose and the screen is secured into a hinged table, ready to be pressed onto the paper.
Finally, the screen is “flooded” with ink, leaving its impression on the paper below. Rinse and repeat until all the colors are accounted for, and you’ve got a limited edition silkscreen print.
Back in the 70s, some aspects of the process looked a bit different: to expose images, Fried and Lichtenstein used to leave them out to bake in the sun. Lichtenstein had to bring screens to the car wash to soak out the designs.
But that was an aberration from the norm — as prints grew in the economy, he was able to settle in a proper studio by the end of the 70s. His current studio in North Adams is a fully self-contained ecosystem, by contrast, where he and his team can wash, expose and dry prints using modern equipment.
A KEEN COLLABORATOR
For artist Amy Yoes, whose "Hot Corners" is on view at the museum through May, working with Lichtenstein fulfilled a desire she had from her art school days.
Yoes spent her first two years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago “just living in the screenprinting department,” she said, before transitioning over to sculpture and other art forms. She always wanted to return to screenprinting, she said — and nally got the chance when she bumped into Gary Lichtenstein at Mass MoCA.
Yoes’ series of prints “Tide Sweepings” are now on display at the studio — iterations featuring rambunctious color and indenable shapes, passing nimbly between craggy mountain passes and the leaflets of a standardized test.
The prints came out of an environment that emphasized “experimenting and play,” she said — Lichtenstein’s willingness to “take risks” and “to be weird” was integral to the process.
“There’s a fluidity, there’s a sense of play,” Yoes said, adding that developing a relationship with Lichtenstein was just as important as the art itself.
“It’s just magic, really,” Yoes said. “Pure magic. I can’t wait to go back.”
A FAVORABLE PLACE TO BE
“It was kind of meant to be,” Lichtenstein said, that the studio ended up at Mass MoCA. Years ago, he collaborated with the Mass MoCA Director Kristy Edmunds, when she was executive and artistic director of UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance.
Lichtenstein later visited Mass MoCA after Edmunds’ arrival and asked if she had anything available “on the back 40” for him to move into. She couldn’t quite do “the back 40,” he said, but she put together an effective sales pitch: instead of having to search for artists, why not have them come to you?
That was music to Lichtenstein’s ears — his print shop had been in Jersey City, N.J., for close to a decade at that point, and he was tired of chasing down artists exhibiting in Manhattan galleries after the fact.
Bringing the studio to Mass MoCA has been a major boon, Lichtenstein said, mainly because of incidental exposure: people who have no idea about screenprinting wander into the shop simply because it's attached to the museum.
Those extra eyes — and hands, if he’s lucky — are helping him keep the medium alive.
Lichtenstein estimates there are “less than half a dozen” print shops focused exclusively on serigraphy — another term for fine art of screenprinting — in the United States. Some universities have exemplary silkscreen print programs, he said, such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but that doesn’t offer the same crash course in resource management as shop work.
Most other practitioners have aged out of maintaining their shops, he said, and the advent of digital printmaking struck a major blow at the silk screen printing scene.
Compared to newer tools, the process is considered labor and time intensive, he said. Lichtenstein made the conscious decision years ago to keep to his “analog” roots.
The studio at Mass MoCA has put him squarely in the center of the action: between visiting artists, returning tourists and a handful of interns from the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts helping out each semester, he’s sharing the magic one person at a time.
Even after 50 years of laying each layer with care, that collaboration is worth the excitement every time.
“It’s honestly the beginning of a new chapter that allows so much more engagement with what we’re doing.”