episode twenty-two | gregory santos

Published 4 September 2019

Miranda Metcalf  Hello print friends, and welcome to the 22nd episode of Pine Copper Lime (Hello, Print Friend), the internet's number one printmaking podcast. I'm your host, Miranda Metcalf. I release an episode every two weeks, and on the off weeks, I publish an article on the Pine Copper Lime website, which features images and maybe a bit more information about the artist I'm going to interview. Things are humming along happily here at PCL headquarters in Print Town, Australia. Just a couple of quick housekeeping notes: first, thank you to everyone who participated in our latest giveaway on Instagram, and thank you again to Mesh Art Gallery of Chicago for their sponsorship. For those of you who may have missed out, be sure you're following PCL on the 'gram (@helloprintfriend). I do a giveaway about every month or so, and it can be anything from a stunning print to editioning paper to a gift certificate for tools. It's all good, clean, American fun, brought to you from Australia. So be sure to be following us there. And of course, there's a link in the show notes to that. Also, a quick but zealous thank you to all our Patreon supporters this month. Every time I get a notification that another person has joined that crew, I can't even believe it. You are incredible for saying 'Hey, I like that PCL exists, and I like to support things that I like.' It makes my heart grow three sizes too large and keeps my chin up when I'm spending my Saturdays slaving over a hot iPad. You're keeping this community going. Printmaking forever, shun the non believers, join the party. And speaking of community and shunning those non believers, I'm super excited to share with you my guest this week, Gregory Santos, but you may know him as @nycgps or @mixedgrit. Gregory is one of the most active and effective voices in our printmaking digital community. His two Instagram accounts are fountains of transparency and decentralization of knowledge. He's open and interactive about the trials and tribulations of his lithography practice and is always there to offer help and humor to those in need. This episode is a little bit like a love song to community and connection in printmaking. So sit back, relax, and prepare to feel the love with Gregory Santos. Hi, Gregory. How's it going? 

Gregory Santos  It's going really well, Miranda, how are you doing today? 

Miranda Metcalf  I'm really good. Thank you for joining me. I know you're a busy man.

Gregory Santos  Well, I ended up with some free time today that I wasn't expecting to have. I was supposed to help a friend, another printer in town, dismantle one of her many - she owns a few - presses. I was going to help her dismantle one of her presses and move it from one studio to another. And I don't know, she just never called me today. So I ended up magically not having to do some hard manual labor and dismantling a press. So my Saturday is just fantastic right now.

Miranda Metcalf  That's wonderful. I feel like that's such a printmaker community moment, when somebody calls you up and says, 'Do you want to do this really complex and uncomfortable thing all day with me?' And the other person is like, 'Yeah, I will.'

Gregory Santos  I love moving presses. But like everything in life, I enjoy it because every time I do it, it gets easier and easier. And you just learn, okay, we only need to disassemble these 12 bolts and then we'll do it in this order. And it just gets faster and faster. But I also believe in karma, and I have helped enough people move heavy shit on the weekend that when the day comes that I need to move my press, I have plenty of people to call in that favor to.

Miranda Metcalf  I love it. For those of our listeners who don't know who you are besides a good samaritan press helper, would you just give yourself a brief little introduction for us and answer the who you are, where you are, what you do questions?

Gregory Santos  I am currently in Denver. This is not my natural home. I'm from New York, but I moved out to Denver about five years ago and just kind of stayed. Didn't really travel anywhere else. I am just a printmaker by trade, I've done nothing else with my life since a BFA in  printmaking from Syracuse University. I kind of got hooked and never turned back, never looked any other direction. I've done some similarly related gigs as a book conservator, a bookbinder, some letterpress printing, some fine art framing, but I've never really moved too far from the printmaking world. I'm very fortunate to be able to say that. I know the struggle is real for many people, and I've just plugged along and had a good support system, and right place, right time, right community, printmaker and lithographer here in here in Denver, trying to make them all work.

Miranda Metcalf  That's huge, that combination of the right place, right time, and right community. That really is the kind of magic formula to get to be in the arts in the way that you want to be in the arts. So you said that you got your BFA from Syracuse in printmaking, but what was your art life like before that? What role did art play in your life when you were a kid and growing up?

Gregory Santos  It's been part of my life since I was a child. You know when you read those artists bios, and they say, "I've been painting since I was six!" And it kind of leads them on a trajectory they never stray from, I was one of those types of children. It was a household surrounded with art and creativity. And my father's painting and airbrushing studio, he actually had two studios in the house, he had a painting and drawing studio on the first floor of the house, but then his air compressor and all of the dirty loud work he would do in the basement. So I'd go down in the basement, and my brother and I would be playing Nintendo while my dad's 10 feet away working on these really fantastic airbrush paintings. It's just been my life. My parents taught me how to draw in perspective, I think two point perspective, my first two point perspective lesson I've must have been in, I don't know, first grade. So they would come home, and as they would be working on a syllabus for the class or working on project planning for next week's assignment, they would just teach me as well, because I'd just be sitting there with nothing to do.

Miranda Metcalf  And then would you say that it was maybe that kind of early introduction to drawing that really affected your art in a way that led you to lithography?

Gregory Santos  I didn't know anything of lithography, I didn't know lithography existed as an art form, until I was a freshman in college. I don't think I knew printmaking existed. I just didn't, we didn't have it in my high school. My parents didn't teach it. They were teaching figure drawing, mechanical drawing, screenprint - oh, no, okay, so my dad was a screenprinter. But I didn't know that at the time. I was too young as a kid to understand what he was doing. So somewhere in my mother's basement, we actually still have these 40, 50 year old wooden screens that we just saved for nostalgia, but I never recognized them and didn't know what they were. My parents' influence and that household growing up, it didn't affect my love of printmaking, because I didn't know it existed. But they taught me to draw. And they encouraged me to draw. And even if it was taking turns playing Nintendo with my brother, they encouraged me to draw the characters from these games. And don't just sit and watch him play, still be creative in that way. And by the time I got to Syracuse, I just really loved to draw, but I didn't know that there was an art form out there that lets you reproduce drawing in a mechanical way. And I thought I was going to be an illustrator. I really thought that's where I was gonna go. You know, there were some friends of mine who went to college a year or two before I did, and they went into illustration. So I just saw how they were progressing, how they were growing, the kinds of really wickedly rad things that they were making as freshmen and sophomores in college, and I was just gonna follow them. I was just gonna copy what they were doing. And I thought that's what it was. And then of course, I got rejected from Rhode Island School of Design, which is where all of my friends were. So that changed that path of life, and I ended up at Syracuse. And what Syracuse did at the time - and I don't know if they still do this, I would need to reach out to Holly Greenberg or Dusty [Herbig], who are faculty, and see If they still do this - but at the time, and we're talking in 1999, at some point your freshman year, you spent an entire Saturday touring different departments within the School of the Arts, the Visual and Performing Arts, at Syracuse University. And you had this check in, sign up sheet, list, piece of paper you were bringing, and you needed to visit, if I remember, it was five different disciplines. Five different departments, who were all doing open houses on this one day. And you needed to talk to the graduate students, meet the professors, and you had to get a signature from either the professors or graduate students to prove that you actually went. And all of this was this major crash course in different disciplines that you could decide to get a major in. It was major specific, there was no interdisciplinary degree at Syracuse at the time, I don't know if there is now. And I went to the illustration department first. I thought that's where my life was headed. And I saw the work that they were doing, and I instantly had a come-to-Jesus moment with myself and realized, I am not good enough to be an illustrator. I knew I did not have the chops to do that. So you were seeing these young artists, these really skilled artists. If the project called for them to draw an anthropomorphized frog on a bicycle, wearing a top hat, riding through the park, they could just whip that out. It's like a quick little doodle. They had just insane natural skills as draftsmen and creators. And when I saw that was the skill that was needed at the time - and this was all pre-digital, there was no Adobe. I think that the digital lab might have had Adobe 2. It didn't exist, it was all still hand drawn. So I realized very quickly that I couldn't be an illustrator. So I went to ceramics, went to the metalsmith department, went to painting, and I don't enjoy painting. So that's not my cup of tea. And then I went into the printmaking studio. And I saw graduate students printing from a stone onto a recycled wedding dress that she got at a thrift store. And hindsight's 20/20, like, wow, I'd never try to do that because I'd be afraid I'd ruin something with that kind of uneven pressure. But you know, the chances you can take when you're in school and you don't own the equipment and the stones aren't yours, yeah, that's definitely the time to try to run a wedding dress through a stone press. But I saw her doing that, and my head exploded. I had never seen anything like this. I didn't know it existed. And I saw what she was printing, and it was just a drawing. It was just a drawing, it was a self portrait. There was some other things going on there. And I asked her, I was like, 'So your art, you can just continue to draw, but then you make more copies of it?' And she's like, 'Yeah, that's exactly it.' I was like, 'Alright, I'm hooked.' And from that day on, I was just hooked as a printer. It was seeing a stone litho demo that got me hooked into printmaking. 

Miranda Metcalf  What a lot of people know you for now is lithography, but also specifically how transparent and interactive you are, particularly on Instagram, for the joy and the pain of litho. You will show all of these different things, and you're really open about particularly those hard moments when it's like, 'This didn't work, and I don't even know why.'

Gregory Santos  Yeah, you and I talked a little bit yesterday, and you know how hard of a day it was, and I fucking knew it. I knew you were gonna bring this up and remind me of the pain I was going through yesterday. I knew it. It just cuts to the quick, Miranda! Yeah, let's do it. Let's do a printmaking therapy session. It was one of those days yesterday that - and it's not just yesterday. I've been having undescribable problems in printing one stone for Mixed Grit for two and a half weeks now. And I can't explain why it's happening. And we always make these jokes, right, all printmakers make the jokes about, 'Oh, you angered the Print Gods, you didn't make a sacrifice to the Print Gods.' Or, 'Oh, the Print Gods are smiling on someone else today, not you.' I'm like, 'Alright, that's great. But for two and a half fucking weeks? Show me some love!' So I've been struggling, and what I like to use the Instagram Mixed Grit account for is to find ways to break that down and, like you said, be transparent with it. Because these problems and these issues and the difficulties of being an artist, they never go away. No matter how much practice you have, no matter how many years or decades you've been doing something, every once in a while, some artistic soul out there just decides to be a ghost in your studio and make things go wrong. And you have to just have the right skills, the right training, the right mindset, the right practice to know how to hopefully course correct that. And I feel like those are the things that get missing from the whole social media bizarre land of the internet, it's so focused on success and nothing but success and beauty. And this is what's hot, and this is what's fresh. And look at me, this is awesome. Look at this, this is fantastic. And there's such a great opportunity to really pull back the veil and do a behind the scenes, like, yeah, the end result is fantastic, but I went through some shit to get there. And I learned some lessons. And maybe you can learn some lessons from this too. And it's been really nice to try to figure out how to tell these stories in 200 characters, or however much Instagram gives you. It's a nice to try to be transparent and allow a discussion to take place. Because there's so many people who are interested in lithography, but they've only had a crash course, and they don't have access to practice it, or they do, but they don't have the same materials. And what I find most enjoyable is when I'm transparent with some of the technical issues that arise, and then as I'm explaining them, someone will jump in the comment section and say, 'Oh, do this, this, and that, and that'll fix that problem.' And I'll have to respond like, 'That's a great idea, but I don't have that ink, so I can't do that,' or I can't do it because of this other reason that exists for my shop and what I have access to. And hopefully someone else who's reading that, a third person, might read that little discourse and say, 'Oh, I've never thought of that. Oh, wait, what did he say as a response? I never thought of that either.' And all of a sudden, someone's getting these free little lessons.

Miranda Metcalf  We dig deep here on Pine Copper Lime.  It's a part of the kind of decentralization of knowledge that happens with the internet in this fabulous way, where - you talked about not knowing that printmaking existed before you went to your undergrad - I think that now, the 18 year olds, the 16 year olds of the world, they don't necessarily have to go to a fine arts department at Syracuse to learn about what lithography is. If they have access to the internet, they can find something about it, and they can find this discourse that's going on. And watching people who have been printing for years, like yourself, being really open about what they go through, and seeing that dialog, and I just think that's such a spectacular step forward and helping the accessibility and the medium.

Gregory Santos  It's one of the joys of the internet. I used to be so frustrated and down on myself when year after year after year, life just gets in the way. But it seems like it always gets in the way right around spring, right when the Southern Graphics conference is happening. And year after year, I couldn't go. I used to get so frustrated that I couldn't attend these conferences, because that's how you interacted with the community, just locally, regionally, nationally, internationally, it all came together at that conference. And when you can't attend, it's very easy to get frustrated and feel like you're missing out on every connection you need to be making. And now, if I can't attend, oh, great, Pine Copper Lime are going to be going to Puerto Rico for the next conference, and I can't attend? Fantastic. She's going to be live streaming that thing, and it'll be like I'm there. And that kind of interactive element of the internet, but especially for Instagram, it's just the visual medium of Instagram has been so wonderful as a way to share information and gain information, and trade secrets and stories. And every day I wake up, and I've got new messages from some printer I've never known, that I've never met before, and they're asking me a question of, 'Hey, this thing's going wrong with my work in my shop. Do you have any advice?' And fuck yes, I've got advice! Thank you for reaching out, I'm so glad you found me. Because if you're reaching out to some stranger on another continent, that means there's probably no one else in your immediate community that you felt you were able to go to for information and help and aid. And now there's this interactive global network. And I love it. I love it.

Miranda Metcalf  I do too. I love it so much. And like I've sort of touched on before, I do really appreciate that I feel like in the spaces that you've created on Instagram, that particular element of dialogue, and showing what did not work, and being transparent about that, is so present and wonderful, because there are people who have their Instagram feeds - and there's nothing wrong with doing it this way - where it's just like, here's everything spectacular that I did, and here's my studio completely cleaned up, that kind of thing. 

Gregory Santos  I knew you were gonna bring it back to that. I thought I had successfully rambled enough and dodged the whole question about what was going wrong and the issues, and of course, you're bringing it right back. What's nice about this one is, so for Mixed Grit, none of the artwork is mine, right? I'm printing for other people. So I'm not trying to promote myself, and I'm not trying to promote my own product, my own artwork. I'm doing this as a print trade. I'm doing it for other artists. And I feel like that allows me the freedom to be open and honest and transparent and interactive with all of the things wrong on the technical side. And I have to figure out how to eventually tell a little bit of the story of what's been going wrong in these past two weeks so that on Instagram, people can ask those questions and have those challenges, but right now, I just printed the edition yesterday, I think I got it, I'll reevaluate everything on Monday. And then I can think about how to tell this the horror story that was this printing endeavor, that's just, you know... you try everything. Things were going wrong enough that I was like, 'Alright, I'm just gonna rotate the stone 90 degrees, and maybe that fixes it. Nope! It didn't. I'm gonna rotate the stone another 90 degrees. And maybe that'll fix it.' At some point yesterday, when things were really hitting the fan, I was like, 'You know what? I'm gonna change the playlist that I'm listening to and see if that fixes it.' This is how desperate I was to get over the hump. And it's still too close, it's a little too painful. I can't really go into detail right now.

Miranda Metcalf  I won't pressure you, I won't pressure you. But I think this is a great opportunity to talk about specifically Mixed Grit and how I think that you've fostered this great open and community based digital world through your Instagram account, which - was it just last year? - that you then kind of used it as a bit of a springboard to start a whole new project that's really quite unique. I've never heard anyone taking this on the way you have. So please tell us a little bit about what Mixed Grit is and how it came to be.

Gregory Santos  So Mixed Grit, all it is in the end, to really simplify it, it's just a print trade. It is nothing more than a print trade, something many of us have all dealt with for years. You make an edition of 15, you mail them off to somebody, someone organizes and coordinates the sets, you get your set in the mail, and boom. Print trade done. In the end, it's nothing more than that. What's different is every round, I'm selecting four artists from the United States, and each image is an edition of five. So it's a very small, intimate group for a print trade. And the part that has everyone calling me crazy - and I'm trying not to take offense to that, but I understand why people call me crazy - is that I'm mailing small lithographic stones through the postal service to these artists around the country. And it's surprisingly simple how the idea happened. And from the time I was in discussion with someone talking about how to do more collaborative work, how to do more stone collaborative work, to the actual mailing of four stones, seven days transpired. I had a conversation with somebody on a Friday, I was having coffee with another printer in town. And what we were talking about was, Denver is this wonderful hub and layover for so many people. The amount of printmakers, and artists who just aren't even printers, but artists who come to Denver, they have friends, they have family, they're doing a road trip through the south or the west, and they just come to Denver. So many people are coming here, and they'll send me a text. They're like, 'Hey, I'm in town for three hours before I hit the road. Can I visit you at Art Gym?' I'm like, 'Yeah, come on by, come see the print studio.' And I was trying to figure out, how do I get all of these artists who are stopping into the print studio for like an hour, how can I get them to draw on the stone and do these drop-in stone lithograph collaborative images? And we were trying to figure out how to make that happen. And then in the end, we realized, well, the artists don't have to come to Denver. Why don't you mail - the original idea was, gonna mail people plates. Obviously, a plate is flat. You can pack it. And then I thought, yeah, but that's no fun. There's no excitement to mailing an aluminum plate to somebody or mailing someone some transparent film and paint markers and saying, 'Oh, draw on this. I'll shoot a photo plate.' Like, there's no appeal to that.

Miranda Metcalf  Where's the drama? 

Gregory Santos  Yeah, there's no drama. There's nothing sexy about that at all. And as this conversation was happening, I realized that almost every small stone I've been buying within the past couple years, they are being shipped to me in flat rate shipping boxes through the postal service. And I just had this little epiphany that, oh, wait, those boxes are like $15 to ship, and the weight limit is 70 pounds. And a small stone is only between 20, 23 pounds, depending on the size. And I just thought, you know what, I'm gonna do it. Because I'm buying stones, and people are mailing them to me. So why don't I just mail them back out? Why not? And so I had the idea on the Friday, I spent Saturday and Sunday grinding stones, the first four stones, reached out to the first four artists - Ali Norman, Todd Herzberg, Ash Armenta, and Craig Zammiello - reached out to the four of them, said, 'Guys, I've got this kind of insane idea. Are you willing to be my guinea pigs for it?' Of course, they all said yes. Who would say no? Who in their right mind would say no to getting a stone mailed to them? And so I did just the logistics Monday through Thursday, and then I mailed out the first batch of stones.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, I'd love to hear you talk perhaps a little bit more about that kind of connection between the community that you built and the genesis of Mixed Grit in the sense that it's like, had you met any of these four artists before? Or did you just have this online relationship with them that you'd built over the past few years that allowed you to reach out to them and to be known and already excited to collaborate?

Gregory Santos  So within the round one of Mixed Grit, I knew two of them from when I was a New Yorker, and I'm still in New Yorker at heart. But when I was a New Yorker, good friends with Craig Zammiello, and Ash Armenta I knew personally through a Tamarind connection. But Ali Norman and Todd Herzberg I've never met before. I had never had a phone call with them, never even a text message. But they're just artists whose work I know, work I admire, and we've maybe corresponded through a like or a share or some kind of correspondence on Instagram, but not much else. I will say, to this day, round one was already months ago, I've still never spoken to Todd. Every time we tried to get on the phone, it just wouldn't happen. And so Todd went through all of round one of Mixed Grit and was part of this. And we were messaging, emailing, we were leaving voicemails for each other. We just couldn't even get each other on the phone. But we've been able to build that relationship. Same with Ali Norman, I've never met her, but I really admire all of her work, her work ethic, her dedication, her talents, her skill, everything she's doing within the community. And I know she was on the Pine Copper Lime podcast a few months ago. So for everyone who's listening to this one, if you haven't listened to Ali's, go back about two months and listen to Ali Norman. 

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, that one's really fun. Real witchy.

Gregory Santos  Yes. And so now most of the artists and printers, they are people I know in some aspect. I haven't met all of them in person. So for round two right now, Reinaldo Gil Zambrano, he is in Spokane, Washington. I've never been to the Pacific Northwest. So I've never met him. And I think it's been really nice, as I'm curating these small groups of artists who I know of, who I follow, who I respect and admire, realizing that they might not know of each other, and whose work, whose personality, might all come together as a really intimate and exquisite set of just four prints. And then letting them build their own relationships and get to know one another. And it's been a nice little bridge between these small little communities of printers. And I've really enjoyed that, being a facilitator, almost like a printmaking matchmaker within these rounds, it's been very enjoyable. 

Miranda Metcalf  That's so interesting. I hadn't even thought about that element of it before. But of course, you're right, because you're acting as printer and facilitator, but also curator and matchmaker, and then all of these people who you say might not know each other, they are going to be connected now forever. They're going to be like, 'Right, Reinaldo, I was in that exchange with him where that guy mailed me a litho stone.' Yeah, and so it's also just such a beautiful way to take our digital relationships into real life, you know, taking it to the next level, because that kind of physicality of interacting with the stone, with the mail, and then seeing it appear again in the digital realm back in your studio, that is such a beautiful way to solidify that bridge building, I think. And there's that digital presence. It's such a great project.

Gregory Santos  It's such a fun project. And this right here, like the conversation you and I are having right now, you live on another continent! You live literally, it's four something in the afternoon here, it's eight in the morning for you. We've never met at a conference, but we're part of this global community and are able to now interact and have a conversation and build this relationship, and I'm hoping that in the end, Mixed Grit... the plan is three years. I'm gonna do this for three years and see what happens. See what happens after three years and see where my savings account is at. But what I'm really hoping is maybe at the end of that, when I'm done with Mixed Grit, can it turn into Fight Club? Can Mixed Grit no longer be my project? Could there be a printer who is based out of New Hampshire who has four small stones and they want they want to organize a round of Mixed Grit and they want to take on the responsibility? Could there be somebody in Portland who owns four small stones and wants to organize their own round? This is like the ridiculous pipe dream at the end of all of this, is can printmaking and Mixed Grit turn into Fight Club and little print trades could be happening everywhere? Because there's so many awesome artists out there, and I'm only doing four artists every three months. And so 36 artists over the course of three years, like think of how many people I have to exclude from participating. And the only way I can get those artists in is if we Fight Club this thing and other pop up Mixed Grit branches happen. And it's surprisingly affordable to do, because it's only $15 to mail a 25 pound rock. So with that said, US Postal Service, if any of you are listening, please don't raise the rates on flat rate shipping.

Miranda Metcalf  They're like, 'People keep mailing rocks with this! We got to do something!'

Gregory Santos  When I shipped the stone to Jessi Hardesty, and she's in Baltimore, Jessi is on round two. Jessi told me that she was there on the porch, and the mailman came up holding this box, and actually said to her, 'What is this? Is this a box of rocks?' And she laughed at him and just said, 'No, just one.'

Miranda Metcalf  I love it. And I love that idea of it's a Fight Club, but it also reminds me, it's a bit also like the Dread Pirate Roberts as well, from The Princess Bride, you know?

Gregory Santos  Oh, anyone could be the Dread Pirate Roberts. 

Miranda Metcalf  Exactly. Anyone can be Mixed Grit. And in that way, again, it goes back to that decentralization, right? Where it's not like there's this small group that has all of that access, but it's like, right now, Mixed Grit, Tyler Durden, Dread Pirate Roberts, right now that's in Denver. But as you say, in a couple years time, that could move to Portland and just continue to grow that community and those connections, and finding ways to take the wonderful community that we have through Instagram and then really bringing it into a tangible experience is such a great project to undertake. 

Gregory Santos  I will say, I need to say a quick thank you, because this might be the only time in my life someone will, within one sentence, compare me to either Ed Norton or Brad Pitt. So that's amazing. Thank you.

Miranda Metcalf  You know, it is well deserved. You've been putting in so much work and being so great about sharing everything. So you've got Mixed Grit, but then on top of that, you work at Art Gym and do the printmaking side of things there, is that correct?

Gregory Santos  I was hired to design and build the printmaking studio. So when they hired me, they had three presses that they acquired from another printer who was retiring. They basically pulled a truck up to his garage and just put everything in the truck, moved it to Art Gym. But that was it, there was nothing else. And so they hired me to actually design, build, and outfit this printmaking studio within Art Gym. And so Art Gym, it's an open space for visual artists. So it's membership based, there's a monthly due that's very affordable. But we provide affordable access to specialized equipment for visual artists. The biggest thing we have is the printmaking studio, it's about 2000, 2500 square feet for printmaking. There's metal smithing and lapidary. We do have a painting and drawing room. There's a small digital lab. We have a mixed media, kind of like a physical makerspace. We have a gallery, we have a cafe. There's a actually a ballet performance room. On top of all of that absurdness, we also have a commissary kitchen. So all of the food that we sell in our cafe is made by chefs in our commissary kitchen who are all licensed businesses, but we just think of them as culinary artists. And so at the moment, we have pierogi makers, there is a chocolate maker, so somebody who actually makes bean to bar chocolate in the building. There's someone who makes potato chips from scratch in the building, one or two private chefs, there's a vegan food truck who preps her food out of the kitchen. So on any given day, if you're not smelling lithotine coming from me in the litho studio or burning cuttlefish coming from the metalsmith department, you're gonna smell chocolate being made or some other ridiculous deliciousness happening.

Miranda Metcalf  So you've got the print shop there, you've got the art gallery. I know that you also curate a national call for prints, is that correct? Does that happened through Art Gym?

Gregory Santos  Yep, that happens through Art Gym. So I was able to convince the gallery curator to give me a print show. It was annual for three years, and we took a year off. And now we've got another national call for entry open right now that'll be on display in March. And we call the exhibit "Impressed." You know, all printmakers come up with very self referential, witty titles for their shows. And this is one of the joys of Art Gym is that we are privately owned, and we can make decisions without answering to a board or to donors. And we can kind of do whatever we want. And what makes our call for entry different than the standard is, we looked at the standard, and we know what those standards are, and we said, 'Fuck you, fuck the standards.' So the industry standard right now, for some reason, for no reason at all, an application is either $30, $35, $40 to apply into a call for entry. Well, ours is $25. So we're going to reduce the barrier to entry. Most every show out there will say return shipping is, if you get accepted, return shipping of your artwork is the responsibility of the artist and you have to include a prepaid return shipping label in the artwork when you're sending it to us. And well, nope, we're not going to do that. We're going to send the artwork back to you, we'll pay for that. So we're gonna reduce the barrier for entry financially again. And then everyone says, artwork must be framed in order for it to hang. Nope, you don't have to frame it. We can do a magnet system, we have ways to do it. So you can't afford to put your work in the frame and then ship a 10 pound frame across the country? Great, don't. Roll it up, send it in a tube, and again, Art Gym can reduce the barrier for entry in multiple ways. If you want to change the system, you have to be part of it and change it within. And we're hoping other galleries and other institutions can maybe start to rethink how they make these decisions. And I get a little passionate about this topic, because I think what's happened is too many galleries or organizations or institutions are using a call for entry as a revenue stream to make up for the loss of revenue streams, because the art market isn't as strong as it needs to be or that community isn't buying artwork the way they should within that local community. And so galleries, hey, you know, if you can find a revenue stream and stay open, and not need to close your doors, you have to do what you have to do as a business. But let's say artists apply to a call. And let's say that call is $35. Well, that gallery is going to bring in $7000 just from those fees. Maybe $1000 of that max is going to go towards whatever institution you're using to digitally host the call, and there are a few out there. You know, you have to pay your administrative fees. But now out of those 200, let's say you choose 25 artists. Of the $6,000 left over, 87% of that money came from artists you chose to not exhibit. And that's where I get angry. Is that your revenue stream came from the people you've rejected. And that gets me angry, right? This overwhelming amount of money, this large sum of money you're claiming to do things with, you took it from people you're not representing. And then on top of that - see, I told you I get passionate about this -

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. Go for it. I love it. That is a very good friend who would invite you to be in that situation. Our dear friend Brandon. Hello, Brandon. So you did go to Tamarind, and you were there for the first year as you mentioned, but it wasn't exactly a straight road there, if I recall. Would you mind sharing your Tamarind legacy with us a little bit?

Gregory Santos  - On top of that, how often do you see calls that say, artist is responsible for shipping, but you're not allowed to ship it to us using packing peanuts or all these other things. It's like, well fuck you! If you're gonna tell me how to ship my artwork, I'm gonna package it however damn well I please. And then they're gonna say, well, your artwork's not on our premises, we're not liable. And then on top of that, let's say there's 25 artists in this exhibit, how many of those individual pieces of artists and artworks will that gallery or institution be highlighting through social media and publicity? Maybe three or four. But I guarantee you, 20, if not all 25 of those artists are going to be promoting you as a gallery through social media. And the gallery just isn't doing what it needs to. And I think a lot of this is galleries are still learning how to adjust to a social media age. I'm old enough, I remember mailing physical slides to galleries. And you'd send a self addressed, stamped envelope so they can mail the slides back to you. And if you got into a show, they'd make postcards and they'd make brochures. And that was their way of trying to promote and sell. And galleries are getting further and further away from the physical realm of promoting artwork, but then they're not doing enough digitally. And all of this to me is wrapped up in this whole call for entry. So anyway, to get back to Impressed, yes, we do a national call for entry. It's affordable. We pay return shipping. You don't have to send it to us framed. I think the show's about three and a half weeks. It's gonna be up during - Denver has a biennial event called Month of Printmaking, and that will be in March where basically many of the Denver galleries and art institutions are doing printmaking based events, artist talks, demonstrations, workshops, exhibits. So ours is tied directly to that. And if anyone's ever heard of Print Austin in Austin, Texas, think of it as a biennial, smaller, less organized Print Austin. I mean, it's a very small group of volunteers. This is our fourth biennial event. So still building traction. But it's all coming together as a nice local community. And with what I'm trying to do with Impressed, so I juried the first one, I co-juried the second Impressed with Brandon Gunn, who's the education director at the Tamarind Institute. Brandon and I were at Tamarind together. We went through the printer training program together, 12 years ago, and we've stayed good friends since. He's the best. This is how good of friends we've become: two years ago, he asked me to come down to Tamarind at the end of the year just to talk to the the first year students about what it feels like to get rejected from the second year program. And I was like, 'So wait, Brandon, you mean you want you and I to sit at the same table, and you're gonna represent the person who got accepted and moved on to the second year, and you want me to talk about the pain and rejection of being rejected as you're sitting right next to me smiling?' And he said, 'Yeah, that's exactly what I want.' I was like, 'Okay, that sounds fun.' Of course. And again, thanks for bringing up old painful wounds here. 

Miranda Metcalf  It's just your theme! I'm sorry. 

Gregory Santos  Yes, so I did. It's one of my fun stories, part of my history. So I was a senior at Syracuse. Falling in love with litho, of course you find out about the Tamarind Institute. So I applied for their summer workshop and the printer training program. And this would have been like spring 2002 maybe. And I thought I had the right recommendations. I thought I had the right skill. I thought I was exactly what they were looking for as a candidate for either program. And at some point, I go down to the mailbox, and there are two envelopes from Tamarind. And I open up one of them, and it's "Dear you, we regret to inform you we don't want you. Sorry." Obviously more friendly, but that's how I remember it. And it was for the summer workshop. And I opened up the other identical letter, and it's the same letter rejecting me from the printer training program. And they were dated the same day. And I remember getting almost euphorically happy about the humor that someone typed up two rejection letters, two different things, for the same person on the same day, and then stuffed two different envelopes, licked two different stamps, and mailed them out. And I remember thinking, oh, what a waste of 30 cents for a stamp. But it was a gut punch. I understand being rejected from the printer training program, but then, in the same day, also being told, 'Nope, we don't even want you for the summer workshop.' I was like, oh, man. I was questioning who I was as a young printmaker and artist and technician. And you know, I filed it away. I think I still have the letters somewhere. They're just too humorous to throw out. I think I have them, I think they're in my mom's basement somewhere back in New York. And then I think maybe three or four years passed, I went and got my master's degree at NYU, I was working as a book conservator at NYU at the time. And I just thought one day, yeah, I'm going to give it another shot. I'm going to try again, but not the summer workshop. I'm just going to go for the training program. And I completely retooled my essay, my application essay, I think that made all the difference in the world. Obviously, in hindsight, what my motivations and my driving force and what my short term and long term goals were, as an artist and printer, while finishing up my undergrad had morphed and changed and grown in those three to four years. I think that definitely helped. I do think also what really helped was all new references. Different people as my references. And I still think this is probably the greatest reference letter ever. So I'm good friends with Dan Welden, who most printmakers know from solarplate. Dan Welden travels the world teaching solarplate workshops and demonstrations. I've known him since college, and he's a friend of the family, and I asked him to write a reference. And I watched him do it. He took an 8 by 11 piece of paper, took out a Sharpie, and just wrote, at this big, sweeping angle across the page, 'Dear Marge, you guys should give Greg a shot. I think he's just what you need. Dan. P.S. Am I gonna see you at the conference?' Or whatever. And he wrote more in a P.S. about his personal relationship than he did his reference letter. And to this day, I swear that's what did it.

Miranda Metcalf  That's it. Well, I'm sure it made you stand out.

Gregory Santos  Just that. A personal touch. Yeah. So it took two tries. Well, if we count, three tries. Two rejections, and then a third attempt, to get into Tamarind. And then they rejected me again when I applied for the second year, professional year, I got that rejection. And of course, Brandan Gunn got it. And now he's teaching there. So. Love you, Brandon.

Miranda Metcalf  Well, and I think that that is such a part of being in the art world, is basically saying, 'I want to experience rejection for the rest of my life.' Like, that is part of it, right? Because I think if you apply to some colleges when you're 18, you get some rejections from them, that doesn't feel good. You get into one, you go study electrical engineering, you apply for a handful of jobs, get some rejections, get into one. And then you work it for 40 years, and then you retire. That's like it. Like you just have a couple of scenarios where you're getting the "I don't want you" letter or email or whatever it is, but when you're in the arts, you're just like, 'Yeah, give me that pain forever. I want it.'

Gregory Santos  You have to want it. Because if you let it beat you down, if you let it crush your soul, and if you let it defeat you, it will do that so easily. And it will do it with glee and joy. And it's not even aware it's doing it. The art world, whatever that is, as an abstract statement, the art world will beat you down to a pulp and push you out the door with a smile on its face if you don't take rejection and see the positives in that. And see that you can still build relationships, and you can still find opportunities through rejection. If you focus it on, 'Oh, they don't like me, they don't want me, they don't like my work, they don't want my work, I'm not good enough.' If that's where your mindset goes, you're gonna have a tough uphill battle forever. So for me, it was like, yeah, find the humor that someone wasted 30 cents on a stamp and another eight cent envelope and hold on to them. Save those letters. Put them in the basement, let that be a driving force, and find the joy and the humor in that. And it becomes a fun story you can tell on a podcast 12 years later.

Miranda Metcalf  I love that. I think that is a beautiful place to wrap up, with some very sage advice about surviving in the art world. So I would love it if you could just tell people where they can follow you and find you on Instagram, I know we talked a lot about that in this episode. So make sure that people can get in on all that beautiful sharing of triumphs and failures and all of the things that are happening.

Gregory Santos  All right, so on Instagram if you only are interested in following Mixed Grit and the technical side of that printmaking project, it is just @mixedgrit on Instagram. Nice and simple. If you want my personal account, it's @nycgps. Pretty much only printmaking and my dog. I don't really do... I mean, what else more do you want on social media?

Miranda Metcalf  That's all I ever want to see on social media. Beautiful.

Gregory Santos  So find me on both. I'd love to connect to all new people, and anyone who has technical issues or problems or questions or jokes or comments, criticisms, send them my way. And let's keep that discussion going.

Miranda Metcalf  I love it. Well, thank you so much for joining me, this has been so great to talk about all of these connections and get to know you a little bit better IRL, as the kids say. And yeah, I can't wait to share this chat with everyone and share the link to Impressed call for entries and just keep the dialogue and community going. So thank you.

Gregory Santos  Thank you for having me. And thank you for being who you are in the community. I love the podcast and I hope it outlives all of us.

Miranda Metcalf  See if I can be my own Dread Pirate Roberts at some point. Well, that's our show for this week. Join me again in two weeks' time when my guest will be Steve Campbell of Landfall Press. That's right, the Steve Campbell of the Landfall Press. Steve has worked at Landfall for over three decades and printed with the greats, from Christo to Kara Walker, and he talks about printmaking with incredible insight and affection. I don't want to oversell this one to you, but it might be the single greatest recorded conversation in the history of the world. So, join me in two weeks, won't you?