Joseph Velasquez | 30 gallon tank

Written by Miranda K. Metcalf | Published 4 mar 2020

Community and printmaking are often paired. Throughout the past 18 months of interviewing printmakers from around the world almost each and every one of them has said, at some point, that the sense of community they found through the medium was a large part of why they chose to dedicate themselves to the craft. The narrative often goes something like “I came for the art, I stayed for the people.” This can mean different things to different artists, but often it’s the camaraderie found within the studio itself and the ability to look across a press bed at another person and know that they’re a like-minded individual with whom you can celebrate the successes and heartbreaks of art making and of life. Printmakers tend to be a special breed. Those who are attracted to a medium slightly left of the canon of art and one that some people have never even heard of. Despite the fact that most all of the “big names” in art made prints at some point, John Q. Citizen isn’t going to describe Pablo Picasso as a famous multidisciplinary artist, he would call him a painter. The fact that printmaking isn’t in the mainstream consciousness in the way painting might be helps us form a band of outsiders, drawn together around the democracy of the medium and the shared experience of making. 

The other side of this coin, however, is that these communities can be a bit insular. More likely than not, when you think about the community in a print shop you’re thinking about a university, or a community shop found in a major city. Joseph Velasquez’s idea of a printmaking community is much larger than this. It expands to concert goers and smaller educational institutions. For the past three years he has been an assistant professor of printmaking at Florida Atlantic University, but for the eight years prior to this he was touring the United States in a van with Greg Nanney and Pelican etching press introducing printmaking and its history to anyone who would listen. They shared the goal of growing our community and bringing printmaking into the lives of those who might not have ever encountered it otherwise.

Life on the road was nothing new to Velasequez. He grew up all over the southwest and Texas. He lost his mother at age five and he and his father spent their time together moving from San Fernando, to Los Angeles, to Austin. Velasquez attended fifteen different schools before graduating high school. The perpetual new kid, he says of the experience “You won’t be shy for long.” His grandmother was an artist and would always be sending him art supplies at whatever address he was currently living. This helped to make art a constant for him in a sometimes inconsistent world. Velasquez comes from a long line of veterans, and he would use the supplies his grandmother gave him to draw their likeness after the formal military portraits which were hanging in the house.

Velasquez also found Chicano art in every city they lived in. Chicano culture is born out of political activism of the Latinx people of Southern California. Velasquez sums this up as “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.” Visual culture is deeply wed to the movement, and wherever he lived he would see Chicano graffiti, murals, tattoos, and detailing on cars. As he grew up, and his artistic talents started to blossom, he began designing some of these for his friends and family. Velasquez remembers drawing out the iconic image of Albertcht Dürer’s praying hands to be engraved on the back of his cousin’s Monte Carlo years before he had any hint that he would one day be following in Dürer’s footsteps as a printmaker. . 

Once he was in high school he started cross stitching images for the backs of the jackets of his sisters’ boyfriends. He would put a pillow case in a fabric loop and embroider the Guns ‘n Roses logo or a smirking devil. The boyfriends would cut it out and put it on the back of their denim jackets. This afforded him a fair bit of social cache that Velasquez describes as, “Yo, who made your jacket?” “It was that quiet nerd, Joseph. Yo, Joseph! You can sit with seniors now.” It might sound small but looking back on it, Velasquez says that the emotional response remains the reason why he thinks people become artists. 

As much as visual art was a part of Velasquez’s formative years, music might have played an even larger role. He was living in Austin and he and most everyone he knew was in a band. During the summer Velasquez would put in 10 or 12 hours days practicing guitar, running scales, and working on growing out “a pretty nice mullet.” At the time, he was working in a welding shop, and one day he saw a coworker get his hand crushed by one of the machines. In that moment he saw how close he was to never playing his guitar again, left the shop, walked across the street to the Air Force recruiter’s office, and enlisted. In the end, he spent four years in total in the military, spending a little bit of time overseas, but mostly in San Antonio, Texas. Towards the end of his time in service, he and his band got to play during Lollapalooza the same year that The Ramones and Sound Garden had top billing. It was an incredible thrill, but the band, like many bands, felt unstable with all of the in-fighting and drama. It got to the point where Velasquez was having a better time making the posters for the band, than playing in it. So after his service had ended, he decided to go back to school.

Velasquez attended the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Belton, Texas. He recalls his first experience in the print shop like this, “I see this guy, who looks a lot like me and he’s pulling a print off a relief block. I’d never seen anything like it before and then he goes on to say, ‘You can have this one, hold on I’m about to make another one.’ And who was it, but Johnny Hancock of The Amazing Hancock Brothers. One of the granddaddies of the Outlaw Printmakers.” The fact that he could just be given a work of art and that the preciousness of it could be stripped away while the quality of the object remained was a watershed moment for Velasquez. To this day, Velasquez speaks about this side of printmaking with such passion. He loves printmaking for how democratic it is. He has done paintings as well, but they were always singular, cherished objects that went to one person and then they were gone. With a single block he can print on a beautiful piece of Rives BFK and that can hang in a gallery, he can print on a cheap piece of paper and wheat paste it up around the city for anyone to walk by, or print it on a t-shirt that people can wear. “Printmaking is the one medium that can really ride the elevator of social attainment from the bottom floor to the top of the ivory tower,” he says. 

After completing his BA and BFA from the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, Velasquez went on to attend the University of Wisconsin, Madison for his graduate work. As his thesis project, in collaboration with Greg Nanney, he mounted a printing press on the back of a vehicle and drove to universities that didn’t have printmaking programs to give demonstrations and lectures about the history of the medium. The two visited thirteen schools in the Wisconsin region, but by the time the project was done they had emails from fifty more asking if they could come to their schools. That’s when they knew they had something special on their hands. For the next eight years they drove back and forth across the country, from university to university, staying in printmaker’s homes and collecting tricks of the trade from other artists. It’s the kind of project that had it happened in the age of Instagram and Twitter there is no telling how big it would have gotten, but with nothing but an infrequently visited MySpace page the project was mostly kept alive through word of mouth and the blood, sweat, and ink of the two founders. 

Everything was done on a shoestring budget, but they were living the life they wanted, putting off the calls from Sallie Mae, and staying away from the drudgery of the adjunct teaching positions that so many of their colleagues went right into post MFA. The year they attended the IFPDA print fair in New York City the antique print dealers from around the country loved what they were doing. They could see that Velasquez and Nanney were being evangelists for the medium they all loved, and doing so in a way that was making a real difference in getting the next generation passionate about printmaking. Driving away from the fair, they felt on top of the world after getting so much praise from all of these towing figures in the print scene, but then the telltale smell of a burned out transmission started to fill the truck, and they knew they had come to an end. All these miles they had been hauling around a Pelican etching press, probably the heaviest possible choice to drag around the country, and their vehicle simply couldn’t keep it up anymore. Knowing that they didn’t have money for a new car, let alone a new transmission, they made their peace with the end of what had been a wonderful and rewarding way of life - sharing what they loved with new people around the United States. Returning home, however, they found a box waiting for them. Not only was it filled with blue chip prints donated by the dealers and publishers they had met at the IFPDA to add to their presentation, but also, perhaps even more importantly, checks adding up $6000 each lovingly memoed “Go, Drive By, Go.” They were back on the road with a new van (well, new to them) within a few weeks.

At one of the first universities they visited with their new set up they were approached by a marketing rep who had been drawn by the deep line of college kids waiting in the sun with t-shirts in hand. The rep invited them on the road with the band Spoon, which Nanney and Velasquez knew must be a sign. Spoon has a song called “30 Gallon Tank” which each would played for the other during those long miles on the open road when it was time to switch drivers. Their vehicle had a 30 gallon tank on which they could drive for 16 hours at a time and when they got calls from a university across the country with the question “Can you be here in two days?,” they would do just that. As it turned out, Spoon is filled with musicians who had studied as visual artists, and they were all familiar with printmaking. Before they knew it they went from their hard won second-hand van to a half-million dollar tour bus, getting dirty looks from the roadies who now had to carry a Pelican etching press in and out of every venue along with the music equipment, and having to figure out how to get ink out of the leather seats. It was an amazing time, but in the end the pressures of collaborating with a corporate entity just didn’t full fill Velasquez the way he would have liked. When it was just the two of them, they could do whatever image they wanted without worry. In joining with Spoon, suddenly every image had to be approved by lawyers and marketing executives. Eventually Velasquez bowed out of life on the road and took up the position he has now as Assistant Professor of Art at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida. 

His interest in community building and the power of the press remains unshaken, and he continues to find ways that printmaking can bring people together. He starting a program this autumn that allows local schools to borrow a table top press for six weeks at a time. Before the press is left at the school one of his graduate students goes to the school and gives a presentation about how it works and the history of printmaking. Then the kids get time to use and create with the press for the following weeks. He likes how he sees the university printmaking system changing. He likes to see the student body much more diverse than 15 years ago in Wisconsin. He likes that people are becoming more open to pulling away from the theoretical, untouchable ivory tower artwork, and he tells his students “The truth is you don’t have to choose between the fine art and the gig poster. You can just say ‘Screw it, I’m going to jump off the cliff and build my wings on the way down.’”

For the upcoming SGCI conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Velasquez is looking to what we, as the collective community of printmakers, can leave behind that will be of benefit to the island. In collaboration with Hannah and Blake Sanders of Orange Barrel Industries he started a fundraiser called “Let’s Leave a Press” an Indiegogo campaign looking to get a new press to Puerto Rico. Within sixty days they had raised $15,000 through donations and perks in the form of prints donated from printmakers from around the country. In the end, Takach covered the remaining cost of the press and they are sending a brand new 22 x 48 printing press to San Juan. Velasquez has also started a registry where Puerto Rican printmakers, whose funding has often been deeply cut in the wake of the hurricanes and earthquakes that have struck the island, can request items that printmakers traveling to the conference might be able to bring with them. A roller here, a screw to a Vandercook there, may be a blanket, and we could all leave behind more than memories in the city we visit this year. Take a look here and see if you can help contribute to the cause. He hopes that this will just be the beginning and that it can set a precedent for what printmakers can do when they get together.

Website for Velasquez

Website for Drive By Press

Printmaking supply registry for SGCI 2020