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Firecracker Press, "The Honeymoon."
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Pele Prints, "Take Flight"
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Yellow Bear Projects, "I Remember When"
Lambert International Airport’s been busy updating Minoru Yamasaki’s “Grand Central Station of the Air,” otherwise known as Terminal 1. Projects have included skylights with colored LEDs and a restoration of the dome ceilings. The airport also replaced Terminal 1’s original copper roof last fall—which had been in place since the building first opened in 1956. Rather than just scrap all those patinaed tiles, Lambert decided to do something to commemorate the roof’s history. Lambert’s Art & Culture Program commissioned three local artists—Eric Woods of Firecracker Press, Amanda Verbeck of Pele Prints, and Gina Alvarez of Yellow Bear Projects—to use a copper roof tile in a printmaking project. The prompt was “the travel and mystery of travel,” and each came up with very different imagery, as you can see in the slideshow. (You can get a glimpse into their processes here, on a WordPress blog specifically set up to document “Printmaking with Lambert’s Roof.”).
Pele created a series of abstract and brightly colored paper airplanes decorated with maps and flight paths for a series called “Take Flight.” As Verbeck noted in the FlySTLPrints blog, copper is a traditional printmaking material, but Pele is an experimental press. So rather than make intaglio prints, she “cut and drilled the flight/city map out of the copper plate. The plate was then rolled with ink and printed in different colors on handmade paper; each print was folded into a separate airplane design and mounted onto a white backing sheet, creating a relevant yet whimsical collection of prints that celebrate flight.” For "The Honeymoon," a piece that embodies the glamour of traveling by air in the 1950s, Firecracker “utilized the weather-worn and hail-beaten surface of the flashing to impart a raw texture, showcasing the natural scarring and scratches that mother nature has imparted on the plate,” for the sky and the clothes of the figures. Then, they used wood salvaged from the 2011 Good Friday tornado (which hit Lambert directly) to create a woodblock for the more detailed parts of the image. Alvarez created a skyscape inspired by the weathered patterns on the tile itself, which were “reminiscent of starbursts or air travel lines in the sky." Her piece, “I Remember When,” was "fashioned using a printmaking process called chine colle, of both printing and collaging paper into the image simultaneously. The color within the image is a throwback to black and white photographic imagery. Embedded in the clouds are the markings of the original copper tile, Lambert's history transferred directly to the print.”
The final 15x20 prints were unvelied in October at this year’s Art of Travel, the annual gala that raises money for the airport's Art & Culture program, but you can still buy them on Lambert’s Airport Art's Etsy Shop or via the airport’s PR office (314-426-8125). They are limited edition prints, so when they are gone, they are gone—and all proceeds go to support Art & Culture, which brings all kinds of good stuff into the airport, including murals, sculpture, and regular rotating exhibits at Lambert Gallery.
