Join us Friday, December 12th for our annual End of Year exhibition.

Over the past few years AIR has been expanding and strengthening its crew, staff, board, advisors, & contractors. Aspects of this exhibition are about showcasing some of the people who are now supporting AIR and in many cases people who have been supporting and building AIR for years.

For several reasons, AIR anchored its activities in printmaking, embracing the idea of print as a vehicle and print processes as frameworks for learning and experimenting with artmaking ideas. We emphasized the evolutions of various print related techniques and embraced new imaging technologies. We focused on initiating broad explorations with mature, experienced artists while engaging younger aspiring artists and students as collaborators and assistants. The laboratory environment has always strived to challenge and stimulate exploration, learning and discovery. 

Work from various artists, many operative in AIR’s evolution and growth has been pulled from the archive and spayed out onto the walls of the studio. Finished work, developmental proofs and sketches have been organized with the help and art of Stefan Hoffman.

Stefan Hoffmann is an artist and printmaker working internationally. His credits include work with museums, schools, arts organizations and other institutions from the Netherlands (where he lives) to the U.S., the UK, and throughout Europe and Asia. Stefan has been part of the development and evolution of AIR as a working project and studio since 2008 and he continues to visit almost every year. 

We consider Stefan as part of our “visiting faculty” and we often ask him to execute a project while he is here. You will see remnants of projects throughout the studio whether it be gas meter images on the front windows, smeared storage tubes on the sliding walls in the upper rear workspace, oneway signs on the central landing or random images of people on walls here and there. 

This year Stefan has been working on projects utilizing images and ideas surrounding bacteria and lichens and other building blocks of life and components that stimulate growth and change. How these components evolve, as well as how they deteriorate and/or can be deconstructed seems to be part of the inquiry. 

For this project, Stefan has reached into the AIR archive and as AIR moves into it’s 30th year of existence, Stefan has been exploring the various developmental stages of the organization. AIR is an artist driven studio that was organized in 1996 as an experiment in alternative approaches to collective studio environments run by artists. The studio was designed to be active, generative, and to ask a few questions - what fundamentally is the role of the artist, can “collectives” emulate that role, can a collective designed to stimulate  generative (artmaking) activities sustain over multiple years and through multiple changing players, can a small purposeful collective impact how we as a community value the role of the artist in our culture?