On the seventh anniversary of our first blog post, this is our last. Since we announced our decision to stop blogging in January, we have taken time to reflect on our past and our present, and to contemplate the future. It’s been a fruitful inquiry, and we appreciate the friends and colleagues who’ve helped us develop an exciting vision for our next stage.
Like many successful ventures, Printeresting is the product of people who were at the right place at the right time. In 2008, we perceived a lack of online discussion about printed art, especially from an interdisciplinary perspective. It seemed to us that the most interesting innovations in print could often be found in other disciplines- sculpture, design, architecture, even bioscience. Art blogs were all the rage, and since we regularly emailed interesting links to each other, we simply decided to share our conversation in a public forum. On April 15th, R.L. wrote, “what we really need is a catchy name, preferably an ink-related pun.” All the good names were taken, and so Printeresting was born.
We never formally stated any founding principles. But over the last seven years, three core values have emerged as guideposts: research, community, and collaboration.
Research. We started Printeresting as a way to collect and share interesting print miscellany, and we’ve done that. We hoped to reframe the discussion about printed art, and we think we’ve done that too. We have learned a tremendous amount, and observed an invigorating array of approaches to the print. We were inspired when we started the site, and we continue to be. Print thrives.
Community. Printeresting allowed us to make new friends and meet colleagues from around the globe. Somehow, our little volunteer effort became an important hub for many people in the print community, and thus it was with regret that we decided to stop blogging. But we know that the online print discourse is now supported by a robust ecosystem of blogs, micro-blogs, and forums representing the combined efforts of artists, designers, museums and academics. We’re not the only show in town.
Collaboration. Printeresting has never thought of our readership as an audience, but as a peer group. And we have been privileged to work with these peers on a range of collaborations, from curatorial efforts to publishing projects. Our ensemble cast of collaborators has proven that the sum can be greater than its parts. And this appreciation for collaboration will continue to be a core value for us in the future.
Seven years is a long time. If you heard about Printeresting in a freshman printmaking class in 2008, you might have your MFA by now. In that time, we feel like we’ve earned an honorary Ph.D. We are profoundly grateful for everything that we gained by writing this site. But in our seven years, we have explored the blog format as thoroughly as we, personally, could. We have added features, explored new content models, and staged new projects. We have shifted the nature of our collaboration many times over. And that’s exactly what’s happening now.
Printeresting is not ending, it is evolving. In the future, we plan to present an annual series of collaborative projects that will take place not just online, but in the real world. This Fall, we are launching the first of these projects, called “Ghost.” Ghost will include a print publication, but also much more: you can think of it as a multi-platform, crowd-sourced symposium.
As we move forward, we want to use the Web differently. We want to slow down, work carefully on our ideas, and present those ideas in a deliberate way. Central to these efforts will be an expanded commitment to our core values: more rigorous research, deeper connections with the community, and more complex collaborations.
We will continue to work together, and we hope that you will continue to work with us.
Click here for more information about Ghost, and join our mailing list for updates: