Printmaker, publisher, and designer Alexander Valentine will be appointed as Lecturer within the department of Painting and Printmaking at the Yale School of Art. He joins Yale from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he has been engaged since 2012 with the departments of Printmedia and Visual Communications as a lecturer and adjunct assistant professor. Alexander Valentine’s appointment at the Yale School of Art will be effective starting July 1, 2017
Art teaching as a radical permission to develop ideas, publishing as a way to build a community, print media as a tool to bypass traditional cultural gatekeepers—these concerns are at the core of Alexander Valentine’s practice, both as an artist and a teacher. Or, rather, as an artist who has made pedagogy an essential part of his practice. Valentine works with offset printing, creating multilayered, perhaps abstract, compositions, built on references and graphic elements from commercial advertisements, desktop publishing or Internet culture. These references almost disappear, overtaken by vibrant, abstract hues that recall painterly gestures.
His work is, partly, the result of an exploration of techniques whose history Valentine considers, ultimately, modes of connection. With connection he refers not only to communication and dissemination of whatever is made, but also to public speech and to the formation of groups who gather to engage in collective action. The act of printing becomes, from this perspective, a site for exchange and learning, a context for sharing skills and urgencies, of producing works for others, and of translating ideas into formats that can circulate among different realms.
Valentine’s engagement with collective endeavors starting in the mid-2000s shaped strategies for sharing, for creating affinity, and for free play that he has continued until today. For example, in No Coast Editions, a project initiated with Aay Preston-Myint that is at the same time a studio, a bookstore, a gallery, and a master printer for artists in Chicago – in essence, an experiment in modes of making together, distributing and displaying. The Yale School of Art looks forward to Valentine’s will to work between disciplines and to support what he understands as empowering “artists’ ability to build coalitions and worlds through conjectural making, risk, and vision [as]… an invaluable legacy and mantle to consider and take up as students and teachers.”
Anoka Faruqee, director of graduate studies in painting and printmaking at the Yale School of Art, has said, “Alexander Valentine is a printmaker engaged both in the history of the medium and the relevance of print media in contemporary culture. His dedication to community is evident in his engagement with collaborative artist projects, his extensive teaching experience, and his generous and straightforward manner with colleagues and students. He is so clearly valued in the worlds of print media and book publishing, in the Chicago arts community, at the School of the Art Institute, and beyond. We are looking forward to working with him at Yale.”
About the Yale School of Art
Yale School of Art provides students with intellectually informed, hands-on instruction in the practice of an array of visual arts media. Promoting a studio-based education within the broad pedagogical framework of a liberal arts university, the Yale School of Art has a long and distinguished history of training artists of the highest caliber. A full-time faculty of working artists and a diverse cross-section of accomplished visiting artists collaborate to design the program and foster an environment where the unique talents and perspectives of individual students can emerge and flourish.
The school currently offers graduate degrees and undergraduate majors in the areas of graphic design, painting/printmaking, photography, and sculpture.