Becca's Box

"Kindness to Animals" streetbox by Rebecca Katz

Washington City Paper's Molly McGinley decided to commemorate the publication's 30th anniversary artistically. "As the paper’s circulation manager, I don’t get many opportunities to exercise my creative chops....I decided it would be an excellent opportunity to redesign the places where the papers live." she says on her blogpost. Streetbox Named Desire was the ideal challenge for Pyramid Atlantic. McGinley agrees: "after seeking advice from other newspapers, I decided to recruit an art studio, and found the perfect partnership in Silver Spring’s Pyramid Atlantic." 10 artists from our community were selected, including Screenprint Associate Rebecca Katz.




The versatility of screenprinting allowed Rebecca to transfer her trademark animal images and text directly on to the box. To create the bobcat, she screenprinted two colors (black and grey), and then painted the panel with water-based acrylic. Rebecca still cuts Rubylith—a plastic 2-ply sheet that can be peeled, leaving the shapes on an acetate ground—to create some of her screenprinting plates.

>See all the boxes and vote for your favorite here.

The finished box, at the Smithsonian Metro stop.

3 Color Circus

A huge turnout kept Rebecca, Marty and Grant Dickie at their color stations for the entire 3 hours of the open house. The demo circus print generated lots of enthusiasm and queues to pull the 3 plates in succession, creating the magic of a finished piece of art.

Special shout out to board member Michael Pollack who rolled up his sleeves and dove in to help with the yellow plate, and Jose Dominguez for the great publicity. It was a fantastic and fun event.

< Marty, manning the red plate

A crowd of partygoers circled around the screenprinting demo. Especially rewarding was seeing the children proudly admiring their finished prints. Becca on board, helping the littlest screenprinter get her hands on a squeegee.

Screenprint Society in the Gazette

Our own Becca Katz was quoted at length in the 4/6/11 Gazette Article "30 and Thriving" about Pyramid Atlantic's 30 Birthday Open House. Go Becca! And hey, isn't that SS regular Allan Akman in the photo?

Like Schermerhorn and Dominguez, screenprint associate Rebecca Katz feels Pyramid's connections to the community is the reason it has thrived.

"I think that other print shops that I've seen also have a lot of spirit to them, but are maybe more focused on advancing the people who are already artists or already printmakers, whereas Pyramid Atlantic is also more for exploration," Katz says.

Katz's function is to provide instruction for both beginning and advanced printmakers. She and fellow screenprint associate Marty Ittner also offer "Screenprint Society," an open studio on the first and third Thursday of every month. During Saturday's open house, she and Ittner will give three-color demonstrations of a print Ittner designed. After graduating from Duke University in 1994, Katz moved to New York City, when she was introduced to printmaking in a class. She proceeded to earn a master's degree in printmaking from the California School of the Arts in Oakland in 2004 before moving to Maryland three years later.

"I just the love the process, and screenprinting has a painterly aspect to it anyway, so I started with etching," she says. A Baltimore native, Katz moved back to the East Coast to be closer to her family. Pyramid Atlantic seemed to be the perfect match for her talents. "There's a real need for Pyramid Atlantic in this area of the Maryland-D.C. corridor," Katz says. "There's nothing really like it. Over in the Baltimore area, there are some facilities, but there's nothing like Pyramid Atlantic. If it weren't here for example, I don't know where I would be making art."— The Gazette, 4/6/2011