Screen Printer and scholar Lincoln Cushing recently posted a fascinating article on the influence of screen printing on social movements on the AIGA website.
Screen printing—or serigraphy, as it’s called in finer art circles—has been a standard commercial process for more than a century. As a reproduction technique, it has many wonderful qualities. It requires very little in terms of equipment, and even that can be easily made by hand; it is easy to teach and to learn; and it’s very well suited to very short runs of large format objects. It seems like an obvious choice when looking for ways to create prints for the public. Yet there have been at least two periods in history when screen printing was “discovered” by artists—the first was in the United States during the mid-1930s, under the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration, and the second time during the 1960s.
Read the rest of the article here.
By the way, if you've never seen it, the prints & photographs division of the Library of Congress has a huge archive of silkscreened posters from the WPA. More than 900 Works Projects Administration posters on this site, including large versions available for download. Check it out.
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