| I love the realm of ideas. But even more, I love the realm of things, where you can touch your ideas and make them real. I was born and raised in Sao Paulo, Brazil, immersed in a socialist milieu where, from the time I entered secondary school, no distinctions were made between the applied and fine arts. Theater, visual culture, domestic handicraft, literature—we worked in them all as children, on stage sets and written narratives, on costumes and paintings. We worked across boundaries that seemed to almost breathe as our thoughts penetrated them from one to the next. That “porousness” has stayed with me into adulthood; I carry it into my studio, where my design process determines the material that I’ll be working with, and not the other way around. Freedom, and the material constraints of craft, are not opposites to me but rather work in concert, like right and left hands, bent upon the same task. By 1981 I received a B. Arch from the Universidade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo de Santos in Sao Paulo, my studies focusing on Utopian architectural forms and conceptual practice. (Already, the primacy of the “idea” was pretty well entrenched into my psyche.) I came to New York in 1983 to pursue my career as a fine artist, first attending Brooklyn College for my MFA degree (where I taught for many years soon after graduation), and later doing post-graduate studies at NYU. By 1989 I worked in DUMBO as a printmaker, and printed hundreds of t-shirts for Andy Warhol and Keith Haring’s Pop Shop. I decided to set up my own shop there as well. It was a pioneer district at the time. We did guerilla installations in empty lofts, ad-hoc exhibitions. It was a super-fruitful era of collaboration, and my 2nd-floor studio on John Street was an arena of sorts. I immediately got a printing press. I got numerous grants from local organizations and held open-studio sessions where people could come and print for three hours for $10; it was a site where artists could meet each other. DUMBO, in real estate terms, flourished after that, but artistically (for me, at least) it died. By 2009 I moved to my Red Hook studio, a place that is like a little village within a town, sited as it is within an enclosed mews of industrial buildings peopled with other practitioners like myself (painting, printmaking, and sculpture). Wherever I go, together with other artists, we form a miniature society. Printmaking is the most democratic of mediums; we must all gather around the press, and share our vision and expertise, our hopes and dreams if we are to create a new world. The studio is a laboratory for change in Society. Printmaking is the graphic science of Democracy. We must provide grassroots-run, people-powered laboratories, locations for change if art is to thrive outside of the museum and the archeological digs of History. |
Goloborotko’s Studio, Established in 1989
