SeattlePrintmakersCenter

150812 What's in a name?  

The name of the Seattle Printmakers Center to Northwest Print Center & Cultural Arts and Technology Incubator because this name is a better fit, more inclusive, and more attractive to visitors coming to Seattle.

Imagine, for example, you are a tourist in Seattle and reading a brochure. You may be a print collector, or perhaps you have a background in the printing industry - now retired. The word "printmaker" is, to most people, a strange word, ambiguous and even a little off-putting.

If you don't know for sure what "printmaker" means, maybe it's not for you. Would you go, and risk disappointment, or even embarrassment? Time is short when you are a tourist.

On the other hand, the Northwest Print Center, while it sounds a little like an office copy place, the fact this appears in the context of a visitor's guide or tour magazine rules out that idea. In the art world, prints are known as fine art prints - art aficionados do not have to be told what's likely to be in store at a print center.

There are print centers in other parts of the world, too, often times in the same place as local crafts for which a city is well-known. In Japan, artisans can be seen printing famous block prints by Hiroshige, Hokusai and other famed artists.

The Incubator part

The main purpose of the center is actually not fine art prints, even though this is the ancestral art form for the center's primary theme, its "brand." Rather it is education, training and innovation which creates jobs and productivity for its membership.

If you are in the incubator, you might be developing a video game with the purpose of teaching the chemistry of printing - both the chemistry as it was known in Rembrandt's time and in modern industrial printing. You may be part of a team which is producing our country's only digital art magazine devoted to fine art prints. In another part of the complex, your role might be that of an editor preparing a YouTube series that teaches the fine points of hand carving wood or linoleum blocks or little-known historical factoids.

In the original business plan for the Northwest Print Center, formerly known as the Seattle Printmakers Center, nineteen businesses were identified which, taken together in a cooperative and interactive way, would make for an important Seattle asset, to be self-supporting, profitable and a benefit to many people inside and out.