Fit to print

David Jones launched Anchor Graphics in 1990 as a community-based not-for-profit print workshop. The mission—to provide free printmaking classes for youths and a place for artists to work—has not wavered, thanks to a little help from a lot of friends. On Saturday 7, Anchor Graphics will throw the Printmakers Ball, its 15th anniversary benefit and art auction. More than 50 artists from across the country have donated prints, with the proceeds going to the general-operations fund.

Printmaking has been practiced by artists since the 15th century and is considered the democratic art because it creates multiple original copies. It was in that spirit that Anchor Graphics was founded.

Jones moved to Chicago from Kansas City after getting his BFA in 1987 and took a job with Landfall Press, the only fine-art print contract shop in town at that time. "I wanted to pursue this idea of printing for people and I wasn't interested in doing my own work," he says.

After a few years, Jones was asked to run a summer print shop in Lakeside, Michigan. There was a visiting artist from Latvia and neither spoke each other's language, but it was challenging in other ways as well. "His methods of working were completely foreign to me," Jones says. "I felt like I didn't know what I was doing." That plunge into the unknown became the springboard for Anchor Graphics: "Something clicked and we ended up doing four or five editions that summer." When Jones returned to his job at Landfall at the end of that summer, he knew that working as a printer at a contract shop was no longer for him. "I had a taste of what real collaboration was," he says. "I wanted something that had more of a community function than just making product."

What he wanted didn't exist in Chicago, so he decided to create it. For advice, Jones called the late Robert Blackburn, who had been running a legendary community lithography shop in New York since 1948. "He gave me his blessing and he said, 'It is going to take everything you have,'" Jones says. "Only later do I realize what he was talking about." A conversation with a friend sparked the name: "I was mentioning that I wanted to create a place that was safe...where there could be a sense of hope. He mentioned that the anchor was a symbol of hope. That made sense and felt right."

Hundreds of artists have printed at Anchor Graphics since it opened its doors, and clearly the place inspires loyalty. St. Louis artist Tom Huck has been donating prints to the annual fund-raiser for three years after hearing good things from fellow artists. "This is not some highfalutin art world bourgeois endeavor," Huck says. "It's about teaching the public about printmaking, and that's what it should it should be about. [Jones] wants to teach and he wants kids—nonfamous people—to make prints, and that's wonderful."

Chicago artist Oli Watt has been donating work to the Printmakers Ball for about seven years. "When I first moved to Chicago, I wanted to make prints and I lived in a really small apartment," says Watt, who moved here from Florida to attend the School of the Art Institute. He found Anchor Graphics at its old location on Damen Avenue.

While the high-end contract shops that print for established artists have their place, artists seem to agree that what Anchor Graphics offers is refreshing. "It's an exciting shop," Huck says. "Students go there for internships and that is real important. It's giving people a start."

Four years ago, Anchor Graphics started the Press on Wheels program to help make the art of printing accessible to schools and senior centers. Recently, POW and related workshops were brought to the Smart Museum in conjunction with the current show, "Paper Museums," which is on the history of the reproductive print. Additionally, Anchor has begun to take on publishing projects, the most recent of which was for the Block Museum's benefit auction. Anchor also will offer workshops at the Art Institute when the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition opens at the end of the summer.

Those projects are great, Jones says, because it's hard to rely on grants alone.

"One of the things that has been good for us is we have a real diverse income stream," he says. "We have put a lot of creative energy into thinking about how to stay alive."

Anchor Graphics' 15th anniversary Printmakers Ball is Saturday 7 from 7 to 11pm.