Collaborative Arts Research Initiative

Druid City Prints (DCP) is a fine art, limited edition publishing research project. DCP is a collaboration between Sarah Marshall, Associate Professor & Printmaking Area Coordinator, Department of Art & Art History and a series of guest scholars and artists who visit the UA campus. Collaborators explore the materials and processes of printmaking, expanding and informing each other’s research methods to create works of art that embody an aspect of the guest’s area of expertise. The collaborations developed through DCP result in community engagement through public lectures, exhibits, and the opportunity to expose students to new visual vocabulary and working methods. One print from each project is donated to the permanent collection of the Sarah Moody Gallery of Art.

Our first collaborator was Jacob Taylor Gibson, a Louisiana artist currently living and working in Texas, who uses images of antique objects, patterns, and spaces to explore how integral past experiences are in shaping our current selves. Jacob’s work centers on coping with past trauma and resultant feelings of shame, inadequacy, and incompleteness. Throughout the project, we exchanged technical information about materials and equipment, and students learned how the artist uses different processes as metaphors for tenderness and abuse. Our collaboration resulted in an edition of fifty eight-color mixed-media prints. (Unclean, Jacob Taylor Gibson, 14 x 11 inches, lithography, intaglio, screenprint, 2022, edition of 50.)

Future collaborations are in development with Doug Baulos, Professor of Drawing and Foundations at The University of Alabama at Birmingham, and Jared Margulies, Professor of Political Ecology in the Geography Department at UA. Doug’s work explores the history of objects and is centered on ideas of spirituality, love, death, shelter, and hope. Their drawings, installations, and books depict scientific illustrations, the human body, and images of the natural world. Jared’s research investigates environmental inequalities and human-nature relationships. This collaboration will take the form of a speculative field guide to cacti that uses irony and the aesthetic of the cute to address the inherently political nature of conservation efforts.