Ben Muñoz and Sergio Sanchez Santamaria are featured in the great article on collaborative printmaking by Southwest Contemporary!
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Printmaking is an expensive endeavor. Etching and litho presses sold by Takach, a press-making company in Albuquerque, sell for anywhere from $6,000 minimum to about $30,000. The press at La Trampa, back in Mexico City, would have cost Alva an arm and a leg in 2009, and maybe even his soul, had a printmaker-turned-painter friend of Alva’s from La Esmeralda not lent it to him. “Hopefully forever,” says Alva. The friend had won it in a printmaking contest, but the less said about it, Alva tells me, the better (in case the friend ever wants it back).
Then come all the other costs, says Muñoz: drying racks, large tables, a good ventilation system, and most importantly, space, and lots of it, because you can’t move your heavy printmaking equipment at will.
Printmaking is, at its core, a medium that requires collaboration. “Collectively, we were able to put it all together,” says Muñoz. None of his colleagues, and neither Muñoz, could have done this on their own.