Artist Image Resource

Artists Image Resources (AIR) is an artist run, non-profit print and imaging organization established in 1996 to serve as a laboratory for artists, educators and the community. AIR’s mission is to integrate the creation of fine art prints with educational programs that explore the role of the artist in contemporary culture. AIR’s primary activities are to initiate and facilitate projects with professional artists and to create active laboratory environments where artists, students and the public interact. AIR’s fundamental interest is in how print and imaging processes are being used in broader contemporary art making practice and how these practices impact and reflect culture.

The organization combines a print lab (that publishes print editions with artists and provides fee for service project support to educators and the public) with a cooperative workshop where individuals can learn all facets of printmaking through individual study, and school-centered collaborative programs. Individuals may also become members of a volunteer workforce that trades technical and organizational skills for facilities access and project assistance from the studio.

Our goal has been to create a dynamic learning environment that supports the artist and informs and challenges our schools and our communities. We do this by initiating new work with artists and providing educational programs, discussions, and exhibitions that encourage strong voices and support informed and active community members. Print shops have long been associated with voice in our communities and printmaking has a long history of apprenticeship learning. We find that our dynamic mix of mentorship and apprenticeship learning models, driven by thoughtful and ambitious artist’s projects, can be extremely effective in stimulating and reinforcing critical thinking and problem solving skills in students and in the community.

HISTORY

Artists Image Resources (AIR) was established in 1996, was incorporated as a nonprofit Pennsylvania Corporation in 1997 and received nonprofit 501(c) 3 tax status in 1998. In 1996, AIR started working with professional artists on projects and began to organize resources in a 10,000 square foot space in an urban neighborhood on the North Side of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. In 1996 and 1997, AIR began working with university educators to design programs that would allow the aspiring artist to work directly, hand in hand, with the professional artist in an active real world studio environment. This methodology continues to define the studio as the active and engaged art production and learning laboratory that it is today.

As AIR continued to support working artists and students in the creation of new work and the development of best artistic practices, we also began to organize exhibitions of the work created. AIR began to archive prints and developmental material (sketches, preliminary proofs, etc.) to create a print inventory and educational archive. The fundamental structure of the organization consists of these three elements: production, education and archive/exhibition.

As we have integrated all of these activities into a dynamic whole, we have expanded the nature of how we initiate artists’ projects, how we allow general access to the shop and how we allow our apprenticeship program to expand. We have also developed a more formal collaborative educational program structure that engages high school students and youth into the shop dynamic. We have further expanded the exhibition opportunities that we provide through the studio, allowing more and more diverse work to be presented and discussed.