NOT MANY OF THE thousands of readers of “Art, Ad, or Alchemy?” can say they’ve ridden a bicycle loaded with screen printing equipment into the middle of an event, then started laying ink. As a founding member of Pedal Press (pedalpress.org), Julia Murphy specializes in doing just that. She says it’s all part of a belief that screen printing can offer kids who maybe don’t fit into high school academics (or even high school) an opportunity not only to learn, but eventually, to earn, as well.
Although Julia’s work and story are unique, this edition of “Art, Ad, or Alchemy?” (the column and the associated podcast) touches on the same topics as another recent interview that got me into a bit of trouble. In episode 13, I made an offhand comment about YouTube University graduates maybe not having sufficient skillsets to walk into a modern production shop and start banging out prints.
What I really meant to say is, it takes hands-on experience over months and years to be a top-notch printer: accumulated knowledge and skills, learned through doing, honed by experience. You can watch it, read about it, listen to it, but until you start and then continue printing (and get self-critical and dive deep to learn from your mistakes), you’re only going to scratch the surface of this crazy process.
Judging from comments received online, many people in this industry have used YouTube to enhance their knowledge of screen printing – and to be clear, I think that’s great. Everyone starts somewhere, and we should all try to encourage those who feel the spark to feed that flame.
Julia feels the spark. She’s been feeding the flame, too – to the point that she’s burning with enthusiasm for what screen printing can do for the youth in Chico, California. As she discusses in the podcast, the Pedal Press team takes bike-mounted equipment into the community with a simple goal in mind: to show people the process, set the hook of interest, and reel them into the industry.
One of the trusty bike presses at Stonewall’s Black History Month Pop-Up. Pedal Press donated time to raise money, printing for Stonewall’s QTPOC fund.
Feeding the Flame
Julia is an artist. She’s always been an artmaker, illustrator, tattooist, and sign painter. She fell in love with this industry while mixing ink in the early 2000s at The Printed
Image (printedimagechico.com), a custom screen printing and embroidery shop. “I kept bugging them to let me on the press, but it didn’t happen,” she recalls. So, she went back to college to finish her education degree. Today, she teaches Art at BASES school in Oroville, California, works for a local screen printer two days a week, and does the Pedal Press stuff in between those two jobs.
Pedal Press began in 2017 when she teamed up with Cathryn Carkhuff, who ran an afterschool program called “Prodigies” that centered around using an old screen printing press they found in the building they were using. With no background or training in screen printing, Cathryn and the youth learned as they went along.
Cathryn and Julia fantasized about getting their own space, but they wanted to begin right away. Putting screen printing setups onto bicycles seemed like a good place to start. “I got my friend Greg to weld setups onto two bikes for us,” Julia says. “The first event we live printed at was the Chico Bike Music Festival in June 2017. We had exposed the screen in the sun – it seemed like magic that it worked. We were hooked!”
Pedal Press received a new infusion of talent in 2019 with the addition of Stefanie Prado, a printmaker who shared space in the studio the women now rent. Meanwhile, Julia has been doing her best to up her screen printing game and become an even better mentor for Chico youth. “I thought I was doing OK until I went to work for Tom Little at Jeeptrail Print (jeeptrailprint.com), and started to learn how much I don’t know about screen printing!”
Local youth participated in a week-long summer print camp in 2022. They sold their wares at the
farmers market and learned a little about the marketing and sales side of the screen printing business.
Working on Workshops
For her part, Cathryn focuses on youth education and engagement as well as grant writing. The latter effort recently paid off in a grant from the California Arts Council to plan a workshop for system-impacted youth. From there, the idea is to provide an opportunity for a more formal apprenticeship with Tom (Jeeptrail Print is Pedal Press’s industry partner for the pilot project). “We can introduce concepts and get folks into making a print. Tom will refine and expand that,” Julia says. Ideally, other local screen shops will take on apprentices, as well.
“The idea of apprenticeship is so satisfying to me,” Julia says. “I went to college for a real long time and that way of learning – it doesn’t hit the same way that getting your hands in the ink does. Not to say it’s better or worse. Just different.”
The current grant is only to plan the project. Right now, Pedal Press is assembling a team of youth leaders to help them figure out how to put the project together, what would work, and how to engage youth. The actual project grant will be submitted in June, and they expect to hear back in July. They’re confident that because the CCA funded the planning grant, odds are good that the project will also be funded.
Tom Little of Jeeptrail Print in Chico, California, works with Pedal Press and Julia Murphy to provide mentoring to youth who have an interest in screen printing.
Bridge Building
Julia’s thinking about screen printing would likely resonate with many of the people we have talked to in “Art, Ad, or Alchemy?” It’s a bridge between creativity and manufacturing, and the end products tend to resonate with youth. She sums it up this way:
“My work all stems from a place of believing that making things (art? crafts? whatever) is good for people and we should all have ample opportunities to do it. I think that people have way more creative power than they realize, and I want to get them to realize it. Screen printing is an amazing thing – I like to call it ‘antique social media’ – and you can engage with it on so many levels, from embroidery hoops and direct-resist-painted-on to all the mind-blowing tech we just saw [at the Impressions Expo] in Long Beach.
Kids’ designs from the 2022 summer print camp.
“And – here is the kicker – after learning the basics, you can bop off and start your own business. You don’t need to stand on anyone’s door with your hat in your hand and beg to be hired – you can hire yourself. I just don’t hear that message being given in schools, and we are depressing the $&#% out of our students by not giving them that option, in a variety of ways.”
For Julia, that’s all the more reason to continue pursuing her own credentials as an educator. Specifically, she’s already halfway through her CTE (Career Technical Education) credential (Manufacturing and Product Development, Graphic Production Technologies). “High schools pretty much still have welding programs, but as for CTE, that’s often the extent of it,” she says. “Let’s make sure students know that a four-year degree isn’t the only option for a good job/life. I also think the CTE certification process is needlessly difficult. But that is a whole other story.”
Listen to the complete interview with Julia Murphy in episode 15 of the “Art Ad, or Alchemy?” podcast.