The Message? Garment Printing Club Forever
March 16, 2024 • Written by Ari Bowman
MassArt students who walked through the Banana Room in mid February may have noticed that the space, once barren and desolate, transformed seemingly overnight into a jam-packed, salon-style garment gallery. Composed from work created by the 40+ members of MassArt’s Garment Printing Club and curated by club founder Nate Bourget, t-shirts, prints, and silkscreens covered every single inch of drywall, with even more art displayed on mannequins, clothing racks, and pedestals throughout.
Titled The Message, the exhibition loosely centered around themes relating to “iconography and aesthetics of the late 60’s to early 70’s … home, bootleg, and guerilla screen printing, which became influential as the US entered the Vietnam war,” according to a club ‘dossier.’ Of course, members were permitted free reign to interpret this idea however they wanted, and no work was to be denied from the show. The title alludes to the influential manner of wearing art on a t-shirt – perhaps one of the most efficient ways of getting one’s ‘message’ across – as well as a connection to “the sense of ‘divine wisdom’ that stupid hippies and acid heads got when taking drugs, also the Manson murders, and also the Jonestown mass suicide,” according to the dossier.
The Garment Printing Club (GPC) is a relatively new student group at MassArt, formed by Bourget and a handful of other friends in the Fall of 2022, their freshman year at MassArt. “I created the Garment Printing Club because I felt like there was a huge disparity in silkscreen accessibility here,” Bourget says. “I feel like the [printmaking studio] is pretty much iron curtains, even though we’re all paying tuition…I’m not saying that everybody’s going to go in and do litho, you know, but screenprinting is an egg that anybody can crack.” The print studio space at MassArt is only accessible to printmaking majors or students actively enrolled in a printmaking class; a frustrating fact to many MassArt students who are interested in print media, but enrolled in other majors. “I’ve been screenprinting for four years now, and I find it to be my favorite medium of all time, despite coming here for graphic design,” Bourget says.
Ultimately, the GPC aims to fill the “printmaking void” for MassArt students that want to make screenprints, but don’t have access to the tools to do it. “There’s so much freedom that you can have in printmaking, and I wanted to bring that to the beautiful members of MassArt, and anybody who was interested,” Bourget says. “I really wanted everybody to have a shot at screenprinting, because really, no joke, it’s fun. It’s something everyone wants to do, and everyone should have access to it.”
Since the club’s creation a little over a year and a half ago, it grew from a modest collection of friends doing Evan’s Way pop-ups and gathering in the 19th floor workroom in Treehouse, to a collective of over 40 members. Artists send their designs to Bourget, who then prints them on acetate and burns the designs onto the screens. The club then meets on Wednesdays where they gather to print their designs onto t-shirts, sweatshirts, paper, newsprint, or anything else they can get their hands on. The amount and type of work is prolific and diverse, from missing posters made for tire swings, to illustrations of furries, to a design using appropriated Catholic imagery that reads, “Garment Printing Club Saved My Soul.”
“The scale of work here is immense, like, this is so many t-shirts,” Bourget says, gesturing to the gallery walls. “And there are so many avid club members who are just so ready to do awesome work and really, it’s come as a shock. Everyone keeps saying I’m a celebrity but like, I don’t really see it like that…I just burn all the screens for everyone, and everyone else really creates the value.”
Currently, the club is on a short hiatus after being “kicked out of the 7th floor [Artist’s Residence] workroom again, this time much more permanently,” according to a club Discord announcement. Bourget and others are currently working to find a more permanent workspace and hope to be up and running soon, but as of right now, nothing is set in stone. However, they are very much excited to start a “new page” in the club’s journey, having ordered new tools, staple guns, irons, heat guns, a new press, and more screens, all to accommodate a growing club population.
Ultimately, with the Garment Printing Club, it all comes back to the community. When asked what he felt most accomplished about in regards to the GPC’s success, Bourget replied, “I am always happy to see each individual shirt get pulled, and there’s no errors with it, and it’s pixel perfect. And then I turn around, or the club member turns around to face me, and they just have this big-ass, shit-eating grin on their face. And I’m like, oh my God, screen printing changed your life, the same way it changed my life. A happy club member is what makes this world go round.”
