Toru Sugita, DVC professor and printmaker, discussed the longstanding relationship between printmaking and social critique for DVC’s 54th faculty lecture.

Sugita presented “The History of Printmaking as Social Art” in the Diablo Room, on Wednesday, April 18th and Thursday, April 19th with the artists’ reception after the Thursday lecture.

Professor Sugita was born in Shiga Prefecture, Japan in 1964.  He graduated with a Bachelor of Art Education at Kyoto University of Education in 1987 and in 2003, received his Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking from San Francisco State University.

Sugita says his work is inspired and directly influenced by light and shadow and the temporary shapes that are created by them. He focuses most of his creative energy on etching and aquatint in black and white. “I love Japanese woodblock printing, but I am an etching artist,” said Sugita.

Sugita gave a brief history of print media and discussed the commentary on sociopolitical issues within many of the prints shown.

The medium of printmaking can be traced back to our most ancient civilizations, from a simple seal with a single character to an intricately designed pattern made for palace walls.

Images of war and its complicated relationship with the economy, human suffering, and racism have been prominent within the print world since the early 1600s.

Several prints dealt with issues like inequality, poverty, immigration and corruption in politics, all of which Sugita believes still plague our society today. To him, the prints convey the issues in humanity’s past and the realization that they will inevitably repeat themselves.

The lecture was intended to show the relationship between the past and present.

A final image shown at the lecture was a stencil print by the notorious artist Banksy, which showed the Israeli-Palestinian wall with a sprayed image of a girl holding a cluster of balloons floating towards the top.