Mary Boone Gallery cotton jersey sweatshirt
Mary Boone Gallery cotton jersey sweatshirt
For Pre-Fall 2024, a Mary Boone Gallery exhibition sweatshirt is meticulously fashioned using the time-honored technique of silk screen printing. Our do-it-yourself approach utilizes a heavyweight 12 oz. cotton jersey to pay homage to the New York art dealer’s 1985 Jean-Michel Basquiat show. Presented on the front of our heavyweight 12 oz. washed cotton jersey sweatshirt (along with all twelve of the show’s works on the back) and slightly oversized.
Only a limited number of 25 were made.
Crewneck
Navy 12 oz. washed cotton jersey
Red Mary Boone Gallery screen print on front
Red 1985 Jean Michel Basquiat show—with complete works—screen print on the back
Made in Canada
Silk screen printed in New York with irregular white paint splatters
Rib trim
Slightly oversized silhouette
Fabric: 100% cotton
Unisex
Mary Boone played a significant role in the art world during the 1980s and 1990s. As a prominent art gallery owner in New York City, she championed and fostered dozens of contemporary artists including Julian Schnabel, Tom Sachs, David Salle, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Basquiat joined the Mary Boone gallery in 1982 but after the show in 1985 was poorly received, Basquiat left the following year. The split would inspire a Basquiat punching bag with Boone’s name daubed on it (Untitled, Mary Boone 1984-1985).
Silkscreen printing is one of the oldest forms of printmaking. The technique, as we know it today, can be traced as far back as the era of Song Dynasty Art in China, around A.D. 960-1279. Japanese artists then turned screen printing into a complex art by developing an intricate process wherein a piece of silk was stretched across a frame to serve as the carrier of hand cut stencils. By the 15th century, silkscreen printing eventually found its way to the west.
For much of the 20th century, this printing method was kept confidential and safeguarded as a “trade secret.” As an artistic form, it appeared for the first time in the United States in the 1930s when a group of artists working with the Federal Art Project experimented with the technique and subsequently formed the National Serigraphic Society. American artists began making "fine art" screen-prints and devised the term "Serigraph" (derived from the combination of two Greek words, seicos, meaning silk, and graphos, meaning writing) to distinguish fine art from commercial screen printing.
In printmaking, each print in an edition is considered an original work of art, not a copy. During the 1960s, silkscreen printing became popular with Pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol, who were attracted to its bold areas of flat color. The technique would go on to make up a large percentage of printed garment works. Silkscreen's predilection for bold and graphic designs makes it ideally suited for our graphic exhibition sweatshirts.
