As a visiting artist at The American Academy in Rome, I walked the roads and piazzas of the city of Rome in my search for examples of epigraphy. Over 1200 photographs of examples were taken and their exact locations were geotagged. 320 of those were selected for inclusion in this project. Each example was selected because it was meaningful and culturally significant, and then they were carefully drawn in the manner of a traditional epigrapher.
My goal was to explore the contemporary layer of communication that rests upon the city's surface and give voice to the everyday Romans and myriad visitors who have left their mark upon the city—to memorialize the mundane and give voice to individuals largely ignored in the historical record. I aim to act as a sort of cultural preservationist documenting the shift from ancient Roman typography engraved upon the facades of imperial structures, to the centuries-old tradition of craftsman designers creating typefaces and signage for shopkeepers in the 19th and 20th centuries, to our present landscape of anarchic graffiti and tagging that dominates the epigraphic landscape.
This book was designed and printed in 2024 during my residency at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica Venezia and Tipoteca in Italy. At the Scuola, I collaborated with Cristina Zanato on the Risograph printing of the interior and with Daniele Fachin on the letterpress printing of the cover. Daniele also bound the book. A poster featuring a unique typeface designed by Cristina Zanato, based on one of the typographic examples in the book is included.
“The Romans, who went down in history for covering Italy and Europe with roads, also enjoyed covering everything they came across in writing.” Giuliano Tedesco, 2001
“...the soil of Rome being stocked to a great depth with words, bits of architecture and sculpted limbs, tombstones and all the other compost of civilized time...” Eleanor Clark, Rome and a Villa, 1950
“When graffiti are found in large numbers in one and the same place they gain the importance of a historical document.” Lanciani, 1891
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“Gilded is not golden. Gilded has the sense of a patina covering something else. It’s the shiny exterior, and the raw underneath” —Historian Nell Irvin Painter
Gilded Cities is an outgrowth of work I completed as a fellow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2018. As part of the fellowship, I explored displacement within the city of San Francisco.
Spurred by this work, I developed Gilded Cities to explore the fact that the San Francisco Bay Area has become an enclave for the rich—unattainable to all but the most privileged. Nine utilitarian objects throughout the Bay Area (such as sewer plates, water pipes and manhole covers) were gilded in 23 karat gold. The objects often have text associated with them that serves as a reminder of the basic services necessary for survival surrounding us that are largely taken for granted: water, sewer, electricity etc.
The project also contained echos of historic events in the convulsive history of the area. For instance the birth of San Francisco in the gold rush and the use of the term Gold Mountain by Chinese immigrants to describe the city.
An immersive website has also been created by developer Nick Bushman. It allows people to view the objects online, or to map their locations and visit them.
The project became part of the national and local conversation about displacement in the San Francisco Bay Area and received the following press coverage:
In 2024 I worked on printing my book Roman Epigraphy as an Artist in Residence at the Scuola in Venice and at the Tipoteca in Cornuda Italy. At the Scuola, I worked with Cristina Zanato to print the interior of the book using their Risograph printer. The cover was printed at the Tipoteca where I worked with Daniele Fachin and Cristina Zanato on a Vandercook press. Daniele Fachin also bound the book.
Over the course of many months, I walked the roads and piazzas of the city of Rome in my search for examples of epigraphy. Over 900 photographs of examples were taken and their exact locations were geotagged. 320 of those were selected for inclusion in this project. Each example was selected because it was meaningful and culturally significant, then they were carefully drawn in the manner of a traditional epigrapher.
My goal was to explore the contemporary layer of communication that rests upon the city's surface and give voice to the everyday Romans and myriad visitors who have left their mark upon the city—to memorialize the mundane and give voice to individuals who are largely ignored in the historical record. I aim to act as a sort of cultural preservationist documenting the shift from ancient Roman typography engraved upon the facades of imperial structures, to the centuries-old tradition of craftsman designers creating typefaces and signage for shopkeepers in the 19th and 20th centuries, to our present landscape of anarchic graffiti and tagging that dominates the epigraphic landscape.
“The Romans, who went down in history for covering Italy and Europe with roads, also enjoyed covering everything they came across in writing.”
Giuliano Tedesco, 2001
“...the soil of Rome being stocked to a great depth with words, bits of architecture and sculpted limbs, tombstones and all the other compost of civilized time...”
Eleanor Clark, Rome and a Villa, 1950
“When graffiti are found in large numbers in one and the same place they gain the importance of a historical document.”
Lanciani, 1891
An online archive of book pages bearing marks, notations and other marginalia, the Webby award winning Pages Project explores the act of reading, each reader’s unique relationship to the material, and the nature of the book as a transitory physical object in a digital age.
The Pages Project will soon be released as a printed publication.
The project has been featured by:
The New Yorker
Mashable
FastCompany
HOW: Top 10 Websites for Designers
Yahoo Tech
Adobe Tumblr
Mental Floss
The Huffington Post
The Global Digital Citizen Foundation
Tech Sources
El Pais
O Magazine
For three days in April 2015, San Francisco’s Market Street was the site of the Market Street Prototyping Festival, which transformed the area into a public platform, showcasing exciting ideas for improving our famed civic spine and how we use it. Our design, Street Sketch, was one of 50 designs selected from over 200 entries from around the world.
The project was a partnership between the San Francisco Planning Department, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Knight Foundation.
The core of the 12 x 12 ft. structure was a free standing wall. The wall’s sidewalk-facing side served as the primary drawing surface, while the other three sides contained information about the project that encouraged people to be a part of the San Francisco creative community. This wall also created a barrier between the traffic along Market street. The chalk surfaces were devoted to drawing, generating a welcoming sense of place and made the area more conducive to social interaction.
The structure was constructed using volunteer work from peers and students from San José State University and California College of the Arts.
Based on the prototypes success it was selected to become a permanent structure in San Francisco and a new prototype was designed. The goal of the new design was that it be more sculptural, be able to withstand the elements, and accommodate visiting artists who would periodically paint murals on its surface.
In 1992, as a design student, I attended the reunion of Black Mountain College in San Francisco. The school is credited with shaping some of the greatest artists in American history: Willem de Kooning, John Cage, Ruth Asawa, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Franz Kline, and Robert Rauschenberg among them.
I took extensive notes that day as former students and teachers recounted their experiences at the school. The quotes I gathered that day are the foundation of this publication.
The book offers a uniquely personal perspective on this legendary school and the thoughts and experiences of these fascinating and influential people.
Each quote has a page devoted to it. The quote is presented in its entirety along with the time it was uttered. A fragment of the quote is also reproduced at a large scale bleeding off the edge of the page and traveling onto the following spread. In essence, it is an evocation of the interplay of the conversation that took place on that day.
The book contains unpublished images taken on the day of the reunion as well as archival images from my personal collection.
American Bauhaus is available here from Slanted Publishing
American Bauhaus in Collections
Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library | Yale University, New Haven, CT
Franklin Furnace Archive, New York, NY
Museum of Modern Art / Artists' Books Collection, New York, NY
Kunstbibliothek Sitterwerk, St.Gallen, Switzerland
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (BMCM+AC), Asheville, NC
Letterform Archive, San Francisco, CA
North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC
Environmental Design Library, University of California, Berkeley, CA
Problem Library, San Francisco, CA
San Francisco Center for the Book, San Francisco, CA
Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit - MOCAD, Detroit, MI
Media coverage
Printing: Black spot color on the interior. Black plus white silkscreen on the cover.
Cover paper: Meta Paper EcoFibres Jute 300 g/sm
Inside paper: Meta Paper Extra rough warm white.
Volume: 108 pages
Format: 7" × 10" (17.78 cm × 25.4 cm)
Language: English
Delivery: Wrapped in shrink foil, packed in box envelopes, shipped with tracking number
Content and Design: Erik Schmitt, Berkeley, California, USA
Publisher and Distributor: Slanted Publishers, Karlsruhe, Germany
Printer: Stober Medien GmbH, Eggenstein, Germany
During World War II my grandfather participated in the removal of the stained glass windows from Chartres Cathedral in France in an effort to save them from destruction by Nazi bombing campaigns (teams of master glass artisans dismantled the hundreds of windows, and soldiers, tradesmen, and laborers with local volunteers crated thousands of glass panels, stowed them in the crypt, and months later—just before German invaders reached Chartres—hauled them across the country to an underground quarry.) This was not an entirely altruistic endeavor on his part, however. As the owner of Conrad Schmitt Studios in Milwaukee Wisconsin, America's largest stained glass studio, an opportunity to examine the exquisite medieval craftsmanship of the cathedral's windows was irresistible.
This story became a part of my family’s lore. In 2013 I set out to visit the cathedral and to see the famous stained glass windows. Upon seeing them, however, I became fascinated by the prismatic play of light being projected upon the interior from the windows rather than the windows themselves. I spent a day photographing this play of light.
The light in the cathedral was not static but shifted with the time of day (and one can surmise the seasons of the year) changing the experience of the interior space.
Some of these circular projected forms suddenly appeared and then just as quickly faded away having lifespans of seconds or moments. Others slowly traveled over the interior geography of columns, vaults, and floors. The structure acted as a massive camera obscura as light from the bright orb of the sun passed through the 12th century Medieval optics of the stained glass windows and was projected into the vast interior.
I was aware of the Gothic aesthetics of light where it is analogous to divinity, purity, and cosmic perfection, and wondered how many throughout the centuries, like me, had contemplated the phenomena of these projected short-lived orbs of light, ignoring the more didactic lessons in the glass above.
When exploring ancient art in European museums, I’ve long been struck by a consistent feature of many classical sculptures: the heads of gods, emperors, and common people have often been defaced. Noses smashed off, chins broken, deep gouges in cheeks, crosses cut into foreheads. Curiously, these institutions have mostly been silent about why these sculptures are so disfigured.
But over the past few years, scholars and historians have begun exploring in more depth the rise of Christianity and the ensuing waves of destruction that swept through the collapsing Roman Empire. Their work has revealed that countless sculptures, structures, and works of literature were obliterated by Christian zealots intent on eliminating all traces of classical culture.
The images in this book of defaced sculptures—which I photographed in European art museums over the course of many years—bear witness to this destruction.
This project explores the vast post-war urban landscapes of the Bay Area in California. I am drawn to these decaying places and structures because of the rich patina of human activity that lies upon them. The massive structures of concrete, glass and steel that inhabit these environments are often ignored as industrial blight; but they serve as witnesses to the historical transformations taking place in our urban environments.
One common thread that runs through this series is my exploration of scale and isolation. In an effort to capture these massive structures and their rich detail, my work probes what we think of as the traditional picture space. Foreground, background and subject have been documented independently as a series of high resolution digital images and then reconstructed. The skies, structures and roads are separate planes. Multiple slices of time are combined to form one image.
Of San Francisco’s 404 privately owned single room occupancy hotels 30 reported that at least half their rooms were empty. Many had 100% vacancy rates.
If those 1,827 rooms were made available to the cities homeless it could have a serious impact on the problem.
Statistics were gathered to locate the six SROs with the highest vacancy rates. Then they were mapped and tagged with Housing Displacement Facts specific to each location.
The intervention strives to shed light on displacement.
Press Coverage
The Bay Area housing crisis depicted as nutrition labels By Michelle Robertson, SFGATE
SF artist slaps notices on vacant SROs to spotlight homeless
By Adam Brinklow, Curbed San Francisco
“I got sick of living around people with money”
Ajo Arizona sits a few miles from the Mexican border and is one of the most isolated and inhospitable towns in America.
Dwellings there are shaped by the intense heat—homes have windows covered in aluminum foil to reflect sunlight, their wood siding buckled and warped. The town “cemetery” consists of graves covered in concrete shoveled into primitive mounds, crosses etched on the surface. A massive abandoned open-pit mine, formed of concentric rings that recede into the Earth's surface, culminates in a black pool. The water and air are tainted with poisons from the operation of the mine.
A man's house sits within this landscape. After his death, I sifted through thousands of artifacts, journal entries, and photographs there—evidence of a life serving in the U.S. military, working aboard biological research vessels in the Caribbean, studying art at the legendary experimental school Black Mountain College, working as a US Forest Ranger, and teaching college.
The juxtaposition of images of the impoverished, otherworldly environment, the desert landscape, and objects found in the house that evidence a rich and interesting life seem incongruous. Found journals containing quotes like “I sleep a lot and do not work in the evening. If I was someone’s horse they would probably take me out back and shoot me.”, capture an increasingly disturbed state of mind, as well as chaotic goings-on in the community. “A week ago Thursday one of my friends, Allen, was stabbed in the stomach by his girlfriend/business partner Ramona. He has been in critical care ever since he went to the hospital. He is a gentle quiet hard-working man”. These journal entries are woven together with images of items found inside the house: wooden boxes of insects mounted on pins, a ziplock bag labeled “ELAINES ASHES”, and notes taped to walls, one saying “SOMEONE HAS STOLEN 19 PILLS OF HYDROCODONE.” as well as images of the desert landscape and the town, suggesting the unpredictability, mystery, and harshness of life.
Ajo is a dialogue between a series of found photographs and journal entries documenting the historic arc of a life, juxtaposed with images from the time when they were found—a meditation on the passage of time, and the shifting nature of one person’s reality.
This project was a Photolucida Critical Mass finalist in 2022.
Print series based on my archive of redrawn Roman epigraphy, contextual photographs, and geotag coordinates.
2023
Giclée prints on Moab Baryta Rag paper
13” x 19” / 33 x 48.25 cm
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