THE Silk Screen Shop 

Maida Campbell, who had worked for the WPA's Federal Art Project, established the Amache Silk Screen Shop with equipment from the WPA’s offices in New York. It was set up in the Recreation Center of Block 6E, and expanded into the Recreation Hall of 7E in November 1943. The majority of the work involved printing educational posters for the US Navy's Training Division, for which the Shop was paid.

Employees  were solicited through advertisements in Amache's newspaper (the Granada Pioneer), and earned typical incarceration camp wages of $16-19/ month. Experience was not required, and there was an established two to five-month training period. The Shop averaged about forty employees at any given time, although there was a good deal of turnover. 

Employees, most of whom were single young adults (18-22), also quickly established both a social component to their work (the Silk Screen Club) and an industry printing small commissions for community groups: dance invitations, school programs, etc., some of which were printed as new-employee training exercises. The majority of the items on this website are those community objects, for which the organization or group paid for labor and material costs. For the most part, the prints do not include any indication of where they were printed, and so we have made the assumption that any screen-printed object from Amache was printed at the Silk Screen Shop. 

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A note on print-making terminology: silk screen printing (also called screen printing) is a technology that does not require a press. Although it is a reproductive technology, each print is individually printed by hand, with the ink or paint pushed through the fabric screen (traditionally silk) stretched on a frame. The methods for creating a design can involve creating a stencil out of paper, which is placed on top of the screen, or creating a design through the transfer of a photograph to an emulsified surface. The Amache Silk Screen Shop used both of these techniques.  Although labor-intensive, screen printing is relatively inexpensive, easy to learn (at least in its basic methods), does not require specialized materials, and can be printed on a variety of surfaces. This means that it was well-suited for the goal of community printmaking.

Banner image: Amache Silk Screen Shop workers using a squeegee. Courtesy of the Amache Museum, McClelland Collection.