A garden of invasive weeds hangs from a fence. A bunch of roses are intertwined in barbed wires. Messages are printed on plastic notes. They’re all made out of folded and cut pieces of paper and plastic.
These are some of the masterpieces of Allyn Bromley’s printmaking displayed at the Honolulu Museum of Art.
The 96-year-old has worked on her large-scale art pieces for eight years. One piece reaches up to 15 feet tall.
Bromley, a longtime printmaker, was inspired by repurposing her old prints by giving them new life in a complex 3D form.
“I labored really quite hard to make them perfect, but I’d had them around for a long time,” she said. “I thought that they might have a better life a second time around, and I think they do.”
Her exhibit, “At the Edge of Forever,” features mixed-media printmaking that pushes the boundaries of the art form.
Bromley moved to Hawai‘i from San Francisco in 1952. She started a printmaking class at Leeward Community College and was the director of the printmaking department at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.
She primarily works in screen printing, a type of printmaking where ink is forced through a mesh screen onto a surface. She learned this technique at San Jose State University before bringing it to Hawai‘i.
“I was lucky to be just at the beginning of that time when screen printing was being used to make circuit boards and being used in industry to make things,” she said. “I took it very easily and adapted it to artmaking.”
Charles Cohan, chair of printmaking at the UH Mānoa Department of Art and Art History, worked alongside Bromley for about five years prior to her retirement. He said Bromley ran a “technically flawless curriculum and facility.”
“On a formal material level, she continually challenges the boundaries of large-scale paper-based installation,” he said in an email. “Her work is innovative in this regard due to the extreme attention to material detail amidst the dramatic expansion of scale 'Detailing' on a large scale is a bit of a contradiction, and she understands the power in this.”
Although printmaking is usually associated with paper, Bromley points out in one of her pieces that she used juice cartons. She had to wash the cartons and scrape off the glue. Then she cut them into square pieces before weaving them together, much like a quilt.
She screen printed letters to her mother on an art piece.
“The fact that it’s letters, I think, is important,” she said. “But what they say on it is very private to me and to my mother who’d been dead 30 years already when I wrote this letter to her.”
Bromley has seen all types of printmaking mediums. But the newer one she’s dabbling in is 3D printmaking, which she calls the future of printmaking.
She’s described as a generous spirit, who has always supported the printmaking community.
Marcia Morse has been friends with Bromley for about 50 years.
“She’s just this force of nature,” Morse said. “She’s just a wonderful presence in the world. Not the least because of her red hair.”
They were both in the wonder woman movement in Hawai‘i, which pays homage to the women’s art movement around the 1970s and 1980s.
Throughout her printmaking journey, Bromley said she’s inspired by the next generation of printmakers.
“I have arthritic fingers nowadays, and I think it’s time for me to support other people coming up.”
Her exhibit is on display in Honolulu until June.
