Amache Alliance Awarded the APS Collaboration Grant for 2023

The Association of Print Scholars is pleased to award its sixth annual Collaboration Grant to Amache Alliance. The grant, in the amount of $1000, will provide funding for the Amache Alliance to create a webpage documenting the history of the Silkscreen Workshop at Amache and offering a digital visual record of the Workshop’s output. The webpage will be produced in partnership with the Amache Alliance, the Amache Preservation Society, and the University of Denver Amache Research Project and will be developed by Dana Ogo Shew and Melissa Geisler Trafton.

Located in a small town in southeastern Colorado, Amache (also known as the Granada Relocation Center) was one of ten inland incarceration camps for forcibly relocated Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II. The Silkscreen Workshop was intended to offer vocational training to Amache’s confined population and made equipment associated with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) poster program available to its audience. In addition to printing posters for the U.S. Navy, the Silkscreen Workshop produced public and private prints and posters, such as informational broadsides, announcements, Christmas cards, and independent artworks, for the community. 

For their time and expertise, APS would like to thank this year’s jurors: Nancy Burns, Stoddard Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs at the Worcester Art Museum; Im Chan, Paper Conservator, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; and Helena Wright, Curator Emerita of Graphic Arts at the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History. 

The Amache Alliance is an all-volunteer non-profit organization that works collaboratively to help preserve the Granada Relocation Center incarceration site (now the Amache National Historic Site) and its history. The aim is to educate the public about the forced evacuation, relocation, and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Preservation of Amach’s stories, artifacts, and historic structures supports the Alliance’s interpretative and educational mission.  

Dana Ogo Shew currently serves as Oral Historian, Interpretive Specialist and Staff Archaeologist at the Anthropological Studies Center at Sonoma State University. She received her master’s degree in anthropology from the University of Denver after completing her thesis on the lives of women at Amache. At ASC, she has continued working with the Japanese community conducting research and interviews with Japanese families in the Bay Area. She served as Project Director for a National Endowment of the Humanities-sponsored project that digitized hundreds of handmade objects created in Amache and curated a related exhibition at the Sonoma State Library Art Gallery and the Oakland Asian Cultural Center. Dana remains closely connected to the Amache community and currently serves as the Secretary of the Amache Alliance. 

Melissa Geisler Trafton is an art historian at the College of the Holy Cross, with an interest in nineteenth and twentieth-century American visual culture. She specializes in ephemera and collective artistic practice, and is currently preparing an article on the Silkscreen Workshop at Amache. She presented this material at the APS-sponsored panel at the 2022 College Art Association Annual Conference. Other recent publications include articles on the illustrations of American painter John Frederick Kensett (1816–1872), the lithographs of Fitz Henry Lane (1804–1865), and exhibitions organized by the Saint Gaudens Memorial between 1948–2019. From her work as the Managing Editor for the Fitz Henry Lane online catalogue raisonné, she has extensive digital art history experience, which she will bring to the Amache website project. 

APS is a non-profit organization for print enthusiasts that brings together a diverse community of curators, collectors, academics, graduate students, artists, conservators, critics, independent scholars, and art dealers. APS aims to encourage innovative and interdisciplinary print scholarship and to facilitate dialogue among its members. Over 550 people from all over the world have joined APS  since it was founded in 2014.

Please contact grants@printscholars.org with any questions regarding this announcement. APS is currently accepting submissions for the 2023 Collaboration Prize (deadline: January 31, 2024). To learn more about the APS Collaboration Grant, click here.