Container, Driving across the Gerald Desmond and Vincent Thomas bridges from Long Beach to San Pedro, variously-colored shipping containers can be seen piled high the landscape, neatly-stacked metal boxes waiting to journey out to sea or be loaded onto trucks, their contents distributed to consumers around the west. Numbering in the tens of thousands and extending inland for several miles, these metal shipping containers provide inspiration for an installation using a substrate of found paper, each sheet with a ready-made silkscreen gradient. Nine printmakers collaborated to create a mosaic of multi-layered prints that when combined approximate the size and dimensions of a shipping container. The images in each panel range from abstract to figurative and are inspired by San Pedro and its environments, with references to bridges, metal cranes, machinery, graffiti, local fauna and flora, and Idah Meacham Strobridge, who operated a small literary press, Artemisia Bindery, in an abandoned fisherman’s cabin in Terminal Island around 1905.

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