ap190514 Chabana Fun: Sustainable Development Goal realized 

I carry a cache of cards in my shirt pocket to remind me of my goal – to take part in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals with the means I have. To begin I added an eighteenth card to the original seventeen posed by the UN, which I call Printmaking Access.

I will pilot an idea which has been gestating for a long time, which is to turn our family’s art collection into a fund for the good of the Earth’s human and other life sustainability. Thanks to a recent meeting of an African woman, the gestation is complete, and the idea is born.

It was her comment, “We can start the Bill and Lynda Ritchie Arts Center in Botswana!” that made it so. She was half-joking. I had told her – also in a joking manner – since the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is only a little distance down 5^th Avenue from our Mini Art Gallery, my wife and I could call our foundation by a similar name – the Bill and Linda Art Center.

We had laugh, and it was fun.

However, my friend, Mavis Nduchwa was half-serious, too, because it is her wish to bring arts experiences to young students in her community.

“What better way than to do this with printmaking,” she stated in a message: “We work with women in bee keeping, we educate them on conservation and land restoration. I suggest we do the same for kids, kids engage best when there is stimulus and what a better way to do it than art print making?”

I never planned to go to another country to teach. Each time I sent one of my press designs to another country over the past fifteen years, a little part of me went with it. The teacher in me wanted to hitch a ride and go with the press – be there with the owner in a way.

I love prints, printmaking and printmakers, so it is this love that energizes me whenever I see a sign that someone agrees with me. When someone like Mavis sees possibilities for printmaking being more than a mechanical way to make images, but as a blend of science, technology, engineering and even mathematics, I glow inside.

It’s true my enthusiasm is inflated, like a balloon, because printmaking is seen by most people as a kind of “fine art” suitable for making framed things on the walls of homes of people of high accomplishment and wealth. This is truly fine art and it has been my source of income for half a century – and continues!

However, printmaking is to me greater than the sums of money it attracts. For the young, it is a way to learn science, technology, engineering and math. When these STEM education goals are blended with printmaking, Reading and Art generate a mix greater than the sum of these parts.

The reason is printmaking is a group effort. Call it a social art, for in many ways, printmaking can bring about interaction among people – even people at long distances away. That’s because printmaking is a media art, and it is media that has made global communication an ordinary thing.

I titled this essay “Chabana Fun” with the idea in mind to add my efforts to those of Mavis’ for her organization, Chabana Farms – a cooperative and network of small farmers in Botswana. The organization has a fund in order that contributors can invest in her project – money to provide materials, supplies, training and education. Land restoration and conservation – a sample of objectives in keeping with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Where kids are concerned, it may help to fund printmaking experiences because, let’s face it, printmaking is fun. Not only is it a grown-up fine art, it is fun, too, for all ages.