We’d like to take a moment to reach out to everyone in our community to address concerns about COVID-19, and the current global situation.
Firstly, we hope everybody is in, or preparing to be in, a safe situation. Our hearts go out to every single person, family, and business affected by this pandemic. We also hope everybody is keeping up with news updates from verified sources (such as the World Health Organization); doing their best at quarantining and social distancing themselves (although we understand that the ability to quarantine may be a privileged position for some); and just generally keeping their bodies and minds as healthy as possible.
For eight years, Bottleneck Gallery has been supported by the absolute best art community including: buyers and fans, artists, and screen printers. We’re always in awe of just how compassionate, talented, and empathetic the community we are surrounded by is, but we’d also like to acknowledge that sometimes, vital background members of the community don’t get as much credit as they deserve. In light of the literal backbone of this community being heavily impacted by COVID-19, we’d like to shine a spotlight on the screen printers and screen printing shops that have helped the Bottleneck and the art community as a whole.
There aren’t that many screen printing shops in the world, and we’re proud to work with some of the best out there. Screen printing, despite potentially being automated for screen layers, still requires incredible knowledge, skill, and human labor to pull off, and the printers we work with are wildly talented. Screen printing shops make the majority of their income from event posters and local business, and with COVID-19 affecting both of those directly, they are feeling the brunt of it.
Due to this, we have been working hard to create as many jobs for the screen printer shops we’ve worked with, in an effort to help ease the financial burden they’re taking on. We try to balance our releases between digital and screen printing, but starting now, we’re veering heavily into creating new jobs for screen printers. Over the last 24 hours, we’ve committed to over 27 new screen printing projects, and we hope we can keep that momentum going in the coming weeks as things develop.
In addition, we thought it would be useful to supply contact information for all of the screen print shops we work with. These are vetted, professional, and brilliant shops, and if anybody has any work for them, please feel free to reach out to them directly:
Bottleneck Gallery is currently working under strict safety measures, making sure that all of our employees are safe. Releases and outgoing shipments are not currently being impacted, but this may, however, change day to day as the City updates us on the current status of the virus in NYC and if there will be any mandates on closures, etc. We will keep everyone updated if such changes do occur.
Please stay safe and informed, wash your hands and thank you for being a part of our family.