The Silkscreen Project
(1976-1988)

"In this country (USA) Carvalho first began working with community groups in 1975-76 as an artist-in-residence in an Arlington, Virginia, county program.
In an effort to make printmaking accessible to a broad community of teenagers, adults, and senior citizens who had had no previous art experience, Carvalho developed easy and inexpensive sikscreen techniques. 
The following year, the artist took her ideas for community art to New York, where she began working as artist-in-residence at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery. There she conceived and developed the Silkscreen Project
(1976-88), which aimed to teach collective silkscreen printing to diverse community and political groups so that they could make banners, posters, and murals for their political rallies and demonstrations. By using an uncomplicated silkscreening process, the groups could make several banners in a two- to three- hour workshop. The project soon became a printing resource center for the communities' political activities.
For important demonstrations, such as the Nuclear Disarmament March (June 1982), more than a hundred different groups gathered to silkscreen some four hundred banners during a two-month period. The tee-shirts, posters, flyers, or "walking" murals were produced collectively and then identified by the name, the Silkscreen Project. Due to the collective nature of the enterprise, the artist seldom made her own objects for these events. One exception, however, was a banner the artist made for the Nuclear Disarmament March. Unfortunately, there is very little visual documentation of either the workshops or the group events for which the objects were made. Considered ephemeral, they were generally discarded after they were used."

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(Julia P. Herzberg)