How POP!NK created a slam-dunk benefit print for Carlos Rolón, Project Backboard and eBay

The Project

Carlos Rolón’s exquisitely intricate paintings, sculptures and installations straddle the line between art and activism. Solo showcases like 2024’s Hilos de Resurgimiento, 2018’s Outside/In and 2016’s Tropicaliza embrace a wide array of materials and found objects to explore profoundly personal themes of identity and inclusion. 

“What has always motivated me is to create work so that I can see myself, or a story I can relate to as a young Latino born and raised in Chicago in a blue-collar setting,” says Rolón (a.k.a. Dzine), whose work is included in the collections of Miami’s Bass Museum of Art, New York City’s Museo del Barrio and the Brooklyn Museum, among others.

Rolón partnered with eBay in 2019 to release a limited-edition benefit screenprint inspired by his multimedia piece “Gild the Lily (Caribbean Azulejo),” which juxtaposes images of rapturously colorful Caribbean flora with Azulejo, a form of painted, tin-glazed ceramic tile. All proceeds from the print aided nonprofit Project Backboard’s efforts to restore a basketball court and community center left in ruins when Hurricane Maria tore through Puerto Rico two years earlier. 

Rolón set out to translate “Gild the Lily (Caribbean Azulejo)” into a full-color, museum-quality release that carried over the original’s vibrancy and tactile expressiveness. The print needed to be affordable, but still suitable for editioning and framing — and Project Backboard required delivery of all 200 copies (as well as all 20 artist proofs) within three weeks’ time.

“We had worked with Carlos about a year earlier, and established a connection,” says POP!NK Editions co-founder Curtis William Readel. “After talking to him and Backboard, we determined the steps we had to take to make this print everything Carlos needed it to be.”

The Process

Screenprinting leverages a blade or squeegee moved across a mesh to transfer ink onto a substrate (e.g., paper), excluding any areas made impermeable to the ink by a blocking stencil. Colors are printed one at a time, necessitating a new screen for each additional layer of color the printer applies. 

POP!NK knew from previous projects that getting “Gild the Lily (Caribbean Azulejo)” done right and on schedule meant honing Rolón’s highly complex and technical image to as few screens/colors as possible. 

“For every print we do, we assess the client’s needs,” Readel says. “Most of the time, people come to us because they want an accurate representation of the image, translated through screenprinting. To get that, we have to figure out how many colors it can be or should be, and what processes we’re going to utilize. A piece like [‘Gild the Lily (Caribbean Azulejo)’] can be challenging to reproduce via screenprinting, especially when it comes to making the product affordable while keeping the integrity of the image.” 

POP!NK determined a four-color technique called CMYK printing would most accurately and adroitly translate Rolón’s lush floral elements, with a UV-gloss varnish to top off the Azulejo tile mosaic at the heart of the image. The CMYK process yields a vast spectrum of colors from just four colors (cyan, magenta, yellow and key/black) printed as tiny, overlapping Ben-Day dots — an aesthetic appropriated by pop-art pioneer Roy Lichtenstein for the comic book-inspired paintings that made him famous.

“When you’re hand-pulling each screen, you don’t want to over-complicate the process. If we’d broken [‘Gild the Lily (Caribbean Azulejo)’] into 10 or 12 colors, we were going to get very uncomfortable with our timeline and our due date,” Readel explains. “We are knowledgeable screenprinters, and we steer you and your project through the pitfalls. We take all the steps necessary to create the best possible screenprinted translation of your image or idea, and we make every effort to make the process both efficient and cost-effective.”

The Product

Rolón visited POP!NK’s Chicago studio for multiple proofing sessions to perfect the four-color CMYK process, and once the hand-mixed archival inks were finalized, “Gild the Lily (Caribbean Azulejo)” blossomed. 

“Collaborating directly with the artist at every stage helped us achieve an authentic final product,” Readel says. “We were reminded how important it is to balance artistic intention with technical precision.
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POP!NK delivered all 200 copies (and all 20 A/Ps) to Rolón’s studio on time. The eight-color, hand-pulled screenprint arrived on 18 x 24-inch Mohawk Superfine UltraWhite paper with deckled edges. After Rolón signed and numbered the edition, “Gild the Lily (Caribbean Azulejo)” was ready for its October 2019 release, sold at $400 per copy and offered in conjunction with eBay’s #Artober campaign. The edition sold out almost instantly. 

“Working with this print studio was a dream,” Rolón says. “They respected my vision and brought the piece to life with incredible attention to detail.”