The Association of Print Scholars is pleased to award the third annual Collaboration Grant to Jennifer Chuong of Harvard University and Kailani Polzak of Williams College. The grant of $1,000 will support Imprinting Race, a two-day interdisciplinary event that will include a keynote lecture, studio workshop, and roundtable discussion that will explore printmaking’s role in tangibly shaping and challenging ideas of racial difference during the long eighteenth century.

Planned for Fall 2020, Imprinting Race will examine the role of engraving and intaglio printmaking in visualizing and circulating material images of bodies during a period when, according to Chuong and Polzak, “theories of human variety were being concretized into racial categories.” On the first day, five emerging scholars will be invited to discuss their scholarship on race and print during an intensive roundtable. This discussion will be followed by a lecture and workshop led by printmaker and publisher Curlee Raven Holton, which will focus on the relationship between ideas of race and the material qualities of print. The event will conclude with a broader discussion of issues raised and on the relationship between art practice and scholarship.

Jennifer Chuong

Kailani Polzak

Chuong and Polzak are early-career art historians and Junior Fellows in the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School, which is also supporting this event. Both have worked extensively on the intersections of race and print. Chuong is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and a historian of the art and architecture of the transatlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly as they relate to histories of science, environment, and race. Polzak is an Assistant Professor of Art at Williams College in Massachusetts. She specializes in European visual culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a particular focus on questions of intercultural contact, race, and colonialism in representations of the Pacific.

APS created its Collaboration Grant to encourage projects that bring together the print community through events like lectures, conferences, workshops, and other public programs. Jurors were impressed by Imprinting Race’s potential for a broad impact and the event’s timely combination of scholarship and materiality to develop a field with potential for future study.

Trisha Gupta

This year’s jurors also awarded an Honorable Mention in the amount of $500 to interdisciplinary artist and educator Trisha Gupta for her project Build a Bigger Table, Not a Higher Wall. This event will include a lecture and woodblock printing demonstration for 150 participants of all ages and skill levels, who will participate in art-making activities using recycled textiles and paper as a means to explore the stories and traditions of immigrants from a diverse range of cultures.

APS would like to thank this year’s jurors for their diligence and generosity in reading the submissions: Katherine Manthorne, Professor of Art History, Graduate Center, City University of New York; Ann Shafer, Independent Curator, Baltimore; and Christopher Sokolowski, Paper Conservator for Special Collections, Weissman Preservation Center, Harvard University.

APS is a non-profit organization that seeks to encourage the innovative and interdisciplinary study of printmaking by facilitating dialogue among its members, which is a diverse community of curators, collectors, academics, graduate students, artists, conservators, critics, independent scholars, and art dealers. Since its founding in 2014, over 500 people from all over the world have become members of APS.

For more information about the Collaboration Grant and other grants offered by APS, please visit our website. APS is currently accepting submissions for the 2021 Collaboration Prize (due January 31, 2021).

Please contact Christina Weyl and Britany Salsbury of the APS Grants Committee at grants@printscholars.org with any questions regarding this announcement.