The Association of Print Scholars is pleased to award its fourth annual Collaboration Grant to Eric Benson, Ben Blount, Emmy Lingscheit, Guen Montgomery, and Maureen Warren. The grant of $1,000 will support Fake News and Lying Pictures: Political Prints in the Dutch Republic, a broadside workshop for students, scholars, and the general public at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), coinciding with an exhibition of the same name. The program will connect early modern printmaking to the present day and encourage appreciation for its continuing legacy and relevance.

Fake News and Lying Pictures will feature an in-gallery conversation with artists addressing issues such as race, gender, and sexuality, followed by demonstrations of printing and papermaking techniques. According to the organizers, the event will “provide a vitally important opportunity for creative voices [of marginalized communities] to be heard as well as for new audiences to be introduced to the medium of printmaking” and allow audiences to “learn about the historical, technical, and contemporary aspects of political printmakers and traditional papermaking methods.” The one-day workshop will begin with a discussion by artists Blount, Lingscheit, and Montgomery about their work and how it connects to historical broadsides. Afterwards, the artists will collaboratively design a broadside using letterpress and relief processes, which will then be printed by student members of the Noble Print Club, a campus printmaking collaborative, and distributed to attendees. The day will conclude with a papermaking demonstration at Fresh Press Agri-Fiber Paper Lab focused on sustainable production.

Ben Blount in the Print Studio

Maureen Warren is Curator of European and American Art at the Krannert Art Museum, UIUC and curator of the forthcoming exhibition, slated to open in August 2022, that shares the workshop’s title. Eric Benson is Associate Professor of Graphic Design at UIUC and developed Fresh Press as part of an interest in regional sustainable agricultural paper products. The three artists were selected for their skills in printmaking, as well as their perspectives on Black and LGBTQ+ issues. Ben Blount is a letterpress artist based in Evanston, Illinois; Emmy Lingscheit is Associate Professor of Printmaking at UIUC; and Guen Montgomery is a Teaching Assistant Professor of Studio Art at UIUC.

APS created its Collaboration Grant to encourage projects that bring together the print community through events such as lectures, conferences, workshops, and other public programs. Jurors were impressed by Fake News and Lying Pictures’ potential to “bring history to the present” through “strong outreach,” allowing the event to “demonstrate printing in the service of political activism today.”

Emma Amos, To Sit (With Pochoir), 1981. © Emma Amos; Courtesy RYAN LEE Gallery, New York.

This year’s jurors also awarded an Honorable Mention in the amount of $500 to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Black Women of Print for the collaborative program held in conjunction with the museum’s 2021 exhibition, Emma Amos: Color Odyssey. The virtual event will center on prints created by Black Women of Print members and inspired by Amos’s experimentation, subject matter, and activism. The program will feature a discussion between the artists and exhibition curator Laurel Garber.

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 are 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 around 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 2022 Collaboration Prize (deadline: January 31, 2022).

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