This seminar in the Kultura Moderna series investigates how books, magazines, typography, and graphic design became powerful tools for cultural experimentation in Ukraine during the turbulent years of revolution and state-building in the early twentieth century. At a moment when political institutions and cultural identities were being reimagined, artists, writers, and designers turned to the printed page to ask a fundamental question: what should a modern Ukrainian culture look like? Focusing on the emergence of a vibrant print culture in Kyiv and beyond, the seminar examines how print, illustration, and design became instruments of artistic innovation and cultural expression.

Kultura Moderna course description:
This eight-week course explores the vibrant and diverse culture of Ukrainian modernism through art, design, literature, music, architecture, and dance. Focusing on the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, it examines how Ukrainian artists and cultural practitioners engaged with modernity while drawing on local traditions and transnational influences. Against the backdrop of rapid social and political change—from the final decades of the Russian and Habsburg empires through revolution, independence, and the formation of Soviet Ukraine—the course considers the complex historical circumstances in which new forms of artistic and cultural expression emerged.

UCL History of Art Department and UCL Art Museum are pleased to announce a one-day conference presenting new research and discussion on the histories and futures of print. Drawing from curatorial, artistic and academic perspectives, speakers will address this protean medium in ways that move between artistic, material and critical histories and practice, reflecting also on the role of prints in teaching and research.

As UCL celebrates its 200th anniversary, this event also gives us an opportunity to honour a beloved colleague, Professor David Bindman, whose brilliant scholarship and enthusiasm for print and the graphic arts, and major contribution to the intertwined histories of the History of Art Department and UCL Art Museum, continues to inspire students, friends and colleagues.

10.30 – 10.50 Welcome and Introduction Richard Taws (UCL, Head of History of Art) and Andrea Fredericksen (Head of UCL Art Collections)

10.50 – 11.30 Esther Chadwick (Courtauld Institute of Art) ‘An Unfathomable Sea: Gillray and Tax’

11.30 – 12.10 Marika Takanishi Knowles (University of St Andrews) ‘‘Why are they so dark?’: On the Accessibility of Early Modern Prints, from Subject Matter to Storage Formats’

12.10 – 12.50 Olenka Horbatsch (British Museum, Dept. of Prints & Drawings) ‘Printmaking in Prague: Art at the Court of Rudolf II’

12.50 – 13.40 Break for lunch

13.40 – 14.20 Allison Stielau (UCL, History of Art) ‘The Corners That Held Them: Schongauer’s Flight Into Egypt and the Rectilinear Imperative of Print’

14.20 – 15.00 Paul Coldwell (University of the Arts London) ‘Working with Archives and Collections’

15.00 – 15.30 Break

15.30 – 16.10 Isabelle Sagraves (UCL, History of Art) ‘Félix Buhot’s Multiple Baptisms: Identity and Interpretation in Buhot’s Japonisme Etchings’

16.10 – 16.50 Aparna Kumar (UCL, History of Art) ‘Writing the Border with Seher Shah’s Argument from Silence’

16:50 – 18:00 Reception (Roberts Foyer)

Book Launch: “Inspection Chambers”, Guest Speakers:
Dr. Irena Gordon, Chief Curator of the Petah Tikva Museum of Art.
Prof. Tamar Elor, Professor of Anthropology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Dalit Matatyahu, Senior Curator Israeli Art, Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
Orit Hofshi, Artist

Landscape is commonly defined as a section of natural scenery that can be seen from a single viewpoint - a totality perceived and interpreted by the human subject.
The word place carries a broad range of meanings, including: a portion of space available or designated for someone; a vacancy or unoccupied position; a position in a sequence or hierarchy; a person׳s rank or status; a geographical location, venue, or setting.

Orit Hofshi׳s (b. 1959, Kibbutz Matsuva) work articulates the intersecting interpretations of landscape, space, and place, as she repeatedly returns to the woodblocks underlying her images, exploring their multiplicity, their incarnations, their modes of existence, as well as their shadows, their ghosts. Her materials, formal, conceptual and mental actions themselves constitute a landscape, a space, and a place, carrying history and time, The affinity between culture and nature: earth and water, humans and animals, seem to emerge reciprocally, mourning and sustaining each other. It is an entity that constantly probes itself, its survival, its loss, as a visual archive that bears traces of the time of its formation.
The images dwell in their own ruins, perhaps in their becoming, in an intermediate realm between a concrete place and nowhere; they unfold as cross-sections, rhythms, resonances, while the cracked, tumultuous earth occupies most of the works׳ visual field. In a continuous seismic movement, in the absence of tranquil or controlled relationship between the figures in the works and the place they inhabit, and between the viewer and the landscape unfolded, the horizon is agitated and the surface disintegrates.
We are confronted with a hybrid language consisting of woodcut prints on handmade paper, as well as the woodblocks from which they were printed, unprinted carved woodblocks, ink and pencil drawings and paintings, rubbings, monotype prints, and spatial installations. In the exhibition Inspection Chambers, all of these converge into an overarching structure, a visual panorama that can be entered, studied, lived in, while evoking memories.
Grounded in woodcutting, Hofshi׳s monumental work undermines the distinction between printing block, image and object, between the original and reproduction, and it is shaped through a virtuoso, painterly and sculptural mastery of the various means of expression. Her images, their traces and echoes, accumulate into an archive from which she continually draws in creating new compositions and meanings.
Much like the infrastructure remnants and monuments, the human and animal figures are both witnesses to the occurrences and inseparable from them; they turn away from the events, and yet remain stubbornly rooted in them, in gestures of lament and grief.

The book, published concurrently with Inspection Chambers, presents a recent body of work alongside earlier pieces, pulling the viewer into the core of the dialogue between print and installation, the printed image and spatial experience. Print, as a reproductive, mobile, archival medium suggesting historical time, encounters installation as a one-off, site- and time-specific medium, a medium of the present.
The turbulent, all-encompassing views in her work are material and mental ruins experienced physically, beckoning the viewer to concentrate on the surface while delving into the depths of Hofshi’s modus operandi.

In the 1950s, the newly established Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts became an important advocate of trailblazing American printmakers by acquiring and exhibiting their early work. Based in Los Angeles, artists Sister Corita Kent (1918–1986) and June Wayne (1918–2011, founder of Tamarind Lithography Workshop) helped catalyze a vibrant and experimental period of printmaking in the postwar era. They also trained a generation of contemporary printmakers. This lecture takes a closer look at how the Achenbach Foundation supported these artists’ early careers, illuminating the important role played by the department’s cofounder, Hazel Jacobs Achenbach (1882–1962), and its first director, Irene Lagorio (1921–1994).  

Join Curator of Drawings, J. Paul Getty Museum, Stephanie Schrader for an after-hours tour of Five Centuries of Works on Paper: The Grunwald Center at 70, Part II at the Hammer Museum.

Capacity is limited. Visitors will be admitted on a first come, first served basis.

Since its establishment in 1956 with a gift of prints from Los Angeles collector Fred Grunwald, the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts has evolved into one of the nation’s foremost collections of works on paper. Over the decades, the Grunwald Center’s holdings have expanded through donations and acquisitions, and now comprise more than 45,000 prints, drawings, photographs, and artists’ books dating from the Renaissance to the present. Housed at the Hammer Museum since 1994, the Grunwald Center fosters learning and discovery through its collection, which is regularly presented in exhibitions and made accessible in its dedicated study room. This exhibition marks the 70th anniversary of the Grunwald Center, celebrating its history through a selection of significant works that reflect the collection’s breadth and diversity. It features over 70 works by artists including Albrecht Dürer, Daniel Hopfer, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Utagawa Hiroshige, Winslow Homer, Käthe Kollwitz, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Sonia Delaunay, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Judy Fiskin, Robert Heinecken, James Welling, Catherine Opie, Jasper Johns, Helen Frankenthaler, Julie Mehretu, James Turrell, Alison Saar, and Kara Walker.

Strange Land, music for voices, chamber ensemble, and electronics with projected media, is an immersive multimedia experience based on the Book of Revelation seen through modern eyes. It sings the long arrow of trepidation and consequence from ancient to future, confronting the collision of ages-old spiritual questions with our modern technological world and a dawning climate crisis, the specter of societal collapse, and forced migration. This concert event is accompanied by etchings by Brian D. Cohen on copper plates, enlarged to colossal proportions and projected in minute detail on the IMAX screen.

Tickets for Strange Land are available! Boston Museum of Science Mugar Omni (IMAX) Theater, Wednesday, September 23 at 7:30pm. The event will be repeated the following evening at the Goel Center for Theater & Dance, Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire.

*The Boston MOS show requires tickets (link above); the Exeter show is free and tickets are not required.



music / Gregory W Brown
text / Todd Hearon and Scripture
etchings / Brian D Cohen
composed for and premiered by Nightingale Vocal Ensemble, Benjamin Perry, director, with members of the Juventas Chamber Ensemble and Jonas Budris, tenor.

Abstract forms converge
Five Centuries of Works on Paper: The Grunwald Center at 70, Part II

Jun 7 – Oct 25, 2026

Since its establishment in 1956 with a gift of prints from Los Angeles collector Fred Grunwald, the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts has evolved into one of the nation’s foremost collections of works on paper. Over the decades, the Grunwald Center’s holdings have expanded through donations and acquisitions, and now comprise more than 45,000 prints, drawings, photographs, and artists’ books dating from the Renaissance to the present. Housed at the Hammer Museum since 1994, the Grunwald Center fosters learning and discovery through its collection, which is regularly presented in exhibitions and made accessible in its dedicated study room. This exhibition marks the 70th anniversary of the Grunwald Center, celebrating its history through a selection of significant works that reflect the collection’s breadth and diversity. It will feature over 70 works by artists including Albrecht Dürer, Daniel Hopfer, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Utagawa Hiroshige, Winslow Homer, Käthe Kollwitz, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Sonia Delaunay, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Judy Fiskin, Robert Heinecken, James Welling, Catherine Opie, Jasper Johns, Helen Frankenthaler, Julie Mehretu, James Turrell, Alison Saar, and Kara Walker.

Beginning in the 1980s, Tamarind embraced a philosophy of cultural diplomacy, recognizing printmaking's ability to foster dialogue, solidarity, and creative exchange across diverse communities. Tamarind Goes Global (1985-2020) examines how Tamarind Institute transformed from a national workshop into an internationally connected center for contemporary printmaking. Drawn from the Tamarind Archive Collection at UNM Art Museum and archival materials from the Center for Southwest Research, it highlights collaborations that encouraged artists from varied cultural and political contexts to explore their backgrounds and find common ground. Also on view for the first time are interviews with former and current directors, printers, and artists, and documentary film footage of the workshop's relocation from Los Angeles to Albuquerque.

Layered Lives gathers a constellation of Cuban women artists whose practices unfold within an aesthetic shaped by circulation, memory and embodiment. They work across diverse media and distinct artistic vocabularies, offering intimate and inventive perspectives on identity, spirituality, migration, and the lived realities of women in Cuba and its diasporas.
Drawing on hydrofeminist frameworks, Layered Lives foregrounds care, connection and the sustaining of self and others as central to contemporary Cuban art. Spanning sixty works from the last three decades, the exhibition situates each work within a “liquid perspective:” a mode of seeing that privileges relationality, collectivity and permeability over isolation and fixity.
Each work offers multiple points of entry, unfolding a labyrinth of layered narratives that immerse viewers in the complexities of Cuban subjectivity. In these practices, the sea’s tides resonate with cycles of labor and care; its depths hold what official histories have overlooked; its horizon evokes desires that traverse political and geographic borders. Within the exhibition, the female experience emerges not as a metaphor but as a deliberate mode of attention allowing silenced and subsumed stories to resurface as radical counter-histories.
Drawn from the Discoveries in Art Certilman Family Collection, the exhibition features the celebrated artists: Belkis Ayón (1967–1999), Ariamna Contino (b. 1984), Aimée García (b. 1972), Alejandra Glez (b. 1990), Elsa Mora (b. 1971), Rocío García Nuez (b. 1955), Mabel Poblet Pujol (b. 1986), Sandra Ramos (b. 1969), Adislen Reyes (b. 1983), and Linet Sánchez Gutiérrez (b. 1989)
The exhibition curated by Arianne Kolb and Sara Garzón with the assistance of Caroline Davis and Allison Westerfield.
This exhibition is organized by Landau Traveling Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA.

This Is America: Selections from PAMM’s Collection marks the semiquincentennial––the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence––through artworks drawn from the permanent collection of Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM). Bringing together works by artists from diverse cultural backgrounds and across multiple time periods and media, the exhibition presents a multiplicity of perspectives on American history and identity. Featuring artists such as José Bedia, Judy Chicago, Alfredo Jaar, and Rashid Johnson, alongside Miami-based contemporaries including Eddie Arroyo, Thomas Bils, Gonzalo Hernández, and Sandra Ramos, This Is America situates national narratives within the cultural dynamics of Miami.