The exhibition on the German artist Käthe Kollwitz at the IKON gallery in Birmingham is accompanied by an academic symposium with speakers from Museum, Art History and German Studies.

This symposium explores the life and work of the German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945). It examines her extensive and varied oeuvre, which encompassed printmaking, drawing and sculpture, and discusses this in relation to wider socio-political and cultural contexts in Germany and beyond. Kollwitz’s works are considered through a series of short papers and roundtable discussion. This is a unique chance to listen to academics, curators and writers talking about the impact of Kollwitz in a gallery setting surrounded by the artist’s own work.

The symposium is free of charge – booking is essential. Please book online or call IKON on 0121 248 0708. Please note that online booking closes at 5pm on Friday 13 October.

Programme

10.00 -10.30am
Coffee and registration

10.30am
Jonathan Watkins (Ikon)
Frances Carey (British Museum)

11.15-11.45am
Dorothy Price (University of Bristol): Imagining the Maternal

11.45-12.15pm
Elizabeth Kajs (University of Bristol): Motherhood at the Centre: Connecting Creativity and Reproduction in Käthe Kollwitz’s Artistic Practice

Discussion – Chair Frances Carey

12.35-2pm
Lunch (own arrangements) and Kollwitz exhibition

2.00-2.30pm
Shulamith Behr (Courtauld Institute of Art): Kollwitz through the Eyes of Women Art Critics: The “Hieroglyphic Language of Drawing” and Gendering of Authorship

2.30-3pm
Nina Lübbren (Anglia Ruskin University): Kollwitz: A Printmaker's Sculpture

Discussion – Chair Camilla Smith

3.20-3.50pm: Tea/coffee and comfort break

3.50-4.20pm
Nicholas Martin (University of Birmingham): Petrified Grief: The First World War in Käthe Kollwitz’s Art and Writing

4.20-4.50pm: Camilla Smith (University of Birmingham): Kollwitz during the 1930s: An Artist between Resistance and Conformity

Discussion – Chair Dorothy Price

5.15-6pm: Round table discussion: Kollwitz, legacy and sites of remembrance Lord Max Egremont and Frances Carey (chaired by Jonathan Watkins)

*NOTE: Due to unforeseen circumstances, the date of this program has been changed*

Learning and Teaching with Rembrandt: Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to the Master Etcher
New date!
Saturday, October 28, 2017 at the Johnson Museum

This daylong symposium will examine how both pedagogical approaches and increased watermarks data for Rembrandt's prints can be used along with traditional connoisseurship to answer questions about Rembrandt as a printmaker--and raise new ones. Speakers will discuss cross-disciplinary projects and collaborative research in academic collections, and how they extend the reach of existing knowledge about Rembrandt's practice. A panel discussion will explore the teaching of Rembrandt's prints from a variety of perspectives in different settings, including the university, the encyclopedic museum, and the conservation studio.

Registration is free; contact Elizabeth Saggese at eas8@cornell.edu or 607-254-4642 to reserve a space.


Keynote presenters

Erik Hinterding, Curator of Prints, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
"Rembrandt's Paper: State of the research and where we go from here"

Susan Donahue Kuretsky, Professor of Art on the Sarah Gibson Blanding Chair, Vassar College
"In Love with Line: Tales of Teaching with Rembrandt"

Additional presentations by Andaleeb Badiee Banta, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College; Stephanie Dickey, Queen's University; Margaret Holben Ellis, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; C. Richard Johnson, Jr., Cornell University; Elizabeth Nogrady, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College; Nadine Orenstein, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Gregory Page, Cornell University; Lisa Pincus, Cornell University; and Andrew C. Weislogel, Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University.

Support for this symposium has been generously provided by Ronni Lacroute, Cornell Class of 1966.

http://museum.cornell.edu/calendar/learning-and-teaching-rembrandt-cross-disciplinary-approaches-master-etcher


Lines of Inquiry: Learning from Rembrandt's Etchings
Exhibition on view September 23-December 17, 2017

In this exhibition, more than sixty impressions from across Rembrandt's oeuvre will show the artist's process, including how he made changes to his plates, and detail his use of a variety of printing supports.

Works from the collections of Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, Syracuse, and Yale Universities, Oberlin and Vassar Colleges, the University of Kansas, the Morgan Library & Museum, and private collections will feature subject matter ranging from portraits and self-portraits to genre scenes, religious narratives, landscapes, study plates, and academic nude studies.

Lines of Inquiry has been organized by the Johnson Museum in collaboration with the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, where it will be on view in 2018.

http://museum.cornell.edu/exhibitions/lines-of-inquiry-learning-from-rembrandt-etchings
http://www2.oberlin.edu/amam/LinesofInquiry.html

Every three years, an exceptional event opens in Chamalières and in its surrounding region : "The International Triennial of Prints and Original Engravings". Small format prints will be presented in an international competition gathering 200 artists from all over the world. Furthermore, there will be many exhibitions to see.

Widely known for her radical engagement with issues of race, gender and sexuality, Kara Walker is one of the most successful and celebrated artists today. Her print series, Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), 2005 will be on display from June 17 – October 22, 2017 in celebration of its recent acquisition by TMA. It features 15 of the artist’s signature black silhouette figures in silkscreen layered over enlarged wood-engravings of Civil War scenes taken from Harper’s Pictorial History, first published in 1866. By uniting her contemporary re-imagining of events from an African-American perspective with the historical record, Walker creates a powerful visual statement that challenges the conventional one-sided textbook account of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. This exhibition is supported in part by the H. L. Thompson, Jr. Family Fund and the Ohio Arts Council.

Over the centuries, Japanese print designers have risen to the challenge of capturing the night in all its various moods. Whether presented as a boundary, a presence, or a frame of mind, the hours of darkness have provided a rich subject for the exploration of aesthetic ideas and artistic practice.

In the earliest prints featured in this exhibition, the darkness of the late evening serves as an almost theatrical backdrop where nighttime is a setting for action. In works by Okumura Masanobu (1686–1764) and Suzuki Harunobu (1725?–1770), the night is often rendered as a solid wall of black placed behind figures, lit only by the glow of lanterns or hovering fireflies. By the 19th century, the evening itself becomes the focus, defined not by the absence of the sun but by the presence of the moon and stars whose modest light seems to inspire a more philosophical approach. This is especially true in the prints of Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), whose night skies, seemingly unlit, arch over scenic landscapes where townspeople and travelers are reduced in both size and stature, making them spectators as well as participants.

This refinement of nocturnal perception is developed further in the 20th century, as artists explored the complexity of night shadows and the moon’s reflection on water. Perhaps no one created more haunting images in Japanese printmaking than Kawase Hasui (1883–1957), an artist obsessed with depicting the evening’s aura. In his hands, the faint light seems to emanate from the landscape, heightening the intensity of vision rather than diminishing it.

In Hasui’s work and in all the nocturnal prints in this presentation—each drawn from the Art Institute’s permanent collection—the complexity of the dark is more clearly brought to light.

This exhibition features a selection of modern livres d’artiste or limited edition, illustrated books and prints that were inspired by classical and mythological texts. Created largely by the French School of Paris artists that includes Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Aristide Maillol among others, these innovative and original prints highlight the artist book’s importance as a vehicle to treat a range of Greek and Roman literary themes written by Ovid, Virgil and other classical poets and playwrights. With their classicizing designs of antique texts that focus upon themes of love, imaginary idyllic landscapes and human mortality, these illustrated books exemplify how major artists from the late 19th and early 20th century, through their imaginative reconnection to age-old narratives and mythological figures, metaphorically assert the aesthetic and personal values of western classical tradition. This exhibition display is drawn from the Toledo Museum of Art’s permanent collection.

Commemorating five hundred years since Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to a Wittenberg church door, the art museum is organizing an exhibition exploring the impact of the Italian Renaissance and the Reformation through the prints of Albrecht Dürer and his contemporaries. It follows the development of Dürer’s genius from his apprenticeship through the eve of the Reformation. The exhibition offers insights into his innovative use of printmaking, his patrons, and humanistic friends.

Visitors will experience the artistic, cultural, and political changes that occurred leading up to Luther’s defiant act. The art museum will collaborate with other Cincinnati institutions in the commemoration.

A symposium to be held at the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester, Massachusetts

This symposium is being organized in conjunction with the Cape Ann Museum’s special exhibition Drawn from Nature & on Stone: The Lithographs of Fitz Henry Lane (October 7, 2017 – March 4, 2018) and Fitz Henry Lane Online, a catalogue raisonné and resource tool created by the Museum. The symposium will feature papers by six scholars working in fields related to printmaking that explore such diverse topics as how race and race relations were portrayed in print following the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863; the role women artists and artisans played in printmaking during the 19th century; and how the rise of industrialization in towns such as Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts, affected the careers of Fitz Henry Lane and other print makers.

The symposium will be held in the Cape Ann Museum’s auditorium and will be a day-long event. Space is limited for this event and seats are available on a first come, first served basis. Cost for the full day symposium is $35 and includes a boxed lunch and admission to the Museum and the Lane lithography exhibition. Tickets are available online at Eventbrite (use External Link below).

SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM
9:15 Registration

10:00 Opening Remarks

10:00 to 12:00 Morning Session

Helena Wright, Curator, Division of Graphic Art, at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution – "Fitz Henry Lane in Lowell"

Marie-Stephanie Delamaire, Associate Curator, Fine Arts, at Winterthur Museum and Joan Irving, Winterthur Paper Conservator and affiliated professor at the University of Delaware – "Fine or Commercial Lithography: A Cultural and Material Reappraisal of Fanny Palmer’s Prints Published by Currier & Ives"

Rebecca Szantyr, Fellow in the Department of Prints and Drawings at Yale – "Rock, Paper, Press: Collecting Prints and Geological Knowledge in the 1820s"

12:00 to 1:00 Lunch Break

1:00 to 3:00 Afternoon Session

Christine Garnier, PhD candidate at Harvard – "Assembling the Runaway: Self-Liberation and Visual Games of the American Civil War"

Ellen Sondag, Adjunct faculty member at the Academy of Art University, San Francisco, CA – "Representing Firefighters: Conflagration of the Masonic Hall, Philadelphia"

Margaretta Lovell, Professor of American Art, University of California, Berkeley – "F. H. Lane’s Lithographs, Robert Bennett Forbes, Pirates of the China Sea"

3:00 to 3:30 Questions/Closing Remarks

3:30 to 5:00 Exhibition Viewing

Processes & Permutations: Prints by Leonardo Drew is on view August 23 through December 8, 2017, in the Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art, Modlin Center Booth Lobby. Leonardo Drew (born 1961) is an African American contemporary artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He is known for his large-scale sculptural installations, massive accumulations of what appear to be found objects. In reality, his sculptures are made mostly of new materials — such as wood, rusted iron, cotton, paper, and mud ― that he intentionally subjects to processes of weathering, burning, oxidization, and decay. Jutting out from a wall or freestanding room-size installations, his works evoke the detritus of urban living and the cyclical nature of existence.

The works on view demonstrate the artist’s similar approach to process, experimentation, and materiality in the making of prints. Each work in the series is the result of a complex exploration of printmaking processes coupled with permutations of layering and the juxtaposing of diptych plates. The print CPP8 uses a flat bite toner transfer with soft ground etching printed in graphite ink on black gampi paper chine collé, while the other three prints incorporate hard ground etching modified by a crackle technique using egg white and gum arabic painted on the plate by the artist and allowed to constrict and crackle in unusual patterns by heating the plate.


*Also on view is "The Personal is Political: Images of Women from the Harnett Print Study Center" [August 23, 2017 - July 2, 2018].

Organized to commemorate the anniversary of World War I, this exhibition focuses on the impact of the war on the visual arts. Moving chronologically from its outbreak to the decade after the armistice, World War I and the Visual Arts highlights the diverse ways artists represented the horrors of modern warfare. The works on view reflect a variety of responses, ranging from nationalist enthusiasm to a more somber reflection on the carnage and mass devastation that resulted.

The exhibition, drawn mainly from the collection of The Met and supplemented with select loans, includes prints, drawings, photographs, illustrated books, posters, periodicals, World War I trading cards from the Museum's celebrated Burdick Collection, and other documentary material. This exhibition reveals how artists—including Otto Dix, C.R.W. Nevinson, George Grosz, Käthe Kollwitz, Fernand Léger, Gino Severini, and Edward Steichen—reflected a myriad of styles, approaches, ideologies, and mediums in response to the war and how it influenced modern art.