Lonely Hearts: New Prints 2021/Summer presents 42 new artworks selected by Christiane Baumgartner. “My selection is my very personal statement about the time we are living in,” Baumgartner commented, noting the relative scarcity of human presence and sense of desolation that emerged in her selection of works, all of which were made since the COVID-19 pandemic began. “There is work showing empty streets or empty billboards, for instance—but there is also abstract or non-figurative work that contains a certain concentration or contemplation.”

This in-person and online exhibition brings together works by 36 artists across the country and internationally. Baumgartner’s selection includes a wide variety of classic printmaking techniques such as woodcut, drypoint, and mezzotint, as well as mixed-media works and print-based videos, reflecting her interest in works that present traditional techniques in a contemporary context.

The radical, inventive art of Jasper Johns (b. 1930) continues to influence today’s artists like few others. In an unprecedented collaboration, the Whitney and the Philadelphia Museum of Art will stage a simultaneous retrospective—the largest of Johns’s seven-decade career—that offers a fresh take on the living legend. From his iconic flags to lesser-known and recent works, the exhibition will feature paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints—nearly 500 artworks across the two museums, many of which are from Johns’s personal collection and will be shown publicly for the first time.

Inspired by the artist’s long-standing fascination with mirroring and doubles, each half of the exhibition will act as a reflection of the other, inviting viewers to look closely to discover the themes, methods, and coded visual language that echo across the two venues. A visit to either museum will provide a vivid chronological survey; a visit to both will offer an innovative and immersive exploration of the many phases, masterworks, and mysteries of Johns’s still-evolving career.

In 1952, Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) transformed abstract art with her first soak-stained painting, Mountains and Sea, which she made by pouring and brushing thinned out oil paint over raw canvas placed on the floor. Her deliberate movements from above resulted in abstract works that seem both intentional and spontaneous. A key figure in the development of color-field painting, she was a tireless experimenter with color, form, and technique over the course of her life.

When Frankenthaler began creating prints in 1961, she had to adapt to a medium that would involve collaboration and a new language of printmaking techniques. Asking questions that began, ‘Suppose I do…’ or ‘Suppose I try…’ she approached lithographs, screenprints, etchings, and woodcuts with curiosity and vision. Frankenthaler achieved the same balance of control and chance she cultivated in her painting practice through many annotated proofs, or trial prints, that traced her progress towards the final impression. She, along with other artists, contributed to a printmaking renaissance in the mid-20th-century, collaborating with master printmakers at studios like Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) in Long Island, Mixografia in Los Angeles, and Tyler Graphics, Ltd. in Bedford Village and Mount Kisco, New York.

Without Limits: Helen Frankenthaler, Abstraction, and the Language of Print celebrates the generous gift from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation of ten prints and six proofs that span five decades of the artist’s career. Her work is joined by that of other artists in the Blanton’s collection using the medium of print to capture and translate their own abstract visions.

From the artist's first drypoint etching, created in 2008 to raise funds for Senator Obama's presidential campaign, to monumental multi-colored aquatints, this survey presents every edition that Mehretu has created in collaboration with Gemini G.E.L., the renowned artists' workshop.

For more information please visit the external link below.

New Tamarind releases by Inka Bell and Ellen Lesperance, and favorites by Stuart Arends, Jim Dine, Louise Nevelson, Rashaad Newsome, Danielle Orchard, Deborah Remington, Fritz Scholder, Judy Tuwaletstiwa, June Wayne and Susan York.

On view by appointment or by chance, June 4 — 13
Make an appointment online at tamarind.unm.edu
Public closing reception, Sunday, June 12, 5—7 PM
Gallery hours, 11 AM—6 PM (closed on Mondays)

Introducing a new podcast called Platemark, a Podcast about Art and Ideas, with Ann Shafer and Ben Levy.

In season one over eight episodes, Ann and Ben and talk about issues facing the artworld with a focus on museums, curatorial work, critiques and studio visits, value (market and conceptual), redefining the art historical canon, and prints, printmaking, print fairs, and print publishing.

Our goal is to share our thoughts on the state of the sector including issues of decolonization and social justice, what it meant to us to be able to teach young artists in the print study room, why prints are the best, and how we did what we did. These conversations are meant to demystify the idea of the curator in the white tower and the museum as an imposing marble edifice.

To listen, please visit the external link below.

Join moderator Lisa Blas for a conversation with Alice Centamore, the Paris-based art historian and writer who will present on Simone Forti's "Newspaper Animations," and Silvia Benedetti, the New York-based curator and writer who will present on the relationship between the media and the artwork of Beatriz González.

To register please visit the external link below.

The Princeton Print Club will be the focus of a free webinar on Zoom at 2:00 EDT on Friday, May 28, 2021. Julie Mellby, Graphic Arts Curator, will present an illustrated history of the organization, joined by Marilyn Kushner, New York Historical Society, who will talk about the explosion of interest in printing and print collecting at that time, and by Alexandra Letvin, from the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, where they continue to circulate fine art prints to the students each semester as part of their Art Rental program.

This year we present the first major UK exhibition of woodcuts by leading Abstract Expressionist, Helen Frankenthaler.
Frankenthaler (1928–2011) is recognized among the most important American abstract artists of the 20th century, widely credited for her pivotal role in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting. She experimented tirelessly throughout her six-decade long career, producing a large body of work across multiple mediums. Opening ten years after her death, this exhibition shines a light on the artist’s groundbreaking woodcuts, which appear painterly and spontaneous with expanses of colour and fluid forms. It will reveal Frankenthaler as a trailblazer of the printmaking movement, who endlessly pushed possibilities through her experimentation.

Exhibition highlights include East and Beyond (1973), created by printing onto multiple blocks to avoid negative space and Cameo (1980) in which Frankenthaler introduced a new layered approach to colour using her ‘guzzying’ technique where she worked surfaces with sandpaper and dentist drills to achieve different affects. Frankenthaler’s masterpiece, Madame Butterfly (2000) is also not to be missed – sharing its title with the 1904 opera by Giacomo Puccini, the triptych’s light pastel colours and stained marks show Frankenthaler at her most expressive and lyrical. Created in collaboration with Kenneth Tyler and Yasuyuki Shibata from 46 woodblocks and 102 colours, the work measures over two metres in length and will occupy an entire room in the exhibition, along with a work proof and study to explore the complexity of its evocative title.

For more information please visit the external link below.

Sarah Kirk Hanley, leading expert on Enrique Chagoya's prints, will give a special presentation on Enrique Chagoya's etchings, artist's books, monotypes, and lithographs. Chagoya was the 2008 Des Moines Art Center Print Club Commissioned Print Artist, and The Art Center holds several Chagoya prints in the permanent collection.

Enrique Chagoya is a Bay Area painter and printmaker and a professor of Art Practice at Stanford University, and he uses political satire to question the nature of historical events, American history, and contemporary politics. Hanley has published several essays on the artist's editioned work and organized a retrospective of his prints in 2014. Hanley will discuss Chagoya's ongoing series of artist books and other print projects which are reinterpretations of Old Master images that tackle contemporary issues. This timely discussion lays the groundwork for the Goya work that will be featured at the Art Center this summer.

Sarah Kirk Hanley is an independent consulting expert and critic in the greater NYC area; and she writes extensively for Art21 Magazine and Art in Print.

For more information and to register for this free event please visit the external link below.