The devastating stock market crash of 1929 triggered the Great Depression, the worst economic crisis in the history of the United States. At the height of the Depression in 1933, nearly 13 million people—roughly 25 percent of the workforce—were unemployed. In response, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created an economic relief program known as the New Deal to offer employment to struggling Americans. The Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federally funded agency, hired some ten thousand artists to produce work for public buildings and traveling exhibitions as part of the Federal Art Project (FAP).

From coast to coast, the WPA supported artists who created paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and murals for the American public. These artists drew on their everyday experiences as they depicted their own communities in a wide range of locations from urban centers to rural outposts. The WPA employed such established figures as John Steuart Curry as well as newcomers like Jacob Lawrence, providing materials, community, and income at a critical moment in their careers. After the WPA was closed in 1943, works of art produced under federal sponsorship were allocated to institutions across the country, including what is today the Blanton Museum of Art. The museum’s allotment serves as the basis for Art in Every Corner and is displayed in the context of pieces made by WPA artists before or after their periods of federal employment, encouraging an exploration and celebration of the dynamic impact of the WPA’s programs on artists who represented every corner of American life during the 1930s and ’40s.

We are pleased to announce that a podcast created by the New Books Network on our recent publication on the European print trade is now available online. Please see the link below.

The Burgeoning European Print Trade is the culmination of years of archival research into the distribution of prints from Antwerp between ca. 1550 and 1640 that illuminates the activity of numerous Antwerp print publishers, including but not limited to: Hieronymus Cock, Volcxken Diericx, the Galles, and the Wierixes. Moreover, the distribution of hundreds of thousands of prints from Antwerp – both plain and hand-colored – is discussed not only from the perspective of the print publishers, but also in terms of the markets where their work was in demand, and the involvement of the Plantin-Moretus family of booksellers, who organized many essential practical matters in support of this trade. Throughout, significant new information on how these prints were ordered, the quantities in which they were sold, and, unprecedented, the prices each of these print sellers asked for their own wares is documented in detail.

Thanks to the thoughtful layout and high-quality production of this publication for the Harvey Miller series, it is a pleasure to page through and enjoy as an attractive publication in of itself (see here for more information).

If you have any questions concerning our book, please feel free to contact us.

Sincerely, Karen Bowen and Dirk Imhof
(bowenimhof@gmail.com)

Manneken Press is pleased to announce the release of a trio of limited edition prints—its first project with New York–based artist Glenn Goldberg. The prints, titled "Empyrean (1)", "Empyrean (2)", and "Empyrean (3)", are monochromatic etchings with aquatint that employ delicate brushwork, intricate stippling, and layered tonal fields to create images that feel both graphic and quietly meditative. The title Empyrean refers to the highest heaven or celestial realm in ancient cosmologies, suggesting a space of light, elevation, and contemplation.
The Empyrean prints feature recurring motifs of birds, floral forms, and abstracted natural elements, organized around central anchors and rendered in rich tones of black and gray. Goldberg has described his work as driven by an interest in structure, hierarchies, and moods found in nature, even though his images are invented rather than painted directly from observation. His process is slow, layered, and meticulous, emphasizing patience, attention, and a kind of “quiet intensity” in the act of creating.
“I’m interested in making images that are both orderly and fragile,” Goldberg notes. “The birds, plants, and marks are less about depicting nature and more about creating a place where attention can slow down and quiet things can be felt.”
The Empyrean prints are etchings with aquatint, hand-printed in black ink on 27 x 20 inch Somerset Velvet Soft White paper in limited editions of twenty impressions. The image size is 18 x 12 inches. The prints are published by and available from Manneken Press.
The Empyrean prints will have their public debut in Manneken Press’s booth (#A13) at the IFPDA Print Fair, April 9–12, 2026, at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City.

The fiftieth annual meeting of the American Historical Print Collectors Society will take place in New Bedford, Massachusetts from June 9th through June 11th, 2026. The program will include a day trip to Nantucket Island and an optional session on June 8th at the Heritage Museum in Sandwich, where the AHPCS held its first annual meeting in 1975. The first two days will be spent at the New Bedford Whaling Museum exploring the museum’s rich collections documenting the region’s culture and history. A series of lectures will include talks on whaling and maritime prints, print-related scrimshaw, prints illustrating Melville’s Moby Dick, and the etchings by local artists R. Swain Gifford and LeRoy Yale. Curator-led tours will focus on the prints on view in the museum’s galleries and provide access to additional prints in the museum’s Research Room. Walking tours will visit historic sites in the city including the Seamen’s Bethel, the Mariners’ Home, the Customs House, and the New Bedford Public Library. Thursday will feature a trip to Nantucket Island for a curator-led tour of the Nantucket Whaling Museum. Optional afternoon activities include a historic walking tour of the town or a bus tour of historic sites on the island. Registration is now open. For more information go to https://ahpcs.org/newbedford/ Membership in the AHPCS is not required, but If you are not already a member of the AHPCS, please consider joining. Membership fees begin at $50. If you’re unable to come for the full three days, a special one-day rate of $100 includes admission to the New Bedford Whaling Museum, the morning lecture program, and other activities at the Whaling Museum. Meals are available for an extra charge. For more information, contact Nancy Finlay at nfinlay@outlook.com

Paper Trails: Latin American Art in Print (1950-1995) features important portfolios of modern and contemporary Latin American printmaking in the collection of the Blanton Museum of Art. During the 1960s, as interest in Latin American art increased internationally, curated print sets emerged as portable exhibitions showcasing the art of the region and of particular countries to audiences abroad. This show explores prominent portfolios produced in the context of a regional printmaking boom that was bolstered by a network of international biennials, key printmaking studios, and the support of transnational corporations. It will feature print sets produced in influential workshops in Mexico and Puerto Rico, while also featuring print sets from other countries, including Bolivia and Paraguay, whose art is seldom exhibited in the United States.

When two technologies converged in the first half of the sixteenth century—artillery warfare and monumental printmaking—a new genre was the result. The monumental siege print was an experiment in how to depict distance between enemies as the defining condition of war. In this talk, Carolyn Yerkes explores a series of enormous woodcuts created in the German-speaking lands of northern Europe during a period of constant war, political turmoil, and religious strife.

The unique beauty of the American Southwest has inspired generations of artists including printmakers. Thanks to Barbara J. Thompson’s generous gift of fine art prints on display in "Southwest Impressions: Prints from the Barbara J. Thompson Collection", the Petrie Institute of Western American Art is able to tell these multi-faceted stories of inspiration, exchange, and artistic excellence. In conjunction, this symposium will consider an array of American printmakers’ stories and techniques from the late 1800s into the mid-1900s as they sought to capture and express their impressions of the region.

"Deep Cuts: Block Printing Across Cultures" explores the world's oldest and most versatile method of making multiple images. More than 150 works from Asia, Europe, and the Americas present the medium as both a means of creative expression and a vehicle for mass production that enabled images and ideas to circulate widely. Textiles, prints, and books offer intricate patterns and striking imagery that reveal block printing’s global history, from the patterned fabrics of India to the illustrated books of the Kelmscott Press to modern artistic experiments by German Expressionist artists and contemporary makers like Christiane Baumgartner. The exhibition also includes a section developed with Los Angeles–based Block Shop, highlighting how contemporary makers continue to reinterpret this enduring art form.

This exhibition explores the intersections of poetry and printmaking in the Turner collection. Discover work by over 20 poets, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Billy Collins, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Naomi Shihab Nye, Anne Sexton and more, alongside prints inspired by poetry. Featuring letterpress printing, illustrated books, and contemporary broadsides, prepare to be delighted by the poetic art of print.

Vivid prints of divinities are part of daily life for Hindus in India and around the world, used for worship in homes, factories, and offices, as well as for adornment on cars, calendars, computers, and shop counters. The art world has historically overlooked these images, often called “calendar art,” because they are inexpensive and mass produced. But they have a rich and fascinating history in and influence on Indian art, religion, and society.

“Divine Color: Hindu Prints from Modern Bengal” explores these popular prints’ origins and powerful impacts. When Indian artists encountered the new printmaking technology of lithography in 19th-century Calcutta (today Kolkata), then the capital of British India, they used it to reinvent devotional art. Depictions of Hindu gods became more realistic, colorful, and accessible than ever before. Shrines in homes across the economic spectrum came to host these images, mixed and matched according to a family’s taste. Though the lithographs of Hindu gods created by Bengali artists were not expensive, they were valuable in other senses. Sold in the bustling bazaars of Calcutta where presses competed to attract customers, the prints served an important role in home worship, satisfied the artistic sensibilities of a Bengali society that had absorbed European fine art values, and helped to spread new political ideas. The exhibition considers how lithography gave these artists—who produced thousands of prints that traveled quickly across the nation—a means to change not just devotional but also artistic, political, and social life.

A highlight of the exhibition is the MFA’s collection of 38 vibrant lithographs from 19th-century Calcutta. The MFA is one of only two American museums that collects this material. This exhibition, the first of its kind in the United States, features more than 100 objects, including other prints, paintings, sculpture, and textiles from the Museum’s South Asian collection and select loans. It culminates in an immersive room developed in collaboration with the Delhi-based Tasveer Ghar—an organization dedicated to collecting, digitizing, and documenting South Asian popular visual culture—featuring wall-sized collages of 20th-century popular images.