Since 1962, Lou Stovall has lived and worked in Washington, D.C., but his artistic journey will come full circle next year, with a return to his birthplace of Athens, Georgia, to receive the Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Award from the Georgia Museum of Art. The museum presents this award annually to a living African American artist who has a strong connection to Georgia and has made significant but often lesser-known contributions to the visual arts tradition of the state. It is named for the couple who donated 100 works by African American artists from their collection to the museum and endowed a curatorial position there. Stovall will receive the award at the museum in April.

Stovall first encountered silkscreen printmaking at the age of 15, working at a grocery store. He was captivated by the practice and spent hours making prints, which eventually earned him a scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied before entering Howard University. As a student at Howard, he made posters for classmates and friends, lending his voice to matters both artistic and political. Early collaborators in these days included activist Stokely Carmichael and artists Sylvia Snowden and Lloyd McNeill.

After graduating, Stovall was inspired by many to give back to his community and teach young artists the craftsmanship he attained through continuous practice. He started Workshop, Inc., which initially focused on community posters and evolved into a highly respected printmaking facility. Over the years Stovall printed for many artists of international acclaim, such as Jacob Lawrence, Sam Gilliam, Elizabeth Catlett, Robert Mangold and Gene Davis. Alongside his collaborations, Stovall also made key innovations in the medium of silkscreen.

Stovall built a community of artists in Washington and extended his efforts to inspire artists all over the country. His own artistry was often overlooked until recent years, but now it has found its way into public and private collections around the world.

Shawnya Harris, the museum’s Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Curator of African American and African Diasporic Art, shares, “When I first came to Athens, I immediately thought of Lou Stovall since I recalled that this was his birthplace. To finally honor an artist whose work and collaborations with other artists has inspired communities for so many decades, is an important aspect of the Thompson Award. We look forward to welcoming him back to his native Athens.”

Harris is also organizing the exhibition “Lou Stovall: Of Land and Origins,” which will be on display at the museum February 19 to May 29, 2022. It will include several silkscreens from Stovall’s 1974 series “Of the Land,” which form the basis of a book of art and poetry called “Of the Land: The Art and Poetry of Lou Stovall,” edited by Will Stovall and due to be published by the Georgetown University Press in 2022.

The next IADA Symposium will be “SHOW IT AND SAVE IT – Exploring the compromises between exhibition and preservation” which will explore the conservation challenges of exhibiting art on paper, archival materials, bound volumes, manuscripts, or similar materials. We hope to bring together all actors involved in these dynamics, whether conservators, collection managers, registrars, curators, installers, scientists, even artists, in order to initiate a discussion around the challenges and compromises between exhibition and preservation.

In fin-de-siècle Paris, the Nabis turned to the medium of color lithography to explore new modes of expression. This practice, however, was technically complex and thus required the involvement and expertise of master printer Auguste Clot. This lecture examines Clot’s collaboration with the Nabis and the printer’s significant role in the production of their avant-garde prints.

Natalia Lauricella is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University. Her research focuses on the history of print, modern art, process, and labor, particularly in nineteenth-century Europe. She received her PhD in Art History from the University of Southern California. Her current project traces the network of dealer-publishers, printers, and artists who produced and marketed limited edition original color lithographs as part of the development of modern art and the art market in 1890s France. Focusing on the technical and creative role of master printers, this work recasts the history of modern art through the lens of artisanal labor, artistic process, and collaboration. Research for this project has been supported by a Fulbright grant to France, the Borchard Foundation, the Visual Studies Research Institute at USC, and USC’s Department of Art History. Prior to pursuing her PhD, Natalia worked as a curatorial assistant of collections and exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and contributed to a number of exhibitions including Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe (2014), Agnes Martin (2016), and Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris, 1892–1897 (2017).

Using the exhibition States of Play: Prints from Rembrandt to Delsarte as a starting point, curator Elizabeth Rudy and conservator Christina Taylor will lead a dynamic conversation about printmaking with a group of Boston-area printmakers.

The speakers will discuss the role of revision, correction, and adjustment in the printmaking process. Each artist will present an example of how they’ve reworked one of their projects, and the group will explore how editing and change play a fundamental role in the creation of fine prints.

Spanning four centuries, the works in States of Play unveil the layers of creative revision behind finished prints. Central to this process is the concept of a “print state,” which traditionally refers to a version of a print that precedes the final product. By decoding creative choices that the artist pursued or abandoned in each successive step, the exhibition helps uncover the full breadth of experimentation and demystifies printmaking terminology and techniques.

Led by:
Elizabeth Rudy, Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints, Division of European and American Art
Christina Taylor, Assistant Paper Conservator, Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies

Printmakers:
Cicely Carew
Susan Denniston
Catherine Kernan
Debra Olin
Rebecca Leopoldina Torres
Christopher Wallace

For more information and to register please visit the external link below.

Artists Stephanie Santana and Tanekeya Word discuss the work of Emma Amos with curator Laurel Garber. They will share how figures like Amos inform and inspire the collective Black Women of Print, of which they are both members and which Word founded. They will also present for the first time new works they created in homage to Amos.

This talk is offered in conjunction with the exhibition "Emma Amos: Color Odyssey," and is made possible with the support of a Collaboration Grant from the Association of Print Scholars.

This Fall a two-volume catalogue of all prints produced and published by the Liefrinck dynasty has appeared in The New Hollstein Dutch & Flemish series (Sound & Vision Publishers). Compiler Jeroen Luyckx (Illuminare - KU Leuven) and editor Huigen Leeflang (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) are delighted to invite you to the virtual book launch on Thursday 9 December 2021 at 17:00 CET.

The Liefrinck family was a Netherlandish dynasty of printmakers that consisted of three generations and was active for over a century. From c. 1500 until the turn of the seventeenth century various family members were involved in printmaking and publishing, producing a highly diverse output. This fully illustrated catalogue brings together almost 400 woodcuts, etchings and engravings, including dozens of undescribed prints, states and editions. To order the volumes, please visit www.hollstein.com.

Programme
17:00 Welcome by editor Huigen Leeflang (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)
17:10 Lecture on the Liefrinck dynasty by compiler Jeroen Luyckx (Illuminare - KU Leuven)
17:40 Questions
18:00 End

This online event is free of charge, but registration is required. You can register by providing your name and e-mail via the external link. If you do, you will receive an e-mail with all practical information in the week of the event.

Join us for a two-part workshop that explores printmaking with the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Studio. Held in conjunction with Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, this workshop offers an opportunity to discover the printmaking process through the technique of monotype. Inspired by the hundreds of experimental monoprints Johns has created throughout his career, participants will print images using different colors to create a multi-layered print. All skill levels are welcome.

During each hour-and-a-half session, participants will be guided by printmakers from the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop and will be able to ask questions live through Zoom breakout rooms.

Session 1
Dec 3, 3 pm

Session 2
Dec 10, 3pm

The Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop is a co-operative printmaking workspace that provides professional-quality printmaking facilities to artists and printmakers of every skill level. The RBPW is committed to inspiring and fostering a racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse artistic community dedicated to the making of fine art prints in an environment that embraces technical and aesthetic exploration, innovation, and collaboration. Robert Blackburn’s vision of a welcoming creative environment with a spirit of openness serves as the backbone of the workshop today.

Free with registration.

For more information and a link to register, please visit the external link below.

Join us for the virtual opening lecture for the Memorial Art Gallery's newest exhibition, Renaissance Impressions: Sixteenth-Century Master Prints from the Kirk Edward Long Collection! Bernard Barryte, an expert on this collection and author of the catalog, will discuss printmaking techniques and how the prints were marketed and prized by collectors. He will also discuss Mannerism, the imaginative style of art that was dominant in Europe during the 1500s, as well as the ways that these images can be interpreted.

For questions about this program, please contact Chiyo Ueyama at cueyama@mag.rochester.edu. For general visitor information, visit mag.rochester.edu/about.

To register, please visit the external link below.

Renaissance Impressions, which includes 82 masterworks in varying techniques by artists as diverse as Albrecht Dürer and Hendrik Goltzius, explores the seminal role that prints played in shaping Renaissance visual culture throughout Europe. The exhibition offers a rich and comprehensive survey of the Golden Age of printmaking and reveals the vital impact of this new creative medium on art, education, and society. It was through the printed image that the myths and motifs of ancient Greece and Rome became widely known, and religious imagery was transmitted across geographical and cultural boundaries. Artistic innovation was also impelled by this new reproductive medium, which allowed the broad distribution of influential compositions by such towering figures as Lucas Cranach, Albrecht Dürer, Michelangelo, and Raphael. The exhibition features many of the era’s most extraordinary and influential prints, including examples in all graphic media from Europe’s major printmaking centers of Antwerp, Florence, Fontainebleau, Haarlem, Mantua, Paris, Prague, and Rome.

Works from MAG’s rich collection of Renaissance decorative arts, including armor, stained glass, ceramics, and textiles, are interspersed throughout the loan exhibition of prints. These works highlight the surprising interconnections between this new print medium and how artists in other media transmitted, transformed, and translated print imagery. This appropriation of the print medium by other artists and craftspeople created a shared visual vocabulary that crossed artistic media and geographical boundaries.

Printmaking has been called the “contemporary art” of the Renaissance. Throughout the 16th century and beyond, print images proliferated and the market for both religious and secular imagery flourished. This developing market led to the new profession of print publishers, who offered collectors diverse subjects from ancient myths to traditional Christian motifs. Compelling imagery, imaginative design, and technical virtuosity were the qualities most prized by 16th-century collectors; professional print publishers straddled the line between art and business, commissioning works from the best artists of the time.