PRINT MONTH 2021

Print Month returns, October 4 - October 29, with daily online programs at 12 Noon Eastern. The IFPDA is proud to share this platform with our members, our cultural partners, and our community with programs and symposia organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the International Print Center of New York, the Print Council of America, the Association of Print Scholars, and the galleries and publishers of the IFPDA.

Oct. 4: Paupers Press (London); A Virtual Studio Visit and Conversation

Oct. 5: A Conversation on the Impact of Prints in Museum Collections: What Do Museum Directors Say? --- with Michael Govan, Glenn Lowry, Sasha Suda, and Sir Norman Rosenthal

Oct. 6: Prints in Relief; Print Study Day Presented by The Metropolitan Museum of Art; A Census of Italian Renaissance Woodcuts; “To Put Art to the Service of People”: Elizabeth Catlett and Prints for Black Liberation; Linocuts: Making and Meaning

Oct. 7: Full Spectrum: Celebrating 50 years of the Brandywine Workshop and Archives

Oct. 8: Gemini G.E.L Celebrates The Met’s 150th Anniversary --- A Virtual Studio Visit and Conversation

Oct. 11: The Art of To-day: Grosvenor School Linocuts and their Legacy --- A Symposium on the Occasion of “Modern Times: British Prints 1913-1939” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Perceptive print-making: Grosvenor School linocuts and the middlebrow market

Oct. 12: IFPDA Foundation 2020 Book Award Lecture: Happy Accident: Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Blackburn, & Tatyana Grossman and the Rise of Collaborative Printmaking

Oct. 13: Looking Back on the New York Graphic Workshop, 1964-1970 (sponsored by APS)

Oct. 14: Themes and Variations: Topics from Print Council of America --- Gilbert Stuart, the Print Trade, and the Genesis of Art as Intellectual Property in the United States

Oct. 15: Harlan & Weaver; A Virtual Studio Visit and Conversation with Felix Harlan & Kiki Smith

Oct. 18: The Art of To-day: Grosvenor School Linocuts and their Legacy --- A Symposium on the Occasion of “Modern Times: British Prints 1913-1939” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Oct. 19: Highpoint Editions (Minneapolis); A Virtual Studio Visit and Conversation

Oct. 20: El Nopal Press: Cross Border Discourses Through Print (sponsored by APS)

Oct. 21: Themes and Variations: Topics from Print Council of America --- Poetic Science: The Origins of Digital Printmaking

Oct. 22: Breaking Ground, Part I: Pattern and Print with Polly Apfelbaum and Jean-Paul Russell, Durham Press

Oct. 25: The Art of To-day: Grosvenor School Linocuts and their Legacy --- A Symposium on the Occasion of “Modern Times: British Prints 1913-1939” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on the Market for Grosvenor School Artists; A Discussion with Mary Ryan and Gordon Samuel

Oct. 26: Printmaking in the Expanded Field with Susan Tallman

Oct. 27: Sybil and Cyril: Cutting Through Time with Jenny Uglow, Moderated by Gordon Samuel

Oct. 28: Themes and Variations: Topics from Print Council of America --- Art and the Pull of Print; A Conversation

Oct. 29: Breaking Ground, Part 2: Pattern and Print with Joyce Kozloff and Judith Solodkin, SOLO Impression

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

One exhibition, two shows, by Dan Welden divided in separate venues are being shown during the month of October. Noteworthy, the work consists primarily of “Mirror Images” based upon 50 year old large, resurrected, oxidized, corroded zinc plates.
Evolving from natures activity on the zinc, through salt air, raccoon urine and whatever else effected the metal, the 11 sets, (making 22 pried apart plates) provided a foundation for the artist to conceive its visual potential.

Known primarily as being the innovator of photopolymer printmaking, Dan Welden returned to his roots as a fledgling etcher with his ingenious use of a handmade auger as a drypoint tool, and a copper sulfate etch. The combination along with his imagination provided the artistic enhancement with the backdrop of his partner with “Nature”. This highly unique series, entitled “Aesop’s Fables” was conceived through the opposite characters created by the Greek Slave. The abstract images of the Grasshopper and the Ant along with the many other images are being exhibited from October 1-28 at the Ink-Shop Printmaking Center in Ithaca, New York while simultaneously being shown at The New Arts Program in Kutztown, Pennsylvania until December 17th.

A new printmaking technique—aquatint—swept through 18th-century Europe, yielding an extraordinary range of works, from images of erupting volcanoes, amorous couples, and mysterious tombs, to Russian exotica, biting caricatures, and moonlit vistas. The first American exhibition to survey the medium’s development in France, England, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain, Aquatint: From Its Origins to Goya presents some 100 early and exceptional impressions, many of which have recently been acquired by the National Gallery of Art. By supplementing the line work of etching, aquatint offered an exciting method for multiplying ink-and-wash drawings that render tone in subtle ways.

Aquatint flourished outside the official circles of European art academies in the hands of three kinds of artists—professional printmakers, amateurs (art lovers), and peintre-graveurs (painter-printmakers). Each played a distinctive and significant role in publicizing, disseminating, and advancing the aquatint medium. Professional printmakers combined it with other intaglio printmaking techniques to reproduce highly prized drawings by old master and contemporary artists. Amateurs, an elite group of like-minded collectors, embraced drawing, etching, and aquatint to not only expand their art-historical and connoisseurial knowledge, but also cultivate relationships with artists. Peintre-graveurs revisited, re-created, and circulated their designs through aquatint to build their reputations and broaden their audiences, dramatically expanding the formal vocabulary and expressive potential of the medium.

The conceptual artist Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) is best known for his programmatic wall drawings and modular structures, but alongside these works he generated more than 350 print projects, comprising thousands of lithographs, silkscreens, etchings, aquatints, woodcuts, and linocuts. Strict Beauty: Sol LeWitt Prints is the most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s printmaking to date, including eighty-three objects, consisting of single prints and print series, for a total of over 250 prints. The exhibition begins with the artist’s earliest prints: figure studies and scenes of urban life made at Syracuse University and in the Hartford Art School. LeWitt’s mature printmaking is explored in four thematic sections that reflect the diverse abstract languages he pursued throughout his career: “Lines, Arcs, Circles, and Grids,” “Bands and Colors,” “From Geometric Figures to Complex Forms,” and “Wavy, Curvy, Loopy Doopy, and in All Directions.”

Curated by David S. Areford, associate professor of art history at the University of Massachusetts Boston, the exhibition is accompanied by an in-depth catalog co-published by the New Britain Museum of American Art, Williams College Museum of Art, and Yale University Press. The exhibition and catalog highlight the essential role of printmaking in LeWitt’s oeuvre, deepening the understanding not only of the variety of LeWitt’s output but of the genealogy of his distinct geometric and linear formal language.

The Art Students League of New York is pleased to present Two Generations of Women Printmakers: Atelier 17 and The Art Students League guest curated by independent scholar Dr. Christina Weyl and on view November 4 – December 5, 2021. What could the venerable Art Students League of New York, founded in 1875, possibly have in common with the avant-garde printmaking studio Atelier 17, formed in the late 1920s in interwar Paris? This exhibition suggests that these two important artistic centers are more intertwined than previously known and that together they produced some of the most accomplished female printmakers of the twentieth century.

Atelier 17’s founder, Stanley William Hayter (1901-1988), took his first printmaking lessons in 1926 from Mary Huntoon (1896-1970), who had spent several years mastering the graphic arts at The Art Students League of New York. Huntoon’s instruction carried forward the pedagogy of her own teacher, Joseph Pennell (1857-1926), who had established a rigorous program at The League whereby his students executed all aspects of the printmaking process themselves and were encouraged to test new technical approaches. From the outset, Hayter also emphasized technical proficiency and experimentation at Atelier 17, which he founded only a few years after his study with Huntoon. Over its history spanning six decades and several locations in Paris and New York City, Atelier 17 remained closely connected with The League’s instructors and its student body.

Through a display featuring twenty-four artists, Two Generations of Women Printmakers demonstrates three major points of connection between The League and Atelier 17.

First, the exhibition takes Joseph Pennell’s classroom (1922-1926) as its starting point to illustrate how women traversed offerings at both institutions. The League was often a feeder of great artists to Atelier 17, particularly during Atelier 17’s years in New York City between 1940 and 1955.

Second, the high level of accomplishment seen in the exhibited prints proves that the egalitarian conditions within each institution’s printmaking studios enabled women to master the skills necessary to execute all steps in the printmaking process. While some women leveraged their newfound proficiency to become instructors of printmaking or open their own studios, others found printmaking inspired creative pathways that impacted their work as painters or sculptors. Carving lines into a metal plate or woodblock inspired the sculptural ambitions of artists such as Louise Nevelson, Dorothy Dehner, Worden Day, and Louise Bourgeois.

Third, the show traces the networks of sisterhood that these women built at The League—in classrooms and at social events—and at Atelier 17. These relationships, both personal and professional, helped artists advance their careers in an art world that was frequently less supportive of entrepreneurial women. The final gallery space features prints and sculpture by Louise Nevelson and Dorothy Dehner, who met at Atelier 17. Their lifelong friendship advanced professional opportunities, such as when Nevelson recommended Dehner to make lithographs at the Tamarind Institute.

Although the stories of women artists at these two venerable institutions are too extensive to capture in one show, this selection spotlights the rich possibilities that printmaking presented to women across two generations of artists.

To explore photography’s chemical and material history, this talk examines the materiality and meaning of 19th-century iron and silver-based photographs that document and celebrate industrial growth in Pennsylvania, particularly railroads and steel mills. By placing these photographs, including platinum, cyanotype, and albumen prints, as well as stereographs in dialogue with each other, the ways that artists have documented transformations to the landscape in the past is reconsidered in terms of the rapid pace of current environmental degradation. Questions of how photography was used to respond to, and express social, emotional, or political perceptions of land, and how these meanings have changed in the 21st-century from an increasing awareness about the human impact affecting climate change will be explored.

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

El Nopal Press, founded by Francesco Siqueiros in 1990, is distinguished by its culturally diverse collaborations with international artists. Although initially focused on the U.S./Mexico border as a site of cultural exchange and Los Angeles as a place of intersection, El Nopal has also worked with artists from Europe to further expand the boundaries of cross-cultural transfer and dialogue through print.

Featuring a virtual studio tour, as well as prepared slides of notable prints, editions, and artists with whom he has collaborated, Siqueiros will discuss his career, which includes his early work at Cirrus Editions, and the myriad of experiences and influences that led him to his present work at El Nopal.

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

This panel will consider the work and legacy of the New York Graphic Workshop (NYGW), a printmaking collective operative from 1964 to 1970. Together, printmakers Luis Camnitzer (b. 1937), José Guillermo Castillo (1938–99), and Liliana Porter (b. 1941) devoted themselves to producing conceptual pieces indebted to printmaking and its labor-intensive processes. Even as they were committed to traditional methods, the NYGW often bent lithography, etching, and engraving away from their conventions, toward new questions, problems, and ideas. As Camnitzer stated in 1966: “We are printmakers conditioned but not destroyed by our techniques.”

In dialogue with curator and independent scholar Ursula Davila-Villa, Camnitzer and Porter will discuss artworks they produced while part of the NYGW. Examining both independent pieces and collaborations, Camnitzer, Davila-Villa, and Porter will draw viewers into the complex ideas these artists conveyed through print, and the ways they exploited the medium’s unique contingencies. The conversation will focus on the role printmaking played in the NYGW’s self-conception – particularly the crucial implications of “the multiple” which were foundational to the group’s interventions. Attendees will learn more about an influential and significant chapter in American and Latin American conceptual art, as well as the under-acknowledged contributions of print within these histories.

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

Highpoint is delighted to partner with Delita Martin and Tanekeya Word to deliver the exhibition A Contemporary Black Matriarchal Lineage in Printmaking. Curated by Tanekeya and Delita, this show centers the narratives of Black women printmakers, by Black women printmakers.

Curated by Milwaukee-based printmaker and book artist Tanekeya Word, and Huffman, Texas-based printmaker and Highpoint Editions artist Delita Martin, this marks the first national exhibition curated by Black women printmakers highlighting the experimental prints of Black women printmakers.

This exhibition will explore the narratives of 12 contemporary Black women printmakers who have shaped a place for themselves in the printmaking world. Utilizing their craft in an improvisational style, each printmaker shares matriarchal perspectives on Black interiority and narrative; bringing personal narratives into focus while paying homage to the foremothers who came before them.

This exhibition will feature recent work made by the following twelve American printmakers:

Delita Martin
LaToya M. Hobbs
Ann Johnson
Althea Murphy-Price
Tyanna J. Buie
Karen J. Revis
Lisa Hunt
Tanekeya Word
Stephanie M. Santana
Chloe Alexander
Sam Vernon
Paula Wilson

For more information please visit the external link below.

Many boldface-name artists admire Highpoint Editions, the collaborative publishing arm of Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Minneapolis. Mia recently acquired Highpoint’s complete archive, comprising more than 325 published prints and multiples, plus hundreds of items of production material. These works, inspired proof of Highpoint’s impact on printmaking, will be on display at Mia in a sweeping exhibition, “The Contemporary Print: 20 Years at Highpoint Editions.”

“The Contemporary Print” showcases 175 artworks in a broad range of printmaking techniques, styles, and subjects. You’ll also find preliminary drawings and working proofs, as well as demonstrations to better appreciate this expressive art form. Featured visiting artists include Carlos Amorales, Julie Buffalohead, Willie Cole, Sarah Crowner, Jim Hodges, Delita Martin, Julie Mehretu, Todd Norsten, Chloe Piene, David Rathman, Do Ho Suh, and Dyani White Hawk.

About Highpoint Editions
Highpoint Center for Printmaking was established in 2001 and is the only community-oriented facility of its kind in the Upper Midwest. Until Highpoint opened its doors, broad public access to the printmaking arts was virtually nonexistent in this part of the country. The publishing arm, Highpoint Editions, produces fine art prints made by invited professional artists in collaboration with master printer Cole Rogers and Highpoint Editions staff. Highpoint advances the work of artists by presenting their projects to a broad public through gallery shows, lectures, and symposia and by placing Highpoint prints in important public and private collections around the
world. Prints created at Highpoint Editions can be found in numerous public, corporate, and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Centre Pompidou.