Literature, language, and philosophy are at the core of Buzz Spector’s work. He is a contemporary Conceptual artist who explores the aesthetic possibilities of language, paper, and books. Buzz Spector: Alterations spans the artist’s career from the 1970s to the present and includes drawings, altered books, postcard assemblages, collages, and more.

A master at tearing paper, Spector brings a constructive energy to that otherwise destructive act. Sometimes he alters found books by methodically tearing their pages. At other times, he creates his own blocks of printed texts or images that he also transforms by tearing. Through this refashioning of existing printed materials, he poses questions about authorship, the history of art, and the written word. His works are at once deeply literate and slyly humorous.

Spector is internationally recognized for his contributions to the field of contemporary art. He taught painting, sculpture, and two-dimensional design at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis for a decade before retiring in 2019. This is the first presentation of the artist’s work at a St. Louis museum.

The art historian and print expert François Gérard Waller (1867-1934) is one of the Rijksmuseum’s greatest benefactors. During his life he donated to the museum his extensive collections of decorated papers, ex libris prints and catchpenny prints; and at his death he bequeathed a veritable treasure trove of paintings, drawings and prints. His most important gift, however, is the fund that bears his name: a resource that enables the Rijksmuseum to purchase hundreds of prints each year. An exhibition of the most exceptional of these acquisitions from the last ten years in two galleries on the ground floor of the museum’s Phillips Wing.

This exhibition includes highlights from early printmaking includes Madonna with Child (c. 1470) by Master I.A.M. of Zwolle and Crucifixion with Four Angels (c. 1485) by Martin Schongauer – Waller allocated much of his wealth to the acquisition of prints from this period. Italian, Dutch, German, and French masterpieces from the 16th to the 19th century will also be on display. They include two drawings: a 1599 design sketch by Karel van Mander and a landscape by Claes van Beresteyn, from 1670. Both drawings were part of the Van Regteren Altena collection, and they were purchased with the support of the Rembrandt Association and the F.G. Waller Fund.

Waller specified that his fund could be used ‘in exceptional cases’ for the acquisition of drawings. The exhibition also includes modern works, such as the results of experiments with a variety of printing techniques conducted in 1870 by Ludovic-Napoléon Lepic, mentor to Edgar Degas, and a 1924 print by Hendrik Werkman.

Since 1938 the F.G. Waller Fund has annually disbursed a sum that is used to further enhance and complement the collections of the Rijksmuseum’s Print Room. Thus far, the Rijksmuseum has Wallers’ generosity to thank for the addition of 55,000 works to its collection.

Crown Point Press announces Landforms, a group exhibition featuring six new black and white etchings by Wayne Thiebaud. Other artists included in the exhibition are Darren Almond, Mamma Andersson, Robert Bechtle, John Chiara, Jane Freilicher, Yvonne Jacquette, Per Kirkeby and Pat Steir. This exhibition focuses on each artist’s interpretation of the natural features of the earth’s surface: mountains, plateaus, valleys, plains, deserts, and rivers.

In 1964 Wayne Thiebaud was the first artist I invited to work at Crown Point Press with the intention of
publishing his work. At the time, Richard Diebenkorn was already engaged with Crown Point’s weekly
“Live Model Group,” a workshop in which artists drew from a model on copper plates. The press was in
the basement of my home in Berkeley; we worked with my young son (now in his fifties) underfoot.
Crown Point’s first publication (after my own art) was Diebenkorn’s 41 Etchings Drypoints in 1965.
Diebenkorn lived in Berkeley. Thiebaud would drive from Sacramento (where he still lives) to work with
me in the studio. In 1965, I printed and published his Delights, seventeen etchings presented in both
book and portfolio forms. Since then, Wayne Thiebaud has created in the Crown Point studio more than
112 different images, including (in 2019) the six new ones now being released. He will be one hundred
years old before the end of this year. -Kathan Brown, founder of Crown Point Press

MMFA’s Cassandra Cavness will connect via Facebook live with two artists from the Museum's current exhibition Personal to Political: Celebrating the African American Artists of Paulson Fontaine Press. Artists Radcliffe Bailey and Lava Thomas will discuss their work, the themes of the exhibition, and the widespread peaceful protests and turmoil surrounding current events.

To submit a question in advance of the livestream, visit: https://forms.gle/5SV34TFDEtWqwqjf9

About the Participants
– Cassandra Cavness recently joined the Museum’s development team after working at Alabama State University. Among other aspects of her job, Cassandra strives to develop initiatives that foster conversations and engage communities in their history.
– Radcliffe Bailey is based in Atlanta, Georgia. He works in layers, incorporating items from his own past and reflections on race, memory, and migration.
– Lava Thomas is based in Berkeley, California. She explores various aspects of identity, including gender, race, and individuality, through varied media and expressions.

About the Exhibition
Personal to Political: Celebrating the African American Artists of Paulson Fontaine Press features works by African American artists who have helped to shape the contemporary art conversation throughout the US. Presenting a wide range of prints, paintings, quilts, and sculptures, the works include an array of abstract and formal imagery depicting narratives that speak to personal experiences and political perspectives. At the heart of this show is Paulson Fontaine Press, a print studio that over the past two decades has developed an unparalleled roster of internationally-celebrated artists including Martin Puryear, Kerry James Marshall, and the Gee’s Bend Quilters.

The exhibition Personal to Political: Celebrating the African-American Artists of Paulson Fontaine Press was organized by Carrie Lederer, Curator of Exhibitions, Bedford Gallery, Lesher Center for the Arts, Walnut Creek, CA

An online exhibition of recent Tamarind lithographs highlighting moments and accounts of release—of energy, expectations, control, or constraint. Included in Sweet Release is a special focus on prints by recipients of the Frederick Hammersley Artist Residency.

Featured Artists include Judy Chicago, R. Luke DuBois*, Michael Krueger, Harold Mendez, Mark Mulroney, Aaron Noble, Danielle Orchard,* Hayal Pozanti, and Shinique Smith. (*Frederick Hammersley Artist Residency recipient)

See how a work of art comes to life. In Proof of Concept, drawings, paintings, and proofs reveal the progress of an artwork prior to the final prints made in etching, drypoint, screenprint, and woodcut. The exhibition title plays on the “proof” in printmaking through selections by Louise Bourgeois, Brice Marden, Anselm Stalder, and the art collective General Idea.

After World War II, as the postwar print renaissance flourished in the United States, countless new print shops were founded across the country, including now-venerable institutions such as Universal Limited Art Editions, Crown Point Press, and Gemini G.E.L. These studios paired master printers with artists—many of whom had never worked in printmaking—to realize innovative and experimental projects. Such efforts continue today as artists further push techniques.

Collaborative printmaking enterprises typically comprise a small team of printers and publishers, engaging with an artist to produce an edition. Often, proof prints and other working materials are also generated as part of the artist’s process. Proof of Concept: Artistic Process in Contemporary Printmaking presents proofs and preparatory works from the Museum’s Peter Blum Edition Archive, 1980–1994, placed alongside their corresponding final prints.

Like many Chicago artists in the first years of the 20th century, Gustave Baumann discovered the beauty of rural Brown County in Indiana. While living in Nashville from 1910 to 1916, he produced his first important set of color woodcuts. In 1917 he headed east before traveling the next year to New Mexico, where he spent the rest of his life. Exhilarated by the state’s natural beauty, he settled in Santa Fe and over the next five decades produced complex color woodcuts that captured the area’s intense sunlight and arid atmosphere. Baumann’s prints portray not only stunning mountain scenery but also indigenous adobe architecture and scenes representing Native American and Hispanic cultures. Over the years, Baumann made numerous trips around New Mexico, Arizona, and California searching for additional picturesque venues, such as at the Grand Canyon and among giant sequoias, all of which became the subjects of beautiful color woodcuts.

The exhibition also illustrates how Baumann worked. He began by making tempura drawings in front of the subject. The outlines of the main forms were transferred to woodblocks, one for each color. The museum owns a set of blocks for his print Summer Clouds (1926) and the proofs, allowing visitors to understand how he printed layers of color to achieve rich effects.

Co-curating an exhibition with another institution can be challenging, especially when a global pandemic prohibits travel, not only to other cities but even to your own Museum. It’s a little easier when you’ve known your co-curator for many decades. On this episode of Art Unbound, Mary Weaver Chapin, Portland Art Museum’s Curator of Prints and Drawings, discusses her upcoming exhibition, Private Lives: Home and Family in the Art of the Nabis (coming Fall, 2021) with her Co-Curator, Heather Lemonedes Brown, the Virginia N. and Randall J. Barbato Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Cleveland Museum of Art. After an overview of their personal history, Mary and Heather highlight the high points of their co-curating experience, as well as the complications of co-curating from home, drawing similarities to the lives of the Nabi artists, as depicted in their work.

This episode of Art Unbound is part of a series produced with funds provided by FRAME, the French American Museum Exchange, of which both the Portland Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art are members. FRAME is a consortium of 32 major museums in France and North America that promotes cultural exchange in the context of museum collaborations. FRAME fosters partnerships among its member museums to develop innovative exhibitions, educational and public programs, and professional exchanges among museum staff, and maintains a website to reach global audiences. For more information, visit the newly re-designed framemuseums.org

Featured in this episode:
Mary Weaver Chapin – Curator of Prints and Drawings, Portland Art Museum
Heather Lemonedes Brown –Virginia N. and Randall J. Barbato Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Cleveland Museum of Art

Give Me Space: New Prints 2020/Summer is an online exhibition featuring 54 new works selected by Chitra Ganesh. Chosen from prints and print-based work created over the last year and submitted by more than 1,000 artists, the exhibition presents a diverse group of 41 artists and “reflects the radical and unprecedented shifts of space, both physical and psychic, that are being urgently enacted by our current political moment,” says Ganesh. Organized in the context of the COVID-19 crisis, the project “speaks to how the global pandemic and the stark inequalities it has laid bare have given way to a radical restructuring of how bodies exist in public space,” Ganesh continues. The exhibition takes its title from Farah Mohammad’s work in Give Me Space.

Organized for the digital format while IPCNY’s exhibition space remains temporarily closed, the exhibition is the latest and first fully-online presentation of IPCNY's long-standing New Prints Program, which supports artists from a wide range of backgrounds and reflects artistic production of the moment. Users of the website can listen to Ganesh's powerful statement, read texts by the 41 artists, and navigate the exhibition's themes: PsychoGeographies, Points of Contact, New Cosmologies, Environment and Justice, and A Story in Fragments.

Artists
Golnar Adili, Marc Aquino-Michaels, Ash Armenta, Avni Bansal, Allison Bianco, Phillip Chen, Ben Clement, Madeleine Conover, Nilanjan Das, Rocky Dobey, Ashley Fuchs, Katie Garth, Mary Gordon, Thayer Nicholas Granstrom Bray, Inma Herrera, Yuji Hiratsuka, Rene Hugo Arceo, Sofija Kamasi, Kathryn Keller Larkins, Ethan J Lauesen, Marc Lepson, Colin Lyons, Neal McCormick, Golbanou Moghaddas, Farah Mohammad, Beej Nierengarten-Smith, Yangbin Park, Mo Peng, Alina Perez, Hafsa Riaz, Isaiah Rivera, Maria Veronica San Martin, Erika Shiba, Annie Silverman, Jean-Marc Superville Sovak, Junko Tamura Eguchi, Magdalena Wanat, Alejandro Waskavich, David Wolske, Judy Woodborne, and Mami Yamamoto.

New Prints 2020/Summer will be the 62nd presentation of IPCNY's New Prints Program. Established in 2000, the New Prints Program is a biannual, juried open call for prints and print-based work created in the preceding twelve months. Artists selected for the exhibition will also be invited to apply for IPCNY's New Prints Artist Development Program consisting of three opportunities: an artist residency, artist mentorship program, and sponsored coursework.

Note: The closing date for this virtual exhibition has not been announced.

The first project at the new printmaking facility at Artists For Humanity in South Boston will commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Boston Massacre perpetrated in King Street. Three weeks after the March 5th massacre in 1770, Paul Revere engraved and printed from a copper plate an image that has become a lasting legacy of Americas’ freedom from British rule.

After numerous printings of the copper plate, the latest occurring in 2003 by the Massachusetts Historical Society, the engraved image is now retired for posterity, gleaming under glass at the Archive Museum at Columbia Point in Boston. While it is true that the images portrayed in the print served as a rallying cry for the aggrieved colonists, many objects depicted in the scene are considered propaganda. Witness testimony procured through legal documents and diaries refute some of the facts depicted in the original image. Revere’s embellishments throughout areas in the print created a bias designed to initiate rebellion.

One of the most important facts about the incident on King Street is the omission of the image of Crispus Attucks. Attucks, born in 1723, was a former slave from Framingham, Massachusetts who worked as a rope-maker in the shipyards of Boston. Attucks found himself caught up in the melee during the night of March 5th 1770, and became one of the colonists killed by British troops, and the first person of color to die for American Independence.

The Boston Massacre Reboot project at AFH follows the continuum of art traveling through life experiences, the humanist trove. The path of the activist artist can bring awareness to the human condition and elevate social consciousness. Exploration into the printing of the Massacre print, combined with an awareness of the current state of mainstream politics led me to address the strained and unresolved racial component in American history.

At the time of the Boston Massacre in 1770, slavery was firmly embedded in colonial America. Revere’s avoidance of adding Crispus Attucks to the original composition must have been more than just an oversight. The notion that a former slave could lead a major revolt for American independence was impalpable until well into the next century when images sympathetic to abolishment of slavery appeared as primary figures. As printmaker and activist, importing the image of Crispus Attucks into the original Boston massacre print seemed a just compromise and fair representation of the facts, becoming a clear example of the way art can advocate for a cause.