Clare Kobasa recently joined the Saint Louis Art Museum as assistant curator of prints, drawings and photographs. Kobasa also will manage the museum’s Print Study Room, where students, scholars and members of the public can make appointments for free viewings of more than 14,000 works on paper in the collection.

“Clare brings a wealth of relevant experience and curiosity to the position,” said Elizabeth Wyckoff, curator of prints, drawings and photographs. “We look forward her fruitful collaborations with colleagues throughout the Museum and with the many visitors to the Print Study Room.”

Kobasa recently completed a two-year appointment as the Suzanne Andrée Curatorial Fellow in Prints, Drawings and Photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she helped run the museum’s study room for works on paper. She also curated several exhibitions and installations, including “Woodcuts: Groove and Grain,” which explored the variety and malleability of the oldest printmaking medium.

Prior to her position in Philadelphia, she was a predoctoral fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana–Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome, and held internships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago and Yale University Art Gallery.

Kobasa received a doctorate and a master’s degree in art history from Columbia University and a bachelor’s degree in art history and history from Swarthmore College.

Saint Louis Art Museum, "Clare Kobasa Joins the Saint Louis Art Museum as assistant curator", News release (October 27, 2020).

Since its founding, the Brandywine Workshop has served as an epicenter for multiethnic artists to exchange a wide variety of thought and concepts through the collaborative process of printmaking. Working together with master printers, artists have pushed the boundaries of the creative process and embraced the possibilities of printmaking. Allan L. Edmunds, Brandywine’s founder and recently retired director, emphasizes the importance of collaboration and the “multiple forces and circumstances that allow art-making to thrive at a particular time and in a particular place.”

Roll, Press, Pull: Contemporary Prints from the Brandywine Workshop & Archives will present the forces of time and place as a unifying component within the artwork of this collection. This important gift provides PAFA the unique opportunity to examine the impact of Philadelphia and Brandywine Workshop on a range of diverse forms, images, and stylistic approaches that artists examined within the span of four decades into the present.

This December 28, 2020 will be the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Prairie Print Makers, a democratically-minded organization established “to further the interests of both artists and laymen in print making and collecting.” Ten active printmakers and one art dealer gathered at the Lindsborg studio of Birger Sandzén (1871-1954) to plan out an exhibition society that would also offer a gift print commissioned from well-known printmakers to subscribing members. These "Associate" members paid $5 annual dues, and "Active" artist members paid $1 dues to participate in the traveling print exhibitions. "Honorary" memberships were occasionally bestowed. The exhibitions' academic year schedules quickly filled for venues from Honolulu, Hawaii; to Fort Worth, Texas; to Rochester, New York, as well as providing art experiences for many underserved, small communities in the Midwest. The Prairie Print Makers continued to show and share affordable fine art prints until disbanding in 1966, never having raised their fees and attracting more than a hundred American, Canadian, and United Kingdom printmakers to the roster through the years.

In this exhibition organized from the Sandzén Gallery's permanent collection, 61 of 101 known Prairie Print Maker artists are represented via 112 prints in a variety of techniques. An accompanying, 32-page catalogue is available, underwritten by the Barton P. and Mary D. Cohen Charitable Trust.

Please join us for a free webinar highlighting material in Princeton University Library’s Special Collections on Friday, December 4, 2020 at 2pm EST.

This December we will offer you a tour of our collection of pre-zoom, pre-cinema optical devices and prints, rare artifacts designed for shared public entertainment or personal moments of wonder, leading up to the invention of the motion picture. Julie Mellby, Graphic Arts Curator, will be joined by Christopher Collier, Executive Director, and Jesse Crooks, Operations Director and Head Projectionist for Renew Theaters, who will share some of the history and treasures of Princeton’s Garden Theater.

Through a series of live webcams, we will attempt the phantasmagoria experienced in the past as we peer into 18th-century peepshows, twirl phenakistoscopes, open a gigantic megalethoscope, and crank a miniature cinematograph. Feel the sense of wonder as still images come to life, turning day to night, causing volcanoes to erupt, and conjuring faces to rise from anamorphic chaos.

Please register in advance at the 'External Link' below.

An online "Working Progress" event by Veronica Peselmann, Volkswagen Postdoctoral Fellow in Art History, University of Southern California

Response by Henry Jenkins, Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education, University of Southern California

The twenty color woodcuts in this exhibition at the Birger Sandzén Memorial Gallery are from the collection of John Impert, Seattle art historian and author of Painters of the Northwest: Impressionism to Modernism, 1900-1930. By the 1880s, Seattle was becoming a center for the arts establishing the Seattle Art Association at what is now the University of Washington, and seeing a great deal of popular interest in printmaking. As the major Northwest port for Pacific trade, examples of Asian art found their way into Seattle homes, particularly Japanese ukiyoe prints, color woodcut “pictures of the floating world.” In 1928 the artist and block carver Yamagishi Kazue (1883-1966) arrived in Seattle to teach Japanese woodcut methods. Kazue’s eager students included Waldo and Corwin Chase and the artist/illustrator Elizabeth Colborne (1885-1948). Brothers Waldo Spore Chase (1895-1988) and Wendell Corwin Chase (1897-1988) came from a very artistic family and, like many Northwest artists, were attracted to the rugged beauty of the mountain ranges and national parks, and focused on landscape in their art.

After holding a variety of jobs and experimenting with photography and hand-colored photographic prints, the Chase brothers decided to work together on color woodcuts, attracted by the relatively simple (and portable) tools required. They studied Frank Morley Fletcher’s (1866-1949) manual, Wood-block Printing, and their initial prints in 1927 were surprisingly accomplished. The brothers taught themselves to sew Indian-style teepees and lived in them on the slopes of Mount Rainier while printing their first woodcuts, nearly 80 of which they gave to hikers passing through Glacier Basin in 1927 in an effort to drum up business. Their initial woodcuts were signed “Chenuis,” an Indian word that for them symbolized a joint endeavor.

Please visit the 'External Link' below to enjoy the lectures presented at Print Study Day, an event organized annually by the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in association with the International Fine Print Dealers Association. The event was held via Zoom on Friday, October 10, 2020.

"Fake News: Dutch Broadsides as Attack Ads, Propaganda, and Lying Pictures in the Seventeenth Century" (starts at 7:11)
Maureen Warren, Curator of European and American Art at the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

"Campaigning for the Presidency: Political humor in Early American Caricature Prints" (28:31)
Allison M. Stagg, independent scholar

"Urgent Images: Chicanx Graphic Arts, 1965-Now" (49:13)
E. Carmen Ramos, Acting Chief Curator and Curator of Latinx Art; and Claudia Zapata, Curatorial Assistant of Latinx Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum


Q&A With Speakers (1:11:33)

Please join the Washington Print Club for a virtual visit to the National Gallery of Art Modern Prints and Drawings Study Room on Tuesday, November 11 at 11am. Shelley Langdale, Curator and Head of Modern Prints and Drawings, will share some recent acquisitions and other works on paper from the Gallery’s collection that she has been contemplating in light of recent events and current projects. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A.

For more information about the Washington Print Club and to sign up for the newsletter, visit https://washingtonprintclub.org/.

Please visit the 'External Link' below to register for this free program.

Bethany Collins (b. 1984), a native of Montgomery, lives and works in Chicago, IL. She is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice critically explores the interaction of race and language. The exhibition Bethany Collins: My destiny is in your hands explores these themes along with notions of home and belonging.

My destiny is in your hands, 2018, for which the exhibition is named, is a white on white screen-printed and flocked wallpaper that depicts the official state flowers of the American South alongside the official flowers of states along Great Migration routes—where more than six million African Americans left the South in a steady population shift that “forever changed both those who fled and the places where they sought refuge.” (1) Collins’ investigation of the language of flowers, or floriography, drew her to the abundance of nineteenth-century flower dictionaries, which made the transmission of covert messages possible through “talking bouquets,” as well as to state symbols—from flags and anthems to poetry—which act as visual representations of a people, their history, and their shared values.

According to 19th c. flower dictionaries, Delaware’s official state flower – the peach blossom – conveys “I am your captive,” while Louisiana’s iris means “I burn for you” and Alabama’s camellia translates to “my destiny is in your hands.” The result is an expansive “talking bouquet” whose messages sound as much like love letter as an indictments. Navigating love, possession, pain, and nationhood, the more than 300 camellia petals in Collins’ site-specific installation memorialize the number of documented lynchings which took place in Alabama post-Reconstruction (1877–1943).

This installation will create a chapel-like setting that envelopes America: A Hymnal (2017). This artist book features 100 versions of My Country ’Tis of Thee written from the 18th-20th century. Since its debut by the Rev. Samuel E. Smith on July 4, 1831, the lyrics of My Country ’Tis of Thee (also known as America) were re-titled and re-written at least one hundred times. Each re-writing in support of a passionately held cause— from temperance to suffrage to abolition and the confederacy—articulates a version of what it means to be American.

Joining these works are 15 drawings from her Southern Review series. In an attempt to rewrite a Southern narrative, Collins unbinds a quarterly Southern Review journal and fills in the body of each page’s text. Titles, authors and footnotes remain untouched. Only the text’s body, the Southern body, is re-thought, re-ordered, and re-written.

Collins will also create a florigraphic poem, translating works from the permanent collection of the MMFA.
Included in this part of the presentation are two works from Collins’ Contronym series, including Certain (1982), 2015, from the MMFA’s Permanent Collection. Contronyms are a category of words which contain their own opposite meaning. In these works, Collins renders in graphite definitions from the 1982 Websters New World Dictionary. Using her own spit and a pink pearl eraser, she erases, blurs, and obscures all but one definition that highlights the opposition and linguistic nuance that is embedded within the meaning of a word.

Regarded as one of the most remarkable artists from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Francisco Goya (1746–1828) is renowned for his prolific activity as a draftsman and printmaker, producing about nine hundred drawings and three hundred prints during his long career. Through his drawings and prints, he expressed his political liberalism, criticism of superstition, and distaste for intellectual oppression in unique and compelling ways.

This exhibition will explore Goya's graphic imagination and how his drawings and prints allowed him to share his complex ideas and respond to the turbulent social and political changes occurring in the world around him. The broadly chronological presentation will follow Goya's evolution and different phases as a graphic artist as well as his approaches to his subjects. Around one hundred works on display will come mainly from The Met collection—one of the most outstanding collections of Goya's drawings and prints outside Spain—with other works coming from New York, Boston, and Madrid’s Museo Nacional del Prado and the Biblioteca Nacional.