The American Historical Print Collectors Society Announces New Publication Awards
The 2023 Ewell L. Newman Book Award for 2023 recognizes Imperfect History: Curating the Graphic Arts Collection at Benjamin Franklin’s Public Library. (Philadelphia, PA: The Library Company of Philadelphia, 2021). 84 pp. Paper. The publication is free, but mailing fees will apply. To request a copy, please contact kmaxwell@librarycompany.org.
Five essays by Sarah Weatherwax, Erika Piola, and Kinaya Hassane explore the development of the graphic arts collection within the Library Company from its founding by Benjamin Franklin in 1731 and including its role as a national library for Congress when Philadelphia was the seat of government in the United States between 1790 and 1800. By the 1850s it was the largest public library in America, and a century later it was transformed into a renowned research library. The authors consider the collection’s development in light of the historical and cultural emphases and biases within this long span of American history.
Imperfect History offers readers a rich understanding of how historical trends in the acquisition and exhibition of the graphic arts mirror attitudes about the role of visual cultural within a single collecting institution as well as American society as a whole. The book provides a timely analysis of the ways in which image-makers and collectors (and their libraries) were shaped by ever-shifting views on race, gender, urban development, and national identity.
New publication awards
The AHPCS Board has voted to add two essay awards to recognize shorter works published in journals and edited volumes, including exhibition catalogues and digital formats. Essays between 3,000 and 10,000 words will be considered. Works should be submitted in published form as a hard copy or digital attachment. The Society’s present Newman Award Committee will serve as the jury to evaluate these additional submissions. Jurors are all AHPCS members and include collectors, curators, and scholars of American prints.
The purpose of the book and essay awards is to recognize and encourage outstanding scholarship in the field, as defined in our mission statement: prints depicting or reflecting North American history and culture, made either in America or elsewhere. Original research, fresh assessments, and the fluent synthesis of known material will be taken into account. The emphasis is on quality and on making an outstanding contribution to the subject. Publications remain eligible from the year of publication through the following year, a period of approximately two years. Once a work has been reviewed by the jury, it will not be considered in a subsequent cycle except in a substantially revised edition. Submissions received by December 1st will be considered for the award announced the following spring.
Each annual cycle typically will result in one Book Award in the amount of $2,000 and two Essay Awards in the amount of $750 each. One of the essay awards will be designated for the best article in the AHPCS journal Imprint. Awards are not necessarily presented each year but are determined by the quality of available submissions. Occasionally, there may be multiple winners in an individual year.
Submissions & contact information
To submit material to the Jury for consideration, please mail a copy to:
Helena E. Wright, 4628 49th Street NW, Washington, DC 20016
For additional information, please contact the Committee chair at:
wrighthelena16@gmail.com
Publishers and authors, please note: if it is possible to provide multiple copies, it would facilitate distribution of the publications among the Committee and speed their work. Please contact the Committee chair for individual addresses. Thank you.
For further information about the Society, please visit our website at https://ahpcs.org . A list of all Newman Book Award winners to date can be found at https://ahpcs.org/newman-award-winners/.

The Getty Foundation in Los Angeles has awarded 15 grants, totaling nearly $1.3 million, for exhibitions, publications, digital projects, and workshops related to prints and drawings.

Please follow the link below to learn more about this year's Paper Project grant recipients.

The Paris-born, Brooklyn-based artist Yto Barrada has won the biennial Queen Sonja Print Award (QSPA), the world’s largest prize for graphic art worth NOK 1m (around $106,000).

Please follow the link below to learn more.

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.

APS member Lisa Pon and her colleagues, Tracy Cosgriff (The College of Wooster), Andreas Kratky (USC Media Arts + Practice), Curtis Fletcher and Erik Loyer (USC Libraries), were awarded a January 2021- December 2022 NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant for "Remastering the Renaissance: A Virtual Experience of Pope Julius II's Library in Raphael's Stanza della Segnatura". Through this project, they will develop a software connector between Unity and Scalar and the publication of a virtual reality experience of Pope Julius’s Stanza della Segnatura.

The annual IFPDA Book Award was founded in 2004 to honor books, articles, and catalogues on fine art prints which demonstrate excellence in research, scholarship, and the discussion of new ideas in the fields of printmaking, history and connoisseurship. One of the two grantees this year is:

The Women of Atelier 17: Modernist Printmaking in Mid Century New York by Christina Weyl
Published and distributed by Yale University Press
In this important and timely book, Christina Weyl takes us into the experimental New York print studio Atelier 17 and highlights the women whose work there advanced both modernism and feminism in the 1940s and 1950s, defying gender norms through novel aesthetic forms and techniques. Weyl focuses on eight artists—Louise Bourgeois, Minna Citron, Worden Day, Dorothy Dehner, Sue Fuller, Alice Trumbull Mason, Louise Nevelson, and Anne Ryan—who bent the technical rules of printmaking and blazed new aesthetic terrain with their etchings, engravings, and woodcuts.

Join us for a conversation with Weyl, author and independent historian, and Jennifer Farrell, Associate Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art on Tuesday, October 27, 2020 at 12pm.

Please visit the 'External Link' below to register.

The annual IFPDA Book Award was founded in 2004 to honor books, articles, and catalogues on fine art prints which demonstrate excellence in research, scholarship, and the discussion of new ideas in the fields of printmaking, history and connoisseurship. One of the two grantees this year is:

The Renaissance of Etching by Catherine Jenkins, Nadine M. Orenstein, and Freyda Spira
Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press
An accompaniment to the highly acclaimed Met exhibition which took place from October 23, 2019–January 19, 2020, the book is the first comprehensive look at the origins and diffusion across Europe of the etched print during the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The etching of images on metal, originally used as a method for decorating armor, was first employed as a printmaking technique at the end of the 15th century. This in-depth study explores the origins of the etched print, its evolution from decorative technique to fine art, and its spread across Europe in the early Renaissance, leading to the professionalization of the field in the Netherlands in the 1550s. Beautifully illustrated, this book features the work of familiar Renaissance artists, including Albrecht Dürer, Jan Gossart, Pieter Breughel the Elder, and Parmigianino, as well as lesser known practitioners, such as Daniel Hopfer and Lucas van Leyden, whose pioneering work paved the way for later printmakers like Rembrandt and Goya.

Join us for a conversation with contributors Catherine Jenkins, Independent scholar; Nadine Orenstein, Drue Heinz Curator in Charge, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Freyda Spira, Associate Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Moderated by David Tunick, President, IFPDA. This event will be held via Zoom on Tuesday, October 20, 2020 at 12pm.

Please visit the 'External Link' below to register.

We would like to congratulate our print and works on paper colleagues for their outstanding work this year -- print scholars and print exhibitions were well represented in the CAA 2019 Awards for Distinction!

Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions -----------------
Andrew C. Weislogel and Andaleeb Badiee Banta, "Lines of Inquiry: Learning from Rembrandt's Etchings"
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 2017

Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award -------------------
FINALISTS
Christophe Cherix, "Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions 1965–2016"
Museum of Modern Art, 2018

Naoko Takahatake and Jonathan Bober, "The Chiaroscuro Woodcut in Renaissance Italy"
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2018

CAA/AIC Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation ------------------
Karl S. Buchberg
Jodi Hauptman

Congratulations to all of the winners! The full list of award recipients can be found by clicking on the 'External Link' below.

René Carcan International Grand Prix
This prize, worth 5 000 €, will be awarded to the artist who has successfully passed the selection process and is chosen by the Jury after they have examined 4 works created during the last 3 years using one of the accepted techniques : etching, lithography, linocut, xylography, silkscreen and monotype.

First mention
This prize, worth 3 000 €, will be presented to the second best artist chosen by the Jury.

Second mention
This prize, worth 2 000 €, will be presented to the third best artist chosen by the Jury.

René Carcan Public Prize
The works of the artists who have successfully passed the selection process will be put to the vote of the website users. The artist whose works receive the most votes will receive the René Carcan Public Prize, which is an honorific prize.