"Deep Cuts: Block Printing Across Cultures" explores the world's oldest and most versatile method of making multiple images. More than 150 works from Asia, Europe, and the Americas present the medium as both a means of creative expression and a vehicle for mass production that enabled images and ideas to circulate widely. Textiles, prints, and books offer intricate patterns and striking imagery that reveal block printing’s global history, from the patterned fabrics of India to the illustrated books of the Kelmscott Press to modern artistic experiments by German Expressionist artists and contemporary makers like Christiane Baumgartner. The exhibition also includes a section developed with Los Angeles–based Block Shop, highlighting how contemporary makers continue to reinterpret this enduring art form.

This exhibition explores the intersections of poetry and printmaking in the Turner collection. Discover work by over 20 poets, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Billy Collins, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Naomi Shihab Nye, Anne Sexton and more, alongside prints inspired by poetry. Featuring letterpress printing, illustrated books, and contemporary broadsides, prepare to be delighted by the poetic art of print.

Vivid prints of divinities are part of daily life for Hindus in India and around the world, used for worship in homes, factories, and offices, as well as for adornment on cars, calendars, computers, and shop counters. The art world has historically overlooked these images, often called “calendar art,” because they are inexpensive and mass produced. But they have a rich and fascinating history in and influence on Indian art, religion, and society.

“Divine Color: Hindu Prints from Modern Bengal” explores these popular prints’ origins and powerful impacts. When Indian artists encountered the new printmaking technology of lithography in 19th-century Calcutta (today Kolkata), then the capital of British India, they used it to reinvent devotional art. Depictions of Hindu gods became more realistic, colorful, and accessible than ever before. Shrines in homes across the economic spectrum came to host these images, mixed and matched according to a family’s taste. Though the lithographs of Hindu gods created by Bengali artists were not expensive, they were valuable in other senses. Sold in the bustling bazaars of Calcutta where presses competed to attract customers, the prints served an important role in home worship, satisfied the artistic sensibilities of a Bengali society that had absorbed European fine art values, and helped to spread new political ideas. The exhibition considers how lithography gave these artists—who produced thousands of prints that traveled quickly across the nation—a means to change not just devotional but also artistic, political, and social life.

A highlight of the exhibition is the MFA’s collection of 38 vibrant lithographs from 19th-century Calcutta. The MFA is one of only two American museums that collects this material. This exhibition, the first of its kind in the United States, features more than 100 objects, including other prints, paintings, sculpture, and textiles from the Museum’s South Asian collection and select loans. It culminates in an immersive room developed in collaboration with the Delhi-based Tasveer Ghar—an organization dedicated to collecting, digitizing, and documenting South Asian popular visual culture—featuring wall-sized collages of 20th-century popular images.

In Hinduism, the act of darshan, or “seeing god,” is central to worship. This intimate exchange between deity and devotee traditionally takes place in the temple. But within each home is also a shrine, dedicated to that householder’s chosen deity. The need to display an image of the divine in the home was traditionally fulfilled by small icons made of clay or metal. In the mid-19th century, new technologies were introduced into India, first photography and then the chromolithographic press. The latter permitted the production of inexpensive prints of the Hindu gods for mass consumption. These proved immensely popular and for the first time in India, even the humblest home could afford a colorful icon of their chosen god to display in the household shrine.

Household Gods: Hindu Devotional Prints, 1860–1930 presents the first encyclopedic exhibition of these chromolithographic prints from the pioneering studio presses of Calcutta (Kolkata), Poona (Pune), and Bombay (Mumbai). These mass-produced prints became a powerful means of expressing Indian religious identity at a time when the country was experiencing the first stirrings of the Independence movement.

Featuring approximately 120 works, shown in four rotations, from The Met’s collection of chromolithographic prints, along with paintings and portable triptych shrines, Household Gods provides a unique window on the vibrant tradition of Indian devotional imagery on the cusp of modernity.

Since its establishment in 1956 with a gift of prints from Los Angeles collector Fred Grunwald, the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts has evolved into one of the nation’s foremost collections of works on paper. Over the decades, the Grunwald Center’s holdings have expanded through donations and acquisitions, and now comprise more than 45,000 prints, drawings, photographs, and artists’ books dating from the Renaissance to the present. Housed at the Hammer Museum since 1994, the Grunwald Center fosters learning and discovery through its collection, which is regularly presented in exhibitions and made accessible in its dedicated study room. This exhibition marks the 70th anniversary of the Grunwald Center, celebrating its history through a selection of significant works that reflect the collection’s breadth and diversity. It will feature nearly 100 works by over 90 artists, including Andrea Mantegna, Albrecht Dürer, Hendrick Goltzius, Rembrandt van Rijn, George Cruikshank, Jose Guadalupe Posada, Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, Vassily Kandinsky, Käthe Kollwitz, Pablo Picasso, Grant Wood, Ansel Adams, Norman Lewis, Elizabeth Catlett, Charles White, Corita Kent, Ruth Asawa, Bridget Riley, David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, Analia Saban, and Toba Khedoori.

Five Centuries of Works on Paper: The Grunwald Center at 70 is organized by Naoko Takahatake, director and chief curator, Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, and Cynthia Burlingham, former deputy director of curatorial affairs, with Jennie Waldow, curatorial assistant and collection specialist, and Kelin Michael, curatorial fellow, Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts.

How did artists and Antiquaries create visual records of objects and places before the invention of photography? How did they ensure the visual preservation of fragile heritage? The next display at the Society of Antiquaries will showcase how monuments, archaeological finds, and faraway places were immortalised through sketching and printing.

By bringing together drawings, printing plates, woodblocks, and their impressions, along with some of the original objects, the display will allow visitors to trace the creative process behind engraved images. Through six themes, the display will not only exemplify the breadth of the Society’s collections but also reveal the collaborative work of antiquaries and artists. This display is a celebration of the enduring legacy of those early visual records and their crucial role in preserving in ink the memory of disappearing heritage, much like today’s digitisation campaigns.

Please note: This display is available to be seen by Fellows and Affiliate Members during our regular Library opening hours (Monday to Friday, 10am-5pm) and by members of the public who are coming to the building as part of an event which they have booked for.

This exhibition is a collaborative effort by five curators around the state of Kansas to raise awareness of the women artists who worked tirelessly to keep the visual arts alive during the decade of the Great Depression, while enlarging opportunities for women artists who came after.

Elizabeth Seaton of the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art at Kansas State University (Manhattan, KS) presents the story of Sue Jean Covacevich (1905-1998) who spent the 1930s primarily in Mexico and was offered the chance to study with Diego Rivera (1886-1957), and brought her mural-making experience back to Winfield, Kansas. Kara Heitz, scholar of Kansas New Deal art at the Kansas City Art Institute, focuses on the Topeka printmaker Mary Huntoon (1896-1970) who was in charge of the WPA’s Federal Art Project for the state of Kansas. Bill North of the Clara Hatton Center (Lindsborg, KS), shows the breadth of study of all the arts –painting, printmaking, ceramics, weaving, metalsmithing, and bookbinding—that Clara Anna Hatton (1901-1991) undertook while teaching at the University of Kansas and then brought to Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, to build up the school’s art department. Mike Brotherton of Labette Community College (Parsons, KS) has studied all the New Deal program print series Margaret Whittemore (1897-1983) created to celebrate the landmarks and natural beauties of the state. Cori Sherman North of the Sandzén Gallery highlights the career of Anna E. Keener (1895-1982) who was an early student of Birger Sandzén (1871-1954) but developed a more experimental body of work with her New Mexico students, and the work of Norma Bassett Hall (181889-1957), charter member of the Prairie Print Makers society that was established in Sandzén’s home studio in December of 1930.

Helen Frankenthaler (American, 1928–2011) began printmaking in 1961, working across lithography, woodcut, and etching for the next fifty years. Frankenthaler is known for her abstract paintings and especially her signature “soak-stain” technique—allowing paint to sit, spread, and pool on untreated canvas. She brought this same sensibility, what she described as a “pouring, flooding, spilling, bleeding one,” to works on paper.

While printmaking is often characterized by precision and control, Frankenthaler’s prints allow for chance encounters between pigment and surface—unintentional effects that emphasize the agency and alchemy of materials. The exhibition focuses on her print practice and calls attention to the unpredictability, chance, and accident in Frankenthaler’s work.

The exhibition includes works by other artists in The Block’s collection who have similarly embraced chance, accident, or aesthetic surprise in their artworks. It brings together a sampling of lithographs, drawings, and watercolors by Frankenthaler’s friends and colleagues—Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, and Robert Motherwell—and many other artists from The Block’s permanent collection.

In 2023, The Block Museum was one of ten university museums to receive artwork as part of the Frankenthaler Print Initiative. The exhibition features this extraordinary gift and brings it into conversation with prints in the collection.

For millennia, wine has played a significant role not only in the human diet but also in cultural myths, rituals, and festivities. As a result, wine—its ingredients, making, drinking, and effects on the human body and mind—has been a constant muse for artistic creation. The exhibition In Vino Veritas (In Wine, Truth), a phrase coined by the Roman polymath Pliny the Elder, celebrates the presence and meaning of wine in prints, drawings, textiles, and objects made in Europe between 1450 and 1800. Drawn from the museum’s collection, more than 70 works by artists from throughout Europe explore wine’s myths, symbols, and stories. These images reveal how diverse cultures and religions ascribed meaning and transformational properties to the so-called nectar of the gods.

This fall, the Vanderbilt University Museum of Art invites the public to look at works on paper in unexpected ways through "Paper Backs: Hidden Stories of European Prints from the Vanderbilt University Museum of Art Collection." The exhibition encourages visitors to encounter 60 prints dating between 1530 and 1915 from multiple vantage points and discover a rich ecosystem of works on paper that includes but also goes beyond the pristine masterpieces typically displayed in museums.

The exhibition emphasizes two sets of interconnected stories. The first section, Paper Tracks, traces the movement of prints between artists and collectors over centuries, showing the intermediary role played by dealers as well as the disruptive impact of historic events such as war. The second section, Paper Hacks, focuses on the prints’ uses (and abuses) by prior owners, demonstrating the changing value of paper images over time. To tell these stories and loop audiences into art historical detective work, the exhibition highlights physical aspects of works on paper that are often hidden, such as stamped marks, offhand doodles, and found materials used in the previous conservation and presentation of prints. Visitors will be able to study selected prints in double-sided displays, while other prints will be shown with their backs facing out. An online version of the exhibition (accessible through the museum's website and going live on September 2) will allow users to toggle between both sides of each print.

The exhibition is primarily drawn from VUMA’s recently rediscovered collection of more than 6,400 European and American prints dating from 1500 to 1915. The collection was assembled by the New York-based Sullivan family and given to the George Peabody College for Teachers and the Brooklyn Museum between 1916 and 1950. Long relegated to storage, the prints reemerged during campus construction in 2023. Their recovery coincided with a renewed investment in VUMA’s collections, including its first full inventory and a new public-facing online collection database.

Visitors will encounter well-known and obscure printmakers and collectors active from the Renaissance through World War I. Many of the prints in Paper Backs will be displayed for the first time. Notable debuts include: a printed headpiece meant to be cut out and worn at a Renaissance wedding (it was later salvaged by an unidentified collector, who pasted it to the back of a nineteenth-century map); an etching by Elisabetta Sirani (1638–1665) that features an elegant ink sketch of a sarcophagus on the sheet’s back; and an enigmatic 1530s engraving formerly owned by the first president of the British Royal Academy of Arts, Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792). Several large sheets of paper featuring prints glued down by the American collector George Hammond Sullivan (1859–1956) will allow visitors to see how prints were stored and enjoyed before entering museum collections. Fifteen prints from the former collection of the Italian artist Giovanni Locarno (active ca. 1800–1862), meanwhile, will collectively offer a window into how artists assembled and used their print collections in the era just before photography took over many of prints’ previous functions. VUMA’s collection includes more than 100 prints featuring Locarno’s distinctive stamp.

In addition to European prints, Paper Backs will also feature a painting by Charlotte Lentrein de Senezcourt (1844–1914), an Edo-period Japanese woodblock print (displayed alongside a 1915 woodcut by fashion illustrator and textile designer Alberto Fabio Lorenzi (1880–1969) depicting a World War I battle scene made to imitate a Japanese fan, and a seventeenth-century album of prints by Johann Wilhelm Bauer formerly owned by Giovanni Locarno, which the university's Special Collections recently acquired.