During the German Romantic movement, active from about 1770 to 1850, many artists hoped to gain a deeper understanding of universal questions. They experienced the French Revolution, France’s invasion of Germany during the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), and a shift from the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason to more interest in emotion and feeling. Decades of changing borders and values led artists to reconsider their national identity and sense of self, as well as their relationship to nature and the divine.

Featuring 84 drawings, prints, and paintings that highlight the Milwaukee Art Museum’s German Romantic collection—one of the strongest in the country—the exhibition examines how artists attempted to comprehend and shape their world. They looked to the sublime beauty of the landscape, religious devotion, and travel to help them respond to the urgent issues of their time. Ultimately, even when it did not uncover answers, the process of seeking offered its own reward. The Romantics’ approach offers an example we can follow today as we live through our own unpredictable moment in history.

The devastating stock market crash of 1929 triggered the Great Depression, the worst economic crisis in the history of the United States. At the height of the Depression in 1933, nearly 13 million people—roughly 25 percent of the workforce—were unemployed. In response, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created an economic relief program known as the New Deal to offer employment to struggling Americans. The Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federally funded agency, hired some ten thousand artists to produce work for public buildings and traveling exhibitions as part of the Federal Art Project (FAP).

From coast to coast, the WPA supported artists who created paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and murals for the American public. These artists drew on their everyday experiences as they depicted their own communities in a wide range of locations from urban centers to rural outposts. The WPA employed such established figures as John Steuart Curry as well as newcomers like Jacob Lawrence, providing materials, community, and income at a critical moment in their careers. After the WPA was closed in 1943, works of art produced under federal sponsorship were allocated to institutions across the country, including what is today the Blanton Museum of Art. The museum’s allotment serves as the basis for Art in Every Corner and is displayed in the context of pieces made by WPA artists before or after their periods of federal employment, encouraging an exploration and celebration of the dynamic impact of the WPA’s programs on artists who represented every corner of American life during the 1930s and ’40s.

Paper Trails: Latin American Art in Print (1950-1995) features important portfolios of modern and contemporary Latin American printmaking in the collection of the Blanton Museum of Art. During the 1960s, as interest in Latin American art increased internationally, curated print sets emerged as portable exhibitions showcasing the art of the region and of particular countries to audiences abroad. This show explores prominent portfolios produced in the context of a regional printmaking boom that was bolstered by a network of international biennials, key printmaking studios, and the support of transnational corporations. It will feature print sets produced in influential workshops in Mexico and Puerto Rico, while also featuring print sets from other countries, including Bolivia and Paraguay, whose art is seldom exhibited in the United States.

"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.