A new series of works by Wilma Cruise produced in collaboration with the David Krut etching Workshop (DKW) in Johannesburg.

In January of this year, David Krut Workshop (DKW) welcomed Wilma Cruise in Johannesburg to collaborate with Master Printer, Jillian Ross. During the course of her time at DKW, Cruise created four new drypoint etchings and completed the varied edition, Harrismith – a carborundum etching which she first began work on in 2007.

In Advice from a Caterpillar, the result of this recent collaboration, Cruise explores the human animal relationship and asks the ultimately ethical question, “What happens if the animals were in charge and treated us as we treated them?”

The Cape Town launch will take place at David Krut Projects’ new space at the Association for Visual Arts Gallery (AVA) and includes a bronze sculpture depicting a quirky duo of baboons.

Baboon politics are rife in the Western Cape where man and animal compete for space and resources. The “wars” are hot and fierce with passions running high amongst the divided humans. There are those who want to see the baboons vanquished and those who wish to live in harmony with them. It is a microcosm of human conflict in which the individual animal is often forgotten.

It was Jeremy Bentham (1748 – 1832) who first challenged the orthodoxy that animals were unfeeling, unthinking automata, when he shifted the weight of the question from reason to emotion;

…the question is not can they reason? Nor can they talk? But, Can they suffer? (Kalof and Fitzgerald, 2007)

In an etching titled The End Game a pair of baboons contemplate the conundrum of the end of the world as they know it. The large carborundum and drypoint work, Harrismith, depicts a human female figure, around whose neck is draped a large cat. The cat both presses into the head of the figure and appears to grow out of it. The figure bows her head submitting both to the burden and the comfort of the animal. The All-knowing Pig, like the Cheshire cat, smiles out of her frame, sealed in her hermetic world of ‘pigness’. It is a world closed to us human animals who have no access to her particular epistemology.

Working from images that float up from Cruise’s subconscious almost predisposes them to incomprehension. It is only later that she is able to decipher their meaning. Like a dream that haunts one long after it has passed, these images eventually allow for a decoding of sort.

This new body of work will be presented alongside earlier works by Cruise, produced in collaboration with DKW. In the juxtaposition of old and new work, the perennial nature of Cruise’s preoccupation with the “animal question” is clear.

This special exhibition will highlight M.C. Escher, a renowned artist, whose visual illusions puzzle and delight audiences worldwide, and is best known for his “impossible constructions” and use of tessellation. The robust exhibit will feature 135 works covering Escher’s entire artistic career, including an array of his most recognizable works such as “Drawing Hands,” “Reptiles” and “Waterfall” alongside rarely exhibited early drawings of family members, panoramas of exotic landscapes and historic architecture of Italy and Spain, original preparatory sketches, mezzotints and more.

“Escher, like Dali, played in a serious way with that fundamental question of visual art – What is real? Is the world as it looks to be, or have I constructed an illusion in my mind? Escher delights every viewer with his visual sleights of hand,” said Hank Hine, Dali Museum Executive Director.

“Escher at the Dali” will feature prints, drawings, a sculpture, wood blocks, a lithograph stone and posters drawn by the artist to explain his printing techniques. The exhibit will delve into his exploration of infinity through tessellation, in which shapes fit together perfectly without overlapping, including an enormous woodcut “Metamorphosis” (1939-40) which spans 13-1/2 feet.

Corita Kent (American, 1918–1986) was a Roman Catholic nun, an artist, and an educator. From 1936 to 1968 she lived, studied, and taught at the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles, and headed the art department at the college there from 1964 to 1968, developing many aspects of her signature style while working alongside her students. The screenprints she created during the 1960s are typical examples of pop art, embodying the vivid palette, focus on everyday subjects, and mass-produced quality of ephemeral objects. Corita Kent and the Language of Pop examines Kent’s screenprints as well as her films, installations, Happenings, and her 1971 mural painted on the Boston Gas (now National Grid) tank—a roadside landmark in Boston. The exhibition frames Kent’s work within the pop movement while also considering other prevailing artistic, social, and religious movements of the time. In particular, the exhibition explores how Kent’s work both responded to and advanced changes then facing the Catholic Church, brought about by the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II). More than 60 of Kent’s prints will appear alongside over 60 works of art by her prominent contemporaries such as Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol, along with a selection of films, books, drawings, photographs, sculpture, and a textile.

The accompanying catalogue, published by the Harvard Art Museums and distributed by Yale University Press, offers nearly 90 illustrated entries and four essays by distinguished scholars and fills a gap in the scholarship about Kent’s work. The exhibition will travel to the San Antonio Museum of Art (February 13 through May 8, 2016) after its time in Cambridge.

Organized by the Harvard Art Museums and curated by Susan Dackerman, the former Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints at the Harvard Art Museums (2005–2014) and current consultative curator of prints.

The project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Additional funding for the project is provided by Barbara Ketcham Wheaton and the late Robert Bradford Wheaton, the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, Jeanne and Geoff Champion, John Stuart Gordon, Marjorie B. and Martin Cohn, Ellen von Seggern and Jan Paul Richter, the Rosenblatt Fund for Post-War American Art, the Anthony and Celeste Meier Exhibitions Fund, and the Harvard Art Museums Mellon Publication Funds, including the Henry P. McIlhenny Fund.

Modern and contemporary art programs at the Harvard Art Museums are made possible in part by generous support from the Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art.

Born in Aberdeen, Mississippi, artist Maltby Sykes (American, 1911–1992) grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. While he always considered the South his home, Sykes travelled extensively to places such as Europe, Japan, and Mexico and these trips influenced his work greatly. Sykes’ formative experiences of working as an assistant to Diego Rivera on a mural for the Hotel Reforma in Mexico City in 1936, and interacting with printmaker George C. Miller in New York, provoked a shift in his style from realism to semi-abstraction and abstraction, and in technique, from painting to printmaking.

In fact, printmaking, and specifically lithography, became a lifelong passion for the artist, and one that he would share with many others. After returning to his teaching appointment at Alabama Polytechnic Institute (now Auburn University) following his stint as an Air Force combat artist in WWII, Sykes began a printmaking program at the school. This program allowed Sykes to experiment with different printmaking technologies including adapting commercial lithographic processes for art making. This type of creative thinking and use of alternative approaches is also inherent in Sykes’ approach to his art.

In 1983 the artist donated a large number of works of art to the MMFA. A selection of works from this collection illustrates the arc of Sykes’ career in printmaking. From realism to abstraction, Sykes’s imagery follows a trajectory, illustrating was happening in art and in the world around him. Sykes not only embodies what it means to be a modernist, but also his art reflects the changes that occur over a lifetime, proving that he was indeed a witness to his time.

Spanning three decades of Warhol’s career, this exhibition features some of the artist’s most iconic screenprints, including his portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Mao Zedong, the splashy camouflage series and the controversial Electric Chair portfolio.

This exhibition will feature 19th-century ukiyo-e woodblock prints by artists of the Utagawa School, and 20th-century shinhanga and sōsaku hanga prints, as well as recently acquired contemporary Japanese works.

This exhibition features a variety of portraits by contemporary artists and photographers, from Julian Opie, Grayson Perry and Ellen Heck to Maud Sulter and Bettina von Zwehl. The exhibition shows how artists have adapted historical or conventional modes of portraiture such as silhouettes, portrait miniatures, medals, Old Master paintings and death masks, as well as passport photographs, ID cards and election campaign posters.

International Print Center New York presents New Prints 2015/Summer, on view at 508 West 26th St, 5th Floor, from June 11 – July 31, 2015. The exhibition consists of forty-six prints by thirty-nine artists, selected from over 2,000 submissions. Showing during IPCNY’s 15th Anniversary year, New Prints 2015/Summer is the fifty-first presentation of IPCNY’s New Prints Program, a series of juried exhibitions organized by IPCNY several times each year featuring prints made within the past twelve months. An illustrated brochure with a curatorial essay by Tom Freudenheim accompanies the exhibition.

This show was selected by: Grayson Cox (Artist, Professor), Jennifer Farrell (Associate Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Tom Freudenheim (Art Critic and Retired Museum Director), Evelyn Day Lasry, (Two Palms, NY), William Steiger (Artist), and Barbara Takenaga (Artist, Professor).

Beginning in the seventeenth century, artists increasingly depicted scenes of everyday life in their work. The doctor’s visit, generally showing a male doctor visiting a female patient in her home, became a popular subject in paintings and prints. As medical knowledge and scientific training progressed over the following centuries, artists presented a wider range of interactions between doctors and patients. Some artists featured doctors as caring, learned professionals, while others showed charlatans promoting dubious remedies. Images often included medical iconography used in symbolic or satirical ways to comment upon political events and social mores.

This exhibition explores the different ways that European artists both documented and interpreted health issues and medical practices of their time. While some works rely on long-established artistic conventions and outdated medical practices, others respond to trends and breakthroughs in treatment or focus on either lauding or lampooning the most famous physicians of the day. Works by the great French printmaker and sculptor Honoré Daumier and his contemporaries demonstrate the wide use of medical imagery to criticize King Louis-Philippe’s government (1830-1848), while works by Hermann-Paul and Charles Maurin consider the public and private aspects of the impact of illness on the average citizen. The exhibition is selected from the Zimmerli Art Museum’s rich collection of European prints from the Renaissance through the twentieth century.

This exhibition features 20 Surrealist-inspired linocut prints by Slovak artist Vincent Hložník (1919–1997) created in Czechoslovakia in 1962. They represent a turning point in the artist's career as his figurative motifs—always related to the exploration of the human condition—began to take on more symbolic and metaphorical meanings.

In the dystopic universe of the prints, detached human limbs, tangled corpses, monstrous figures assembled from eyes and teeth, the Angel of Death, and threatening flanks of silhouetted and stylized archaic warriors signal unspecified danger. Angles and voids activate the space and create an instability marking the very real threat of annihilation, whether from war or nuclear arms. Hložník's approach to art was profoundly affected by his time as a student in Prague during World War II where he witnessed Nazi atrocities. This experience led him to address themes of war, isolation and human suffering in his work.