Written from day 60 of quarantine, early in the days of the pandemic:

I can’t really write about this year’s Screenprint Biennial without adding in some background information. I’m in my makeshift basement home studio writing this essay, because my wife is in her small upstairs office having an online departmental meeting, and my 12-year old son is in the other room having internet school. Like everyone else in the country, we’ve been on lockdown, relatively lucky that no one in our house is:

- Sick

- A toddler

For this 4th Screenprint Biennial, a team of jurors selected the artworks that make up this exhibition. The jury pool included artist and printmaking professor Althea Murphy-Price, print scholar, writer, and curator Christina Weyl, master printer and printmaking instructor Luther Davis, and myself. We worked to put together a diverse, exciting, and challenging exhibition bringing together a fusion of color, expression, ideas, and innovation.

The biennial exhibit highlights innovation with works like Justin Diggle’s laser-engraved screenprints. By building up layers of screenprint ink and excavating it with a laser, he is able to create his Dada-like surveillance creatures. Building upon this surveillance narrative, Dana Potter mines the facial-recognition of our online systems for imagery that starts digital and becomes very physical through intensive ink layering and flocking (dusting a wet ink layer with a colored powder to add dimension to the print). Artist Yoni Asega pushes technical innovation in another direction, creating a piece using thermochromic ink (ink that changes color when you touch it) to create his “Certain Blacks,” exploring blackness in contemporary African American culture.

Conceptual ideas, from the personal to the political, pervade the exhibit. Robert Tillman’s brilliant over-the-top ode to the 1968 French student protest posters makes the case for screenprinted communication, then and now. In a similar vein, Ruthann Godellei’s “Bunting” uses vocal satire to call attention to attitudes and ideas damaging the social fabric of our communities. Other pieces in the exhibit work on a quieter level, like Arron Foster’s lyrical cyanotype/screenprint landscape, evoking a message of conservation, or Nicolas Ruth’s masterful “Watch This Space” series, in which he creates a personal vocabulary of signs and signifiers dotting a delicate, textured landscape.

A number of artists in the show create mind-blowing visual experiences. Both Travis Janssen and Robert Howsare work the line between geometrics and moiré to create psychedelic, illusionary playgrounds. The masterful work of Ann Aspinwall balances the same kind of hyper-dense mark-making with calming landscape-like fields, a perfect optical frission. Both Ayshia Taskin and Sophia Isaak take the gestural possibilities of screenprint to new levels, the former folding screenprint imagery into trippy animation, the latter adding in sculptural elements to compliment her patterned, biomorphic world.

There are scores of other amazing art works in the exhibit that use screenprinting to make us think and feel. They act as both a timestamp of what artists were thinking about before the pandemic, and act as a map moving forward to show us the state of the art in the years to come.

Nathan Meltz

Founder, Screenprint Biennial

This year, due to the developing global epidemic, "International Academic Printmaking Alliance" and the International Printmaking Institute of Central Academy of Fine Arts overcame many difficulties and successfully organized this online exhibition. We have invited artists from more than 40 academies in nearly 30 countries around the world to participate in the exhibition, with an increase of more than 10 academies over the previous two exhibitions, and with more than 470 pieces of printmaking works including installations and other new forms of arts, representing the latest level of international printmaking development. At the same time, an academic symposium was also held, in which more than 30 printmaking scholars and artists from all over the world will conduct academic discussions and exchanges through online conference meetings. Providing a brand new platform for exchanges and exhibitions for Chinese and foreign artists in this special period is of great significance for the prosperity of print art and the market, improving the level of creation and appreciation, and enhancing the artistic influence of prints.

To view this exhibition virtually please use the external link below.

Nkame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón presents forty-eight prints and audiovisual materials that encompass a wide range of the artist’s graphic production from 1986 until her untimely passing in 1999. Ayón mined the founding narrative of the Afro-Cuban all-male fraternal society called Abakuá Secret Society to create an independent and powerful visual iconography. She is highly regarded for her signature technique of collagraphy, a printing process in which a variety of materials are collaged onto a cardboard matrix and run through a press. Her deliberately austere palette of subtle black, white, and gray adds drama and mystery to her works. By joining multiple printed sheets she made large-scale works which are all included in the exhibition.

Ayón’s choice of subject matter—the history and mythology of Abakuá—was a direction she took in 1985, while still a high school student at the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts. This brotherhood arrived in the western port cities of Cuba in the early nineteenth century, carried by enslaved Africans from the Cross River region of southeastern Nigeria, and since then became a nucleus of protection and resistance for its members. A brief synopsis of the founding myth of Abakuá begins with Sikán, a princess who inadvertently trapped a fish while drawing water from the river. She was the first to hear the unexpected and loud bellowing of the fish, the mystical “voice” of Abakuá. Because women were not permitted this sacred knowledge, the local diviner swore Sikán to secrecy. Sikán, however, revealed her secret to her fiancé and because of her indiscretion was condemned to death. In Ayón’s work, Sikán remains alive, and her story and representation figure prominently.

Nkame, a word meaning praise and salutation in the Abakuá language, defines the character of the exhibition. Cristina Vives, a Cuba-based independent researcher, art critic, and curator of the exhibition, states, “Nkame is not simply an homage to Belkis Ayón but a possibility to dialogue with her work in quest of that affirming message of life and future that humanity needs.”

Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939) was an outstanding figure on the art market at the turn of the century. He distinguished himself by his audacity which made him support modern artists such as Cézanne, Gauguin or the young Picasso and Rouault. With this exhibition, the Petit Palais has chosen to focus on his major role in the specific field of print and illustrated book publishing. Beneficiary of numerous gifts and bequests from Vollard himself and his heirs, the Petit Palais will highlight this exceptional collection of prints, enriched by numerous loans from other institutions and collections.

Passionate about this publishing activity, Vollard invested the profits he made from the more lucrative trade of the paintings of the modern masters that he had under contract. He is involved in the choice of special papers, typographic research, printers, among other aspects of production of these works of great luxury. A particularly new chapter of the exhibition will focus on the activities of Henri Marie Petiet (1894-1980), the merchant who bought the Vollard gallery collection at the end of the war. He was also a discoverer of talents and a support for personalities as diverse as Jean-Émile Laboureur, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, Aristide Maillol and Marie Laurencin. The development of the central figure of Henri Marie Petiet benefits from recent research and discoveries that shed new light on the question of the French printmaking market in the 20th century.

The exhibition is designed to help people gain a better understanding of the techniques of printmaking
and publishing. It includes printmaking tools and a copper printing press on loan from the French national printing works (Imprimerie nationale), which will be activated during live demonstrations. Lastly, visitors can enjoy a lively guided tour of the exhibition by downloading the museum app, due to launch in tandem with the exhibition. The app, whose contents will also be available on the museum’s video guide, takes visitors through several key works and offers a glimpse of the unique and endearing personalities of Vollard and Petiet themselves through several anecdotes. There will also be a small area dedicated to creating a printed page with typeface and ornamental patterns.

Ashcan School Prints and the American City, 1900–1940 presents prints of city life made by urban realists during a time of rapid demographic, social, and economic change to America’s cities. With New York City as an epicenter of change—packed with vibrant new communities of immigrants from Europe and Latin American countries, and Blacks migrating from the American South—artists responded to the everyday lives and experiences of city dwellers, incorporating advertising and mass media techniques into their depictions of the lower classes, immigrants, working women, and social elites alike.  

The first two decades of the 20th century saw an explosion of visual culture in America’s cities, from advertising placards, painted storefronts, and newsstands stocked with illustrated magazines and comics to decked-out shop windows, vaudeville shows, and penny arcades. The city’s public spaces were also packed with people. In New York City, the vibrant street culture was the result, in part, of crowded living conditions, as the booming population sought to escape cramped tenement housing. The Ashcan School artists (a term coined for their apparently dingy subject matter) rejected academic artistic traditions and instead fed on the visual feast of the city, observing the interactions between people and the places they inhabited. John Sloan and George Bellows captured private moments in New York City’s public spaces, such as parks, streets, subways, bars, beaches, and amusement parks, largely overlooking any tensions in favor of positive, sometimes humorous spins on city life. By the 1920s and through the Great Depression, a new generation of urban realists including Edward Hopper, Isabel Bishop, and Benton Spruance took an often more skeptical or introspective approach to the changes and pressures of the American city. Others, such as Reginald Marsh, celebrated the visual decadence and the escapist delights that the city offered to all races, classes, and creeds.  

Drawn from the CMA’s holdings and a local private collection, the works in this exhibition evoke a bygone era, yet one in which visitors might recognize some of the social and economic tensions that persist in America’s cities even today.  

This exhibition is presented in conjunction with A New York Minute: Street Photography, 1920–1950 on view in the Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Gallery from April 18 to September 12, 2021. 

In its foundational years, The Block Museum of Art gained a reputation for presenting groundbreaking exhibitions that considered the unique roles prints and printmaking have played within visual culture. Printmaking stands apart from other artistic media in its capacity for reproduction and dissemination and is an ideal medium for telling stories about human experience to the broadest audiences. The Block began to build its collection around etchings, lithographs, screen prints, and other printed media. While the museum’s mission has evolved over time, prints continue to resonate with its aspiration to present art across time, cultures, and media and to inspire interdisciplinary discussions relevant to our lives today.

On the occasion of The Block’s 40th anniversary, For One and All: Prints from The Block’s Collection celebrates prints and printmaking by bringing together a diverse range of artwork from the permanent collection. The exhibition considers print production through various lenses layering complex histories of reproduction, circulation, collecting, and social activism.

For One and All places highlights from The Block’s collection, many of which have not previously been on view, into conversation with one another. The exhibition includes examples of works that have been in the collection since the founding of the Block in 1980, along with recent acquisitions and gifts. From early modern European prints, to Depression-era and social activist prints, and those produced at print workshops throughout the United States, the exhibition surveys the depth and breadth of the Block’s print collection and showcases the vital role that prints serve within the context of academic art museums.

Out of Print: Innovations of 19th- and 20th-Century Printmaking from the Collection of Phoenix Art Museum and the Schorr Collection explores the history of printmaking in Europe and the United States through more than 50 works by Paul Klee, Louise Nevelson, Robert Rauschenberg, Käthe Kollwitz, Mary Cassatt, Faith Ringgold, Fritz Scholder, Keith Haring, Paul Cézanne, Edvard Munch, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and more.

Amassed over four decades by the Lewis family, the United Kingdom-based Schorr Collection is considered one of the most important collections of Old Master and 19th-century paintings in the world. The collection features more than 400 works, including tender 15th-century devotional images, 19th-century French Impressionist landscapes, works by 20th-century Modern Masters, and a wide selection of prints. To increase access to these significant artworks, the Lewis family often shares them with public museums on a long-term basis, and in 2017, Phoenix Art Museum welcomed a selection to bring to Arizona audiences.

This exhibition showcases an assortment of works from the renowned Schorr Collection in conversation with those from the European and American art collections of Phoenix Art Museum, a wide selection of which have never before been exhibited.

The Cincinnati Art Museum presents a major re-evaluation of the work of Frank Duveneck, the most influential painter in Cincinnati history, with the first comprehensive exhibition in more than thirty years. This exhibition dives deep into Duveneck’s artistic development, his working methods, and the historical and social context of his subjects. Presenting abundant new research, the exhibition upends many common misconceptions and reveals the artist’s accomplishments across subjects and media, including oil paintings, drawings, watercolors, pastels, etchings, monotypes and sculpture.

Through his brilliant and inspiring work as a painter and printmaker and as a charismatic teacher, Duveneck’s impact on the international art world of his time was substantial and enduring. More than ninety examples across media from the holdings of the museum, the leading repository of the Covington native’s work, and thirty-five pieces on loan from collections across the United States will provide a fresh, in-depth look at this important artist.

Elsewhere in the museum, Duveneck will be celebrated with a free display, Grand Experiment in Italy: Etchings by Duveneck and His Students on view through April 4, 2021 (G213). Curated by Kristin Spangenberg, the special feature showcases 18 rare etching by Duveneck and his students, including a trial proof of The Riva, a previously unrecorded early etching by the artist in 1880. In addition, Duveneck’s art in the Cincinnati Wing has been freshly installed with More Duveneck! Paintings from the Vault, which presents 35 paintings by the artist from the museum’s renowned collection, hung salon-style in the Museum's Otto M. Budig Family Foundation Gallery.

Robert Blackburn & Modern American Printmaking celebrates both the artist and the democratic and diverse creative community he developed. Blackburn was an African American artist born to Jamaican immigrants in 1920 and raised in Harlem, New York. The exhibition highlights his life and work, revealing how his innovative printmaking expertise helped define the aesthetic of the American graphics “boom.” An influential teacher and master printer, Blackburn explored avant-garde ideas, while promoting a new collaborative approach to printmaking. The exhibition contains over 80 works, including lithographs, woodcuts, intaglio prints, and watercolors by Blackburn and the artists with whom he collaborated, including Elizabeth Catlett, Grace Hartigan, Robert Rauschenberg, and Charles White.

Blackburn was raised in Harlem, New York, during the Harlem Renaissance, an unparalleled flourishing of the arts centered in New York City’s Black community. The arts were considered crucial to the well-being of society as well as a fertile medium for activism and these values resonated with Blackburn throughout his life and work. In 1947, he founded a printmaking workshop as a welcoming space where artists of any level and from any background could learn and create together and it remains in operation to this day.

Over six decades as an artist, Blackburn gradually shifted from figurative work to highly colored abstraction. His early work reflected the powerful example of the Mexican muralists and the activist view of Social Realists addressing poverty and race in the 1930s. By the 1940s, like many other young artists, Blackburn had turned to abstraction, focusing on the exploration of color, composition, and mark making.

This exhibition celebrating the 300th anniversary of his birth brings this Piranesi principle back to life in all its creativity. It is centred around Piranesi’s masterpieces of engraving, his books, pamphlets, satirical illustrations, and drawings from the collections of the Kunstbibliothek and the Kupferstichkabinett, some of which are being shown for the very first time.

An exhibition catalogue will be published by E.A. Seemann Verlag. Leipzig, 144 pages, 135 colour illustrations, ISBN 978-3-86502-443-5 (German edition), 978-3-86502-444-2 (English edition), RRP: €27.