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.

Nexo Entre Raíces | Nexus Between Roots brings together thirty-three contemporary artists working on either side of the US-Mexico border. Through powerful and timely prints, this exhibition explores how our cultural roots shape and define us.

Organized by artist Marco Sánchez, Nexo Entre Raíces has traveled to the National Hispanic Cultural Center, Kent State University, and the El Paso Museum of Art and will be shown for the first time in California at The Turner.

Indian-born artist Krishna Reddy (1925–2018) was a key member of the Paris-based printmaking studio Atelier 17, where his groundbreaking technical achievements and teaching methods left an important legacy on twentieth-century printmaking. As co-director of the studio and a lifelong educator, Reddy advocated for an open-ended, exploratory approach to making art. For him, the creative process is as important as the final product: “Inquiring, learning: this is the real joy, the movement of life.”

Using a new multicolor printing process that he co-developed at Atelier 17, Reddy expanded the expressive, and even spiritual, possibilities for rendering the natural world in print. This exhibition, timed to coincide with the centenary of the artist's birth, explores his abstract representations of seeds, flowers, insects, water, and the human figure. Dazzling feats of color and texture, Reddy’s prints vibrate with the cosmic energy that, according to his personal philosophy, pulses through and connects all elements of nature. As objects, Reddy’s prints were imbued with a life force of their own. By modifying an image over time—either by reworking the plate or printing in different color combinations—he could give a composition a new life with each printing.

The exhibition celebrates the generous donation of sixty-three works by Reddy to the museum from Drs. Umesh and Sunanda Gaur, making this museum a major repository for the artist’s work.

Estelle L. Roberge, an APS member, will be participating in the Donald M. Robinson
Photography Biennial at “The Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art” with three new
Photo/Collages. Exhibition: July 25-October 19, 2025. Reception: August 2nd, 6-8PM. Anderson House in Bedford, 137 E. Pitt Street, Bedford, PA. 1552

During the 19th century, advancements in industry, science, and technology changed how people thought about and dealt with death. In response, some European artists reimagined a motif known as the dance of death, which historically featured skeletons gleefully clinging to people from all walks of life. This exhibition highlights two portfolios from the Museum’s collection by Albert Besnard (French, 1849–1936) and Max Klinger (German, 1857–1920). Both artists represented death disrupting everyday moments, emphasizing how sudden and unpredictable it could be. The 20 prints convey public anxiety related to previously unknown or more industrial causes of death. By looking to and updating traditions, Besnard and Klinger found a way to cope with the complex world around them.

Experience the wonder of nature through the eyes of artists. Look closely at art depicting insects and other animals alongside real specimens.

Art played a pivotal role during the dawn of European natural history in the 16th and 17th centuries. Advancements in scientific technology, trade, and colonial expansion allowed naturalists to study previously unknown and overlooked insects, animals, and other beestjes, or “little beasts.” Artists such as Joris Hoefnagel and Jan van Kessel helped deepen and spread knowledge of these creatures with highly detailed and playful works that inspired generations of printmakers, painters, decorative artists, and naturalists.

A delight for all ages, this exhibition features nearly 75 of these paintings, prints, and drawings in a unique presentation alongside specimens and taxidermy from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Learn about the rich exchange between artists and naturalists that sparked a fascination with earth’s living creatures, big and small. See how this intersection of art and science continues to inspire us today in a new film by artist Dario Robleto.

How far does the apple fall from the tree?

Traditionally, professions were passed down in families in much the same way as certain traits, abilities, and resources. This exhibition tells the stories of eighteen artistic families active in France, Italy, England, Scotland, and India from the late-seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. In some cases, there is a striking visual resemblance between the artworks produced by members of the same family, while in others, the styles of individual artists within a family are highly distinctive. Family relationships also overlap with the roles of teacher and pupil, business partner, and rival.

From highly refined French engravings intended to glorify King Louis XIV and archaeological views of Rome designed for tourists and architects to evocative landscapes of Britain and India, the works in this exhibition chart two and a half centuries of social and artistic change in Europe and beyond. The invention of new printmaking techniques that mimicked the tonal effects of drawings broadened the appeal of prints during this period, and they were enthusiastically collected by a growing middle class. More women entered the profession, too, and more artists traveled internationally in search of inspiration and new markets.

Amidst these significant cultural shifts, the family nonetheless remained a persistent locus of artistic production due to inherited aptitudes as well as close personal and economic connections. Drawing from the Blanton’s collection of European art, A Family Affair presents prints, drawings, and paintings created by some of the continent’s most fascinating artistic families, revealing patterns of inspiration, competition, and evolving family fortunes.

Curated by Holly Borham, Curator of Prints, Drawings and European Art, and Sarah Bane, Assistant Curator, Prints & Drawings, Blanton Museum of Art.