El Nopal Press, founded by Francesco Siqueiros in 1990, is distinguished by its culturally diverse collaborations with international artists. Although initially focused on the U.S./Mexico border as a site of cultural exchange and Los Angeles as a place of intersection, El Nopal has also worked with artists from Europe to further expand the boundaries of cross-cultural transfer and dialogue through print.

Featuring a virtual studio tour, as well as prepared slides of notable prints, editions, and artists with whom he has collaborated, Siqueiros will discuss his career, which includes his early work at Cirrus Editions, and the myriad of experiences and influences that led him to his present work at El Nopal.

For more information and to register for this virtual event please visit the external link below.

This panel will consider the work and legacy of the New York Graphic Workshop (NYGW), a printmaking collective operative from 1964 to 1970. Together, printmakers Luis Camnitzer (b. 1937), José Guillermo Castillo (1938–99), and Liliana Porter (b. 1941) devoted themselves to producing conceptual pieces indebted to printmaking and its labor-intensive processes. Even as they were committed to traditional methods, the NYGW often bent lithography, etching, and engraving away from their conventions, toward new questions, problems, and ideas. As Camnitzer stated in 1966: “We are printmakers conditioned but not destroyed by our techniques.”

In dialogue with curator and independent scholar Ursula Davila-Villa, Camnitzer and Porter will discuss artworks they produced while part of the NYGW. Examining both independent pieces and collaborations, Camnitzer, Davila-Villa, and Porter will draw viewers into the complex ideas these artists conveyed through print, and the ways they exploited the medium’s unique contingencies. The conversation will focus on the role printmaking played in the NYGW’s self-conception – particularly the crucial implications of “the multiple” which were foundational to the group’s interventions. Attendees will learn more about an influential and significant chapter in American and Latin American conceptual art, as well as the under-acknowledged contributions of print within these histories.

For more information and to register for this virtual event please visit the external link below.

VIRTUAL EXHIBITION OPENING FOR IMPERFECT HISTORY: CURATING THE GRAPHIC ARTS COLLECTION AT BENJAMIN FRANKLIN'S PUBLIC LIBRARY WITH SPECIAL GUEST DR. SHAWN MICHELLE SMITH

Monday, September 20, 5:30 p.m. EDT

Join Curators Sarah Weatherwax, Erika Piola, and Kinaya Hassane for Imperfect History and the Archive, a roundtable discussion, with special guest Dr. Shawn Michelle Smith, from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Smith and the curatorial team will discuss the thought processes behind and the visual materials informing the curators’ conception of the exhibition and overall project. Themes of close-looking at images and their historical context, and the cultural and racialized biases that create, read, and assemble collections of historical graphic materials will be examined.

For full information about the opening and to register please visit the external link below.

For more information about the Imperfect History project: https://librarycompany.org/imperfect-history/

Join distinguished Art Historians Joe Siry, Professor of Art History; Larry Silver, Professor of Art History emeritus at the University of Pennslyvania; and Miya Tokumitsu, Curator of the Davison Art Center, for a virtual weseminar as they discuss some special objects in the Davison Art Center.

The Davison Art Center is the home of Wesleyan’s art collection, which is focused primarily on graphic art and photography. The breadth of the collection is equaled by its outstanding quality; exceptionally fine impressions by Rembrandt van Rijn and Francisco de Goya, rare early engravings, and important contemporary artwork by artists including Kara Walker and Jasper Johns are only a few highlights. The Davison Art Center supports teaching, learning, and research in its study room, and presents public exhibitions in its gallery. We hope you can join us to learn more!

Event details
Thursday, September 23, 2021
12:00- 1:00 p.m.

Please register by Tuesday, September 21. Registrants will then receive a follow-up email on Wednesday, September 22 with details on how to join the program. This is a webinar-style Zoom gathering. If you are not able to join by video, you may dial-in.

For more information and to register please visit the external link below.

In conjunction with the opening of Dürer & After, exhibition curator Anne Leonard, Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, examines the inspiration that artists of Albrecht Dürer’s time—and continuing long afterwards—found in his incomparable print corpus. Running the gamut from meticulous copying to free interpretation and from respectful tribute to outright piracy, the methods and motivations of Dürer’s imitators offer a distinctive lens through which to view his remarkable artistic legacy.

Registrants will receive an email with a private Zoom link to this live virtual program before the event. The museum will also be broadcasting via Facebook Live.

For more information and to register for the event please visit the external link below.

Typewriters around the world: machines, practices, cultures

We invite you to a series of distinguished presentations that situate typewriters, typewriting, and related communities of practice within a rich diversity of languages, interactions, and interfaces. Each presentation in this series offers a glimpse of critical historical enquiry around everyday technologies for different writing systems around the world.


Upcoming talk • 14 July 2021

THOMAS S. MULLANEY (Stanford University)

A typewriter with no keys: the letterpress-typewriter-computer transition in global, comparative perspective

The transition from movable type to typewriting, and then from typewriting to computing, was experienced in dramatically different ways depending on the language in question. For English, the transition from letterpress to typewriting was marked by a technological schism. With the introduction of the keyboard, and with metal typefaces being moved largely out of sight, and into the chassis of the machine, typewriting bore little resemblance to the act of movable type composition. The transition from typewriting to computing, by contrast, was a relatively seamless one for English speakers. Not only did the keyboard stay the same, but so did the logic of textual production: to produce the letter ‘X’ on an IBM PC monitor, one depressed the letter ‘X’ on the keyboard – just like one did in the age of Remington. What you type is what you get.

These same transitions were completely different in the context of Chinese. Chinese typewriters continued to feature metal character slugs, with the exact same dimensions as those found in Chinese movable type. There was no keyboard on a Chinese typewriter, moreover, with typists looking directly at a tray bed of approximately 2500 metallic slugs, each a Chinese character or symbol in mirror image. For Chinese, that is to say, the letterpress-typewriting transition was marked by continuity, so much so that some referred to Chinese typewriters as ‘tabletop printing presses’. The transition from typewriting to computing, by contrast, was one of rupture for Chinese. Not only did Chinese computing introduce the mechanism of the keyboard for the first time, but it introduced an entirely new logic of textual production: input, where what you type is never what you get.

In this talk, Stanford historian Thomas S. Mullaney will provide an overview of the letterpress-typewriter-computer transition in global, comparative perspective.

Join moderator Lisa Blas for a conversation with Alice Centamore, the Paris-based art historian and writer who will present on Simone Forti's "Newspaper Animations," and Silvia Benedetti, the New York-based curator and writer who will present on the relationship between the media and the artwork of Beatriz González.

To register please visit the external link below.

The Princeton Print Club will be the focus of a free webinar on Zoom at 2:00 EDT on Friday, May 28, 2021. Julie Mellby, Graphic Arts Curator, will present an illustrated history of the organization, joined by Marilyn Kushner, New York Historical Society, who will talk about the explosion of interest in printing and print collecting at that time, and by Alexandra Letvin, from the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, where they continue to circulate fine art prints to the students each semester as part of their Art Rental program.

Sarah Kirk Hanley, leading expert on Enrique Chagoya's prints, will give a special presentation on Enrique Chagoya's etchings, artist's books, monotypes, and lithographs. Chagoya was the 2008 Des Moines Art Center Print Club Commissioned Print Artist, and The Art Center holds several Chagoya prints in the permanent collection.

Enrique Chagoya is a Bay Area painter and printmaker and a professor of Art Practice at Stanford University, and he uses political satire to question the nature of historical events, American history, and contemporary politics. Hanley has published several essays on the artist's editioned work and organized a retrospective of his prints in 2014. Hanley will discuss Chagoya's ongoing series of artist books and other print projects which are reinterpretations of Old Master images that tackle contemporary issues. This timely discussion lays the groundwork for the Goya work that will be featured at the Art Center this summer.

Sarah Kirk Hanley is an independent consulting expert and critic in the greater NYC area; and she writes extensively for Art21 Magazine and Art in Print.

For more information and to register for this free event please visit the external link below.

Typewriters around the world: machines, practices, cultures

We invite you to a series of distinguished presentations that situate typewriters, typewriting, and related communities of practice within a rich diversity of languages, interactions, and interfaces. Each presentation in this series offers a glimpse of critical historical enquiry around everyday technologies for different writing systems around the world.


Upcoming talk • 10 June 2021

DAVID ARNOLD (University of Warwick)

The typewriter as protagonist: India’s new age of technology, 1890–1920

Typewriters are special kinds of ‘things’: they have a voice, a signature, a generative power of their own. They are ‘things’ that produce ‘things’. They are also harbingers of a transformative techno-modernity, in which from the mid-nineteenth century onwards a cluster of small machines — the camera, bicycle, sewing machine, gramophone, typewriter — began to isolate, mimic, and augment specific human functions. Combining ‘thing theory’ with the discursive and material idioms of modernity, this presentation asks what makes typewriters special and in particular poses this question in relation to society, politics, and the techno-culture of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India. It ponders the semantic significance of the hyphenated hybrid ‘type-writer’ and the use (before the rise of the ‘typist’) of the term ‘typewriter’ to designate both the machine and the person who operates it. The presentation further examines how, in contrast to standard notions of ‘colonial knowledge’, India reacted to an assertive American take on modernity — with typewriters as the stylish exemplars of speed, uniformity, and efficiency, from the re-gendering (and re-racializing) of office work, through technological mobility and physical portability, vernacularization and commercialization, to newspaper advertising and brand recognition. The typewriter spawned a new pedagogy, with secretarial courses, business schools, instruction manuals, and sales leaflets. It stimulated new levels of functional literacy, office and business skills. It also necessitated new forms of technical expertise, from the typewriter repairman to the handwriting and typewriter specialist of the Criminal Investigation Department. These overarching dynamics are read against two specific episodes — the Parsi postcard case of 1915 and the Lahore conspiracy case of 1914 — which highlight the internal tensions and contradictory impulses in India’s emergent typewriter culture.

David Arnold is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Warwick and a Fellow of the British Academy. His principal contribution to typewriter scholarship is Everyday technology: machines and the making of India’s modernity (2013), which also considers bicycles, sewing machines, and rice mills. His earlier work has ranged widely over the history of medicine, science, technology, and the environment in modern South Asia, including Colonizing the body: state medicine and epidemic disease in nineteenth-century India (1993) and The tropics and the traveling gaze: India, landscape, and science, 1800-1856 (2005). His latest book, Burning the dead: Hindu nationhood and the global construction of Indian tradition (2021), discusses cremation in India and the South Asian diaspora, but the ‘everyday’ in technology remains an abiding interest.

For more information and to register please use the external link below