In his talk, Dr. Curlee Raven Holton will discuss his personal and professional journey to becoming an artist and the creative possibilities that he discovered through printmaking. Reflecting on his own experiences and relationships with Robert Blackburn, Elizabeth Catlett, and David C. Driskell, among others, Dr. Holton will trace how his passion for collaboration – so deeply inherent in the printed medium – grew out of a desire to build a community with a shared belief in the transformative power of art, and how that passion has been, and can be, a source for self-liberation and social engagement.

An artist, director, professor, and scholar, Curlee Raven Holton has exhibited widely, and his artwork can be found in the collections of several major international art museums. For nearly three decades, Dr. Holton has served as the David M. and Linda Roth Professor of Art at Lafayette College in Easton, PA, where he has taught printmaking and African American art history. He is the founder of the Experimental Printmaking Institute and Raven Fine Art Editions. Currently, Dr. Holton is the Director of the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, which provides an intellectual home for artists, museum professionals, art administrators, and scholars interested in broadening the field of African diasporic studies.

The virtual lecture will be held on Friday, May 7, 2021, from 3:00-4:30 PM (EST). Participants will be welcome to ask questions during the Q&A after the lecture. The lecture is free and open all, but pre-registration is required. To receive the Zoom link, please register at the external link below.

The material and spatial changes of the printmaking process and their social and conceptual implications will be discussed in this lecture series.

The intricate and often counterintuitive effort of creating matrices for printing (woodblocks, copperplates, etc.) has been a form of invisible labor for centuries. How do we think about the relationship between the time and skill put into the matrix and the value of the image it generates? (Or: where does all the time go?) This final lecture will explore the misregistration of time in print, especially in terms of the conflicts—and convergences—between slow and fast media that are frequently staged in contemporary printmaking.

Each lecture will premiere at the date and time listed on the Contact: Art and the Pull of Print web page and will remain there for public viewing. These programs are free and open to the public and designed for anyone interested in art and art history. No art or art history background is required. Ages 18 and up. No registration is required.

For more information and to access the lecture upon release please visit the external link below.

The material and spatial changes of the printmaking process and their social and conceptual implications will be discussed in this lecture series.

The layering of images in printmaking, especially when grids and regular linework are involved, often results in the emergence of interference or moiré patterns. While printers usually work hard to keep these disruptive eruptions at bay, some artists have cultivated them, allowing unruly patterns to emerge from the combination of seemingly rational image layers. Moiré patterns also bring printmaking into conversation with the sound arts, which are built on the same waves, frequencies, and beats that are used to describe print interference.

Each lecture will premiere at the date and time listed on the Contact: Art and the Pull of Print web page and will remain there for public viewing. These programs are free and open to the public and designed for anyone interested in art and art history. No art or art history background is required. Ages 18 and up. No registration is required.

For more information and to access the lecture upon release please visit the external link below.

The material and spatial changes of the printmaking process and their social and conceptual implications will be discussed in this lecture series.

Many modern printmaking processes involve passing ink or light through screens or meshes, especially when converting continuous-tone photographs into printable formats. These processes create the conditions in which most exchanges between the ink-world of print and the light-world of photography take place, and also link the practice of making images to a long history of straining, sifting, refining, and filtering in material and political realms beyond the art world.

Each lecture will premiere at the date and time listed on the Contact: Art and the Pull of Print web page and will remain there for public viewing. These programs are free and open to the public and designed for anyone interested in art and art history. No art or art history background is required. Ages 18 and up. No registration is required.

For more information and to access the lecture upon release please visit the external link below.

The material and spatial changes of the printmaking process and their social and conceptual implications will be discussed in this lecture series.

In printmaking, color must be broken down and reassembled through separation, layering, sequencing, and registration. Most color prints are, in essence, piles of broken color: stratified, even geological affairs that bear little relation to the fluid spontaneity that is often associated with color in other media. Thinking through color separation suggests new models of the image as a structure of assembly and risk and opens a space for examining the intersection of print and critical race theory.

Each lecture will premiere at the date and time listed on the Contact: Art and the Pull of Print web page and will remain there for public viewing. These programs are free and open to the public and designed for anyone interested in art and art history. No art or art history background is required. Ages 18 and up. No registration is required.

For more information and to access the lecture upon release please visit the external link below.

In this six-part lecture series titled Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, Roberts focuses on printmaking as an art of physical contact, involving transfer under pressure between surfaces—a direct touch that can evoke multiple forms of intimacy. And yet it is simultaneously an art of estrangement: it requires the deferral, displacement, and distribution of artistic agency, and it trades in reversal and inversion.

In this second lecture, “Reversal,” premiered on the National Gallery’s website on May 2, 2021, Roberts explores how every predigital print process produces some form of reversal—the entire history of printing is based on the reversal of information. Making prints thus requires a certain backwardness; the capacity to imagine things from the other side is compulsory. This is especially true for artists using text. An attunement to reversibility allows for unique ways of exploring communication and confrontation in bodily space.

For more information and to access the lecture upon release please visit the external link below.

Grab your binoculars and join us on Friday, April 30, 2021, at 2:00 p.m. for an hour of virtual birding, as we turn the pages of John James Audubon’s gigantic, hand painted Birds of America (1827-38). Rarely does the public have the opportunity to see this amazing four-volume work and when they do, it is usually only one plate through a sealed case. As we have done for our students, we will page through multiple volumes so you can experience the colossal scale of Audubon’s birds, painted life-size and then transferred to copper plates for the printing and painting of the published ‘double-elephant’ volumes. We will compare Audubon's 'guide' to current pocket guides and birding apps.

The lecture will be devoted to the phenomenon of 19th-century Rembrandt prints collecting in Russia, discussing three major figures – geographer, man of law and an amateur etcher, all of them - from the Russian hereditary gentry. All three of them were born in old Russian capital, the city of Moscow, all three spent a lot of time abroad but the nature of their collecting seems to be quite different. Senators Petr Semenov-Tjan-Shansky (1827-1914) and Dmitry Rovinsky (1824-1895) being on the state service from their early years, are famous as an active participants of the Great Reforms of Alexander II (1861-1864), acting in the process of liberation of peasants from serfdom, elimination of legal corporal punishment and establishing an institution of jury trial in the absolute monarchy of Russia. The third hero of the lecture, hereditary collector Nikolai Mosolov (1846-1914), who multiplied the collection of his father and grandfather, was a freelancer etcher, Rembrandt fan, who could allow himself to devote all his life to the art of printmaking. Their collection had a very different fate. The ones created by Rovinsky and Mosolov (today, respectively, in the Hermitage at St Petersburg and in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow by the will of collectors) are preserved in relative intact. Rembrandts (as well as Durers) from Semenov collection, which was sold by him directly to the Imperial Hermitage (1910), were mostly sold by the Soviet government in late 1920s. How these three assembled their collections in Russia and in Europe, how they used them and how they studied them will be the main topic of talk on April 22, 2021.

To receive a Zoom Webinar link, please register here:
https://princeton.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_7Yehds2rRQCdMLH6Fhe8jQ

The material and spatial changes of the printmaking process and their social and conceptual implications will be discussed in this lecture series.

A print is an image transferred, under pressure, between two surfaces in direct physical contact. Every print is the record of a contact event: pressure followed by release. This makes print an especially subtle medium for exploring alternative models of the sensory image and for working through the social continuum of touch, from intimacy to violence.

Each lecture will premiere at the date and time listed on the Contact: Art and the Pull of Print web page and will remain there for public viewing. These programs are free and open to the public and designed for anyone interested in art and art history. No art or art history background is required. Ages 18 and up. No registration is required.

For more information and to access the lecture upon release please visit the external link below.

The ancient world, specifically Mesoamerica, has been a source of inspiration for Chicanx and other artists of Mexican descent. Join us for a virtual conversation that examines how Chicanx artists incorporate ancient Mesoamerican iconography with contemporary political efforts as an act of honoring and reinforcing Indigenous histories. Panelists include internationally renowned Mexican-born printmaker Enrique Chagoya, who creates prints conceptually fusing Mesoamerican mythology, western religious iconography, and American popular culture; currently, he is a professor in the department of art and art history at Stanford University. Chagoya is joined by Yreina D. Cervántez, a Xicana feminist artist based in Los Angeles. Her multimedia works incorporate ancient spirituality and feminist histories as a commentary on Chicana political consciousness. Cervántez is a professor emeritus in the department of Chicana/o studies at California State University at Northridge. This virtual conversation is moderated by Claudia Zapata, curatorial assistant for Latinx art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Zapata is also a contributor to the ¡Printing the Revolution! Catalogue.

This program is the fourth in a five-part online conversation series that examines Chicanx graphics and how artists have used printmaking to debate larger social causes, reflect on issues of their time, and build community. Hear from artists, scholars, and activists about the Chicanx graphics movement, from civil rights–era prints to today’s digital landscape.

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