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

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.