MCA Denver is excited to announce the first solo museum presentation of work by painter Diego Rodriguez-Warner. The exhibition focuses on the artist’s production from the past five years, showcasing the evolution of his singular style, including four new paintings.

Trained as a printmaker in Havana, Cuba and at the Rhode Island School of Design, Rodriguez-Warner has developed a manner of painting that is informed by woodblock printing and characterized by trompe l’oeil, collage, and art historical references. He enhances the trompe l’oeil by carving into and staining the plywood panels on which he works. Painted shadows and subtly carved ones confuse the eye. This sensation—that of the possibility of depth—is amplified by the layering of forms, figures, and patterns that twist around, melt into, and overlap one another. Some of these fragments, those cribbed from works by ukiyo-e master Yoshitoshi, Henri Matisse, and George Grosz, among others, appear familiar, while others elude identification, even as simple shapes.

The exhibition aims to help viewers disentangle these complex images and understand the illusionistic devices Rodriguez-Warner employs in composing them. To this end, smaller works on paper or plywood, as well as maquettes, accompany the larger paintings. In these studies, viewers can identify discrete forms that appear repeatedly throughout the exhibition.

Diego Rodriguez-Warner was born in Managua, Nicaragua in 1986 and moved to Denver, Colorado in 1990. He holds fine arts degrees from Hampshire College and the Rhode Island School of Design, and he has studied under the Cuban Minister of Fine Arts, Lesbia Dumois, in Havana. At RISD, he was a recipient of the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship. His work has been shown around the US, in Cuba, and in Germany.

"Printmaking, like the poetry and novels of Latin America, gives us back our confidence in the genius of our peoples. It is both earthly and spiritual nourishment: color and heat, form and idea."

—Octavio Paz, 1979



In November 2016 SCMA was pleased to receive a generous gift of eighty-nine works on paper from Marius and Suzanne Sznajderman. A printmaker himself, Marius Sznajderman fled his native France in 1942 during World War II, settling with his family in Venezuela at the age of 18. Despite having moved to the United States in 1949, he still considers himself a Latin American artist. His connections in Venezuela led to his coordination of the international editions of prints for Pan American Graphics Arts from 1980 to 1986.

All the works on display are works that were part of the AGPA project which published prints by artists from primarily Pan-American countries including Venezuela, Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Ecuador, and Argentina. This collection includes prints, proofs, and preparatory drawings.

Consummately cosmopolitan and cool, Andy Warhol in the great outdoors seems like an oxymoron. Yet the groundbreaking artist known for his Pop Art multiples of celebrities and soup cans created more than 10,000 images of flowers over the course of his career. Warhol: Flowers in the Factory showcases the surprising, and little examined, role of nature in Warhol’s art and life. The spectacular 15-acre tropical setting of Marie Selby Botanical Gardens on Sarasota Bay will provide a matchless context for examining Warhol’s fascination with the natural world in this focused, immersive exhibition.

Warhol: Flowers in the Factory is curated by Carol Ockman, Ph.D., curator-at-large of Marie Selby Botanical Gardens and the Robert Sterling Clark Professor of Art History at Williams College. It will be on view exclusively at Selby Gardens in Sarasota, Florida, from Feb. 11 through June 30, 2018.

Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies 49th Annual Conference

SESSION: "Cognitive Approaches to Early modern Spanish Literature"

[Julien Jacques Simon, Indiana University East]
"Negative Emotions and the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (1502): Anatomy of a Literary Success at the Dawn of the Printing Press"

[Darryl Dedelow Jr., University of Kentucky]
"Engañosas e Ingeniosas: Mujeres empoderadas en Don Quijote"

[Elizabeth Cruz Petersen, Florida Atlantic University]
"The Art of Somatic Expression in the Works of Renaissance Rhetoricians: Lope de Vega, López Pinciano, and Gildon"

Chair/Commentator: Isabel Jaén Portillo, Portland State University

Nun, printmaker, and activist, Corita Kent developed and used a striking Pop sensibility in her religious art. Drawing on the visual language of advertising and the daily world, her screenprints combine images and words to create bold messages of joy. Leading the art department at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles, Kent became part of an enthusiastic community of socially engaged artists who revolutionized campus life. Her adventurous approach in art and life unsettled many, including the Church hierarchy; she left holy orders in 1968 and moved to Boston, where she continued her pursuit of social justice through art until her death in 1985. The nearly thirty prints in this exhibition chronicle her most productive periods including the mid-1960s, when her forceful imagery and message—and her unexpected calling as a nun—led to her greatest popularity.

This exhibition provides a comprehensive overview of influential American artist Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000). Lawrence was primarily concerned with the narration of African American experiences and histories. His acute observations of community life, work, struggle and emancipation during his lifetime were rendered alongside vividly imagined chronicles of the past. The past and present in his work are intrinsically linked, providing insight into the social, economic and political realities that continue to impact and shape contemporary society today.

Featuring more than 90 works produced between 1963 and 2000, the exhibition focuses on his graphic work and explores three major themes of his printmaking oeuvre. Lawrence’s recording and recollection of African-American and larger African diasporic histories are featured, as well as his vivid observations of the dynamic city life in his native Harlem, New York City. Works in the exhibition span from 1963 to 2000 and include significant complete print portfolios, such as the “Toussaint L’Ouverture” series, as well as “The Legend of John Brown” series, amongst others.

History, Labor, Life: The Prints of Jacob Lawrence is curated by Storm Janse van Rensburg, SCAD head curator of exhibitions. The exhibition is organized by the SCAD Museum of Art and is made possible with support from the Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation.

An International Conference hosted by Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library in partnership with LARCA (Laboratoire de recherche sur les cultures anglophones) Université Paris Diderot, and with the generous support of the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Copyright policies had, and continue to have a profound impact on the creation and circulation of creative works. This conference brings together historians of material culture, art, law, and literature to explore the relationship between copyright law and the cultural, economic, and technological factors that transformed the pictorial landscape of the anglophone world in the nineteenth century.

The full conference brochure, and information about registration and fees are available online via the 'External Link' below.

PROGRAM
Thursday, March 29
8 am: Registration and Coffee
8:45 am: Introduction

MORNING SESSIONS:
9 am: The Status of Images and the Boundaries of Copyright (Chair: Georgia B. Barnhill)
Isabella Alexander, "The First Copyright Case under the 1735 Engravers’ Act: The Germination of Visual Copyright?"
Simon Stern, "Artistic Copyright and Derivative Rights in Nineteenth-Century England."
Mazie M. Harris, "Photographs and the negatives thereof which shall hereafter be made"

11 am: Originals and Reproductions: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Chair: Anne McCauley)
Christopher J. Lukasik, "Neither Copy, Nor Original: The Meanings of Illustration in Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture."
Will Slauter, "Photography, Stenography, and Copyright for News."

AFTERNOON SESSIONS:
2:15 pm: Artists, Entrepreneurs, and Publishers (Chair: Anne Verplanck)
Erika Piola, "The Frame Maker/Picture Dealer: The Hybrid Entrepreneur of the 19th-Century Popular Print Market."
Shannon Perich, "Did Patent Confusion Dim the Ambrotype?"

3:30 pm: Stretching the Print-Based Model of Copyright (Chair: Jessica Silbey)
Stéphanie Delamaire, “Painting as Intellectual Property in 19th-century America.”
Michael Knies, "Honorable Emulation Versus Dishonorable Appropriation: Copying, Piracy, and Copyright in Late 19th Century Typography."
Oren Bracha, "Before a Picture Was Worth a Thousand Words: Ben-Hur in Court.”

5 pm: Reception

Friday, March 30
MORNING SESSIONS:
9 am: Ownership, Appropriation, and Political Sovereignty (Chair: Peter Jaszi)
Nora Slonimsky, "Maps, Borders, and the Image of Geographic Copyright in Early America."
Kathleen Washburn, "Reconsidering 'Native Indian Design': Angel De Cora's Book Art and Illustrations."
Jill Haley, "Protecting the Photograph: New Zealand's Fine Arts Copyright Act 1877."

11 am: Transnational Publishing and Printed Illustrations (Chair: Will Slauter)
Amy Sopcak-Joseph, "Creating a Magazine Worth Buying: Ownership and Attribution of Images and Texts in the Godey’s Lady’s Book, 1830s-1850s."
Sandra M. Szir, "Transculturation in Production Practices and Image Appropriation: Argentina and England, First Half of the Nineteenth Century."
Thomas Smits, "Piracy, Copyright, and the Transnational Trade in Illustrations of the News in the Mid-Nineteenth Century."

AFTERNOON SESSIONS:
2 pm: Privacy, Publicity, and Obsenity (Chair: Jason Hill)
Amy Werbel, "State v. Charles Conroy: New York Photographers' Battle for Free Speech in the Tangled Web of late-19th Century English and American Law."
Jessica Lake, "The Kodak Camera and Privacy v. Copyright: the (Gendered) Fight for Rights in a Photographic Image in Late 19th Century and Early 20th Century America."

3:15 pm: Photographers, the Press, and the Law (Chair: Eva E. Subotnik)
Katherine Mintie, "Photography vs. The Press”: Benjamin J. Falk and the Value of Studio Photography in the Halftone Era."
Barbara Cohen-Stratyner, "Florence Vandamm: Captions, Credits and the 1911 Copyright Act."

4:15: Round table discussion with Georgia B. Barnhill, Peter Jaszi, and Anne McCauley.

5:15: End of the conference.

Prints by the English landscape painter and watercolorist Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) reflect what many celebrated as his “truth to nature.” Turner’s art influenced several nineteenth-century American painters, Winslow Homer among them, and how they depicted the natural world. Turning to Turner features a selection of the master’s prints, including rare selections from his Liber Studiorum and Turner Gallery series, alongside prints by Homer and other artists who were inspired by Turner’s style.

Contemporary Chinese artist Sun Xun uses woodblock printing, a centuries-old technique, to reimagine and transform the 21st century medium of digital animated film. In Time Spy (2016), Sun Xun has created a three-dimensional cinematic world that roams freely across time and cultures, following an enigmatic and visually driven narrative that draws its influences from both Eastern and Western traditions of art, history, myth, and imagination.

To produce Time Spy, the artist and his team carved more than 10,000 woodblocks, then inked and digitally scanned them to create the animation cells. A selection of the woodblocks that were used to create the film will be on view in the exhibition.

Sun Xun’s work is in constant dialogue with art history, and in recognition of this, four prints from the Museum’s collection by Albrecht Dürer will be on view in the exhibition. These works were selected by Sun Xun in recognition of this German Renaissance artist’s influence on his own practice.

Time Spy, Sun Xun’s first 3D film, was commissioned by Audemars Piguet, and premiered in 2016 at Art Basel in Miami, and subsequently was adapted to be shown on multiple screens in New York City’s Times Square. Sun Xun has screened his films at film festivals across the globe, and he has had numerous solo exhibitions, including at The Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai.

The Museum recommends entering the exhibition through Gallery 234 before viewing Time Spy in Gallery 235. The runtime is approximately 10 minutes.

Deborah Wye, Chief Curator Emerita of Prints and Illustrated Books at MoMA, is joined by her friend and former colleague Wendy Weitman, independent curator, for a conversation about their careers curating prints, and life after the traditional nine-to-five.

About Deborah Wye
Deborah Wye started out at an art gallery specializing in prints, drawings, and rare books and went on to the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard. In 1979, she joined the staff of The Museum of Modern Art, rising in the ranks to become Chief Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books. Her responsibilities included overseeing acquisitions, exhibitions and publications, as well as research and educational programs. Her special focus was online projects exploring printmaking. She retired from that position in 2010. A specialist on the work of Louise Bourgeois, Wye recently organized, “Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait,” and is currently completing an online catalogue raisonné of the artist’s prints.

About Wendy Weitman
Wendy Weitman is an independent curator. Until 2007 she was Curator in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books at The Museum of Modern Art, New York where she had worked since 1980. Most recently she curated the exhibition Kiki Smith and Paper: The Body, The Muse, and the Spirit and Punctuating Space: The Prints and Multiples of Richard Artschwager. At The Museum of Modern Art, she curated a number of important monographic exhibitions on twentieth century and contemporary artists, including the work of Kiki Smith, Jasper Johns and Sol LeWitt. In addition to her exhibitions, Ms. Weitman has taught and lectured widely on prints in the U.S., Europe, and Japan.

About Colleagues & Friends
The Colleagues and Friends breakfast series invites established women in the art world to have conversations about their current positions, career paths, and professional relationships. The program is generously hosted by Emigrant Bank Fine Art Finance, a subsidiary of Emigrant Bank (Member FDIC, founded 1850) and its subsidiary, Fine Art Asset Management (Member APAA, AAA). Emigrant Bank Fine Art Finance is a leading provider of loans secured by paintings, drawings, sculpture, wine, classic cars, stringed instruments, and other passion assets. Fine Art Asset Management provides independent, conflict-free, expert art advisory services, and USPAP compliant appraisals.