The "National Original Print Exhibition", established by the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, is an annual and international open submission exhibition celebrating the best of contemporary printmaking.

New work from LOOP, an informal co-operative of artists with a background in print. LOOP has shown regularly at Bankside, and this exhibition will present new work from 26 artists, informed by a wide range of experience and interests.

"Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait" explores the prints, books, and creative process of the celebrated sculptor Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010). Bourgeois’s printed oeuvre, a little-known aspect of her work, is vast in scope and comprises some 1,200 printed compositions, created primarily in the last two decades of her life but also at the beginning of her career, in the 1940s. The Museum of Modern Art has a prized archive of this material, and the exhibition will highlight works from the collection along with rarely seen loans. A special installation will fill the Museum’s Marron Atrium.

The artist’s creative process is the organizing principle behind the exhibition. Over the course of her career, Bourgeois constantly revisited the themes of her art, all of which emerged from emotions she struggled with for a lifetime. Also, she said there was no “rivalry” between the mediums in which she worked, noting that “they say the same thing in different ways.” Here, her prints and illustrated books will be seen in the context of related sculptures, drawings, and paintings, and within thematic groupings that explore motifs of architecture, the body, and nature, as well as investigations of abstraction and works made from old garments and household fabrics. In addition, the evolving states and variants of her prints will be emphasized in order to reveal Bourgeois’s creative thinking as it unfolded.

For the last twenty-five years native Angeleno and one of the country’s foremost reduction linocut artists Dave Lefner (b. 1969) has explored and recorded the historic and vintage characteristics of Los Angeles, from the sleek lines of mid-century American automobiles, to roadside signage and dilapidated neon theater marquees. A self-professed “old soul,” Lefner preserves the icons of America’s Golden Age in the exacting, time-consuming, and relatively lost art of reduction linocuts. The artist’s prints depict a nostalgia for the glamour of old Los Angeles with both a playfulness and masterful precision that belies their complex creation. LA Redux: Reduction Linocuts by Dave Lefner explores Lefner’s prints and process, presenting a vivid picture of Los Angeles’s past and present as well as the ingenuity and creative processes the city continues to inspire.

On view in the PMCA’s Project Room, the exhibition celebrates the artist’s significance as part of the Los Angeles and PMCA community. Not only does Lefner live and work at The Brewery, the world’s largest artist colony, he also regularly leads printmaking workshops at the PMCA and is one of the honorees at the Museum’s ¡Fiesta Cubana! gala in fall 2017. Featuring approximately 10 prints, LA Redux, like the artist’s retro prints, revives the bygone architecture, signage, and automobiles of Los Angeles while shining a neon spotlight on the artist’s dedication to craft and the perpetuation of culture.

Jim Steg (1922-2001) was the most influential printmaker to be based in New Orleans in the twentieth century. He arrived in New Orleans in the early 1950s to teach printmaking at Newcomb College, after serving in the United States Army in World War II and training with renowned printmaking professor Mauricio Lasanksy (1914-2014) in Iowa. During his long and productive career, Steg used almost every known printmaking method and even pioneered several of his own. He also trained countless young artists in his tenure of more than forty years as a beloved professor at Newcomb College. This exhibition reveals Steg as both an innovator in the field of printmaking, and an artist at the forefront of several major twentieth-century movements. It also details his fascinating and multifaceted career, which included time as a soldier responsible for deceiving the armies of the Third Reich by staging troop movements with inflatable tanks, appearances at the Carnegie International exhibition of contemporary art in the late 1940s, and his role in inspiring many now renowned artists as a teacher in New Orleans. Jim Steg: New Work, includes etchings, woodcuts, drawings of refugees made during World War II, photo-resist etchings, Xerox toner works, and many others that have never before been on public display. The exhibition also celebrates the acquisition of several new pieces and expands upon Steg’s last monographic show, which NOMA also presented nearly forty years ago.

Jim Steg: New Work is organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art and is supported by Stephen W. Clayton and the Azby Fund. Additional support is provided by Andrew and Robyn Schwarz, John Abajian and Scott Simmons, and Ann and Holly Barnett.

Expatriate American artist, James Abbot McNeill Whistler (1834 –1903) played an essential role in the etching revival of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and will be the featured among some of his contemporary printmakers in Whistler & Company: The Etching Revival. The exhibition includes nearly a dozen works by Whistler, whose gritty images of the River Thames, views of Venice, and Parisian scenes revived, at least in part, the art of etching in the 19th century. Works from Whistler’s ‘Thames Set’ and ‘French Set’ will be featured in the exhibition. Other artists who participated in the etching revival include Francis Seymour Haden, James McBey, Edwin Edwards, David Young Cameron, Muirhead Bone, Mortimer Menpes, Charles Meryon, Maxime Lalanne, Joseph Pennell, and Frank Duveneck, among others.

The etching revival of the second half of the 19th century took hold in France, England and the United States. Artists set out to reestablish etching—the art of incising lines with an etching needle into a thin copper plate which was then inked and pressed into paper with the help of a printing press to create impressions—as an art form that could stand on its own. Inspired by Rembrandt, and old masters, practitioners created remarkable original and expressive compositions that gained popularity with refined collectors and the broader public.

All of the works in in the exhibition are drawn from RPM’s permanent collection of works on paper, which numbers more than 10,000.

Five hundred years ago, the reformer Martin Luther rebelled against his Church, penning 95 theses criticising the sale of indulgences in exchange for salvation. Thanks to the printing press, this dispute within the Church had unexpectedly far-reaching repercussions – and so the Reformation was born! To commemorate this 500th anniversary, the Musée international de la Réforme takes a closer look at a technology that both transformed Christianity and changed people’s mindsets.

A purpose-built reproduction of a Gutenberg press measuring 3 m tall will be used to hand-print a single large-format copy of the Bible in the 16th-century style. Visitors will be able to participate in the process, as each of the 800 pages, from Genesis to the Apocalypse, emerges from the press before being bound on 31 October, the last day of the exhibition. The text is based on a modern French translation by contemporary authors, known as the ‘Bayard Bible’.

John Armleder, Marc Bauer, Vidya Gastaldon and Mai-Thu Perret will create original works of art directly on the press, in the footsteps of the great Renaissance illustrators Lucas Cranach and Hans Holbein.

A Century of Japanese Prints presents a selection of the Museum’s finest examples of modern and contemporary Japanese prints from the 20th and 21st centuries, two thirds of which have never before been displayed at the Museum. Unfolding over 100 years, the works in the exhibition span new prints (shin hanga), creative prints (sōsaku hanga), and postwar and contemporary prints.

Commercially published new prints brought a modern sensibility to the traditions of ukiyo-e, "pictures of the floating world," a category of woodblock prints and paintings that depict beautiful women, kabuki actors, landscapes, and scenes from everyday life that flourished between the mid-18th and early 20th centuries. The 2016 acquisition "Tipsy," a renowned image by artist Kobayakawa Kiyoshi (1899–1948), depicts a "modern girl"—Japan's answer to the 1920s flapper.

Artists of the creative print movement rejected the commercialism of ukiyo-e and new prints, and instead explored the potential of printmaking to be a medium of artistic expression equal to painting and sculpture. To assert complete creative authority over their works, many artists insisted on carving and printing their own designs, frequently resulting in a rough finish that celebrated the material qualities of the woodblock.

Printmaking continued to flourish and diversify during the post-war period. Japanese artists found new patrons among members of the Occupation, participated in international juried exhibitions, travelled widely, and lived abroad. Moving beyond the practices of shin hanga and sōsaku hanga, artists began working with techniques such as etching, screen-printing, and inkjet printing, and engaging with international art movements such as Conceptualism and Minimalism.

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts celebrates the Experimental Printmaking Institute (EPI) at Lafayette College and its 20-year history as one of the nation’s leaders in fine art prints.

Through the creative vision of its founder, master printmaker Curlee Raven Holton, EPI transcends boundaries, developing innovative visual methodologies that articulate the non-verbal exchanges between environment and experience, medium and process, and ultimately artist and printmaker.

As one of the few mediums intrinsic to cooperative environments, printmaking requires cooperation between artists and creative technicians to produce new visions of printed images. Featuring Holton’s generous gift to PAFA of over 60 EPI prints, A Collaborative Language details how EPI functions as a destination for artists to create fresh vocabularies with printers and Lafayette students, collectively reinventing approaches to surface, form, structure, and technique that allow artists to realize their work in imaginative ways.

The exhibition displays prints by such noted artists as Alison Saar, Sam Gilliam, Robin Holder, David Driskell, Martha Jackson Jarvis, Willie Cole, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Barbara Bullock, Melvin Edwards, and William T. Williams, illuminating EPI’s unique effect on the infinite possibilities of paper.

Since its start in 1996, EPI has produced over 100 editions by more than 80 different artists. The results of these collaborations have been included in museum collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as within the permanent collections of various colleges and universities.

What makes an image – especially a replicated image – unique? This is the question tackled by curator Hans Wolfgang Singer at the beginning of the 20th century in his book, "Unika und Seltenheiten im Königlichen Kupferstich-Kabinett zu Dresden". Singer addressed the topic in a surpri- sing way; without exception, he chose prints for his catalogue although at rst sight the medium of mechanically replicated graphic reproduction seems to rule out originality. UNIQUE! asks anew how we today perceive the singularity of works on paper and how we can understand it not only in terms of close observation (in the publically accessible study room) but also with distance and the aid of digital media. Through changing perspectives, the inexhaustible collection of the Dresden Kupferstich-Kabinett reveals itself to be a source of manifold singularities, from the fifteenth century Master of the Housebook to the contemporary artist Günther Uecker, in drawings, prints and photographs.