A growing part of the McNay’s collection of prints and drawings is a fantastic group of contemporary prints by California artists. The very name California immediately conjures up images of Hollywood, sandy beaches, palm trees, and abundant sunshine. And while some of our prints, by such California artists as David Hockney and Ed Ruscha, do conform to that vision, others show a different side of the Golden State. For instance, Beth Van Hoesen, a consummate printmaker who worked in the Bay Area, asked people she met on the streets of her San Francisco neighborhood, the Castro, to pose for her. Her beautifully printed portraits of Traci and Steve are the epitome of excellence in etching, and challenge our perception of California as being populated by blue-eyed, blond-haired surfers. Traci and Steve exemplify the state’s counterculture.

Also included in California Dreaming, to provide a different perspective on the state of California and its stereotypes, are a number of works by contemporary Latino artists. These printmakers represent a parallel track to that of better-known, more mainstream artists—a track that celebrates the state’s diversity. Another work in the exhibition, John Valadez’s Clavo and Alice depicts two friends who often visited the artist in his studio. The monumental figures of this diptych powerfully represent a contemporary California and Latino vision of Adam and Eve.

People love books. They are essential artifacts of human culture. Think about their physical and symbolic presence in our lives, not to mention the knowledge they contain. Books have evolved, and continue to evolve, in form and function. They are shaped, modified and adapted by those who hold, read, or otherwise interact with them.

Library Company conservators have gathered a wide assortment of materials to present unique (and fun!) perspectives on the book. You will find large books, small books, ugly books, beautiful books, silly books, and serious books to name just a few. We highlight the many different roles books play in our lives. As vessels of knowledge, memory, and culture, books help us remember the past, record the present, and imagine the future.

Long live the Living Book!

The white-line color woodcut was an early twentieth-century innovation that allowed artists to print multiple colors from a single carved woodblock. Originating with the Provincetown Printers in Massachusetts, the technique offered simplicity of execution as well as a painterly result. Featuring beautiful examples of white-line woodcuts ranging in subject, style, and complexity, this installation, along with a display of Arts and Crafts decorative arts, complements the harmonious ideals of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Little Library, on permanent view at the Museum.

Special thanks to John Rossetti.

You Are Going On A Trip brings together a selection of highlights from the Museum’s wide-ranging collection of Modern and Contemporary prints. Focusing on works produced between the 1940s and 1970s, the exhibition presents an eclectic array of works on paper created by artists from the United States and other countries around the world. Coinciding with the summer—a season typically designated for travel—the exhibition offers the viewer a metaphoric venture to various new destinations. Titled after an etching by Charles Garabedian that depicts the gentle hand of the artist touching the viewer's consciousness, the exhibition, like the image, plants the seed of a journey.

Organized by writer and independent curator, Michael Duncan, the exhibition is loosely divided into themes, including dreams, icons, notions of home and travel, history, and images of humans and wildlife. Duncan states, “Prints take us places. They lead us to exotic and familiar locales, offering mind-expanding fantasies as well as fresh takes on everyday objects. They present new considerations of well-known people and stories and revisit historical events. They confront desires and goals and sometimes lead to an expansion of our definitions of art.” His distinctive take on the Museum’s rich collection of lithographs, screenprints, woodblock prints, and other forms of printmaking offers novel ports of entry into a vast range of imagery.

Artists represented include Terry Allen, Lee Bontecou, John Randolph Carter, Vija Celmins, Bruce Conner, José Luis Cuevas, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Red Grooms, Nancy Grossman, Hagiwara Hideo, Paul Jacoulet, Allen Jones, Oskar Kokoschka, Jacob Lawrence, Rico Lebrun, Marisol, Kerry James Marshall, Malcolm Morley, Alice Neel, Sidney Nolan, Eduardo Paolozzi, Pablo Picasso, Ken Price, Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist, Munakata Shiko, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Raphael Soyer, Rufino Tamayo, Azechi Utemaro, Andy Warhol, June Wayne, Grant Wood, and many others.

The Whitney Museum of American Art announced that Kim Conaty will be joining the curatorial department as Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints. Currently serving as Curator at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Conaty will begin working at the Whitney in mid-July.

As Curator at the Rose Art Museum, Conaty has overseen the museum’s renowned permanent collection of modern and contemporary art and leads the curatorial program of special exhibitions, collection installations, and related programming. Collection stewardship has been of paramount importance to Conaty’s work at the Rose, highlighted in her current exhibition Collection at Work (2017), which turns one of the museum’s galleries into a publicly accessible active work space for cataloguing, digitization, and conservation initiatives.

“I'm excited to return to the Whitney, an institution for which I have the deepest respect and admiration,” said Conaty. “Following a tremendous period of growth, the Museum has broken new ground in its exhibition program while also making a decisive commitment to the care, research, and presentation of its collection. I look forward to collaborating with the Museum’s exceptional team, and to developing future projects and research initiatives that will highlight the richness and diversity of its extraordinary collection of drawings and prints.”

Between 2008 and 2015, Conaty served as the Sue and Eugene Mercy, Jr., Assistant Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Prior to MoMA, Conaty served as Biennial Coordinator for the 2008 Whitney Biennial, following previous posts as a curatorial intern and researcher at the Whitney on the exhibitions Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe and Picasso and American Art. She has also held positions at the Clark Art Institute; the Grey Art Gallery, N.Y.U.; the Guggenheim Museum; and the Harvard University Art Museums.

Visions of America: Three Centuries of Prints from the National Gallery of Art surveys how America and its people have been represented in prints made by American and non-American artists between 1710 and 2010. As the final venue on a four-city international tour and the only other US venue, the DMA will present more than 150 outstanding prints from the colonial era to the present, drawn exclusively from the National Gallery of Art’s collection. Visions of America, which the Washington Post described as “historically riveting,” features more than 100 artists such as Paul Revere, James McNeill Whistler, Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer, George Bellows, John Marin, Jackson Pollock, Louise Nevelson, Romare Bearden, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Chuck Close, Jenny Holzer, and Kara Walker.

Picasso: Encounters explores Pablo Picasso’s (1881–1973) interest in and experimentation with large-scale printmaking throughout his career, challenging the notion of Picasso as an artist alone with his craft. The exhibition includes important paintings on loan from the Musée national Picasso–Paris. The exhibition addresses his expansive formal vocabulary, the narrative preoccupations that drove his creative process, the often-neglected issue of the collaboration inherent in print production, and the muses that inspired him, including Fernande Olivier, Olga Khokhlova, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, and Jacqueline Roque.

The exhibition begins with Picasso’s seminal Self-Portrait (1901) from his Blue Period as a representation of the artist’s mythic isolation. The painting, on loan from the Musée national Picasso–Paris, is followed by thirty-five of the artist’s most important graphic achievements, ranging from the Clark’s rare impression of The Frugal Repast (1904)—Picasso’s first major statement in printmaking—to Ecce Homo, after Rembrandt (1970), executed three years before his death.

Picasso continuously mined his personal life for subject matter. The exhibition includes the captivating 1923 drypoint portrait of his first wife Olga, the playful image of his daughter Paloma (1952), and the heartrending aquatint of his embittered partner Françoise Gilot (1952).

The exhibition also explores the intertwined narrative threads of the Minotauromachia (1934), The Large Bullfight (1935), and Weeping Woman I (1937). Four Weeping Woman prints are accompanied by Portrait of Dora Maar (1937), the revered oil painting on loan from the Musée national Picasso–Paris. Maar was Picasso’s muse and served as his model for the paintings, drawings, and prints of weeping women produced in the 1930s. Picasso’s final years, during which he transformed the compositions of Old Masters from Rembrandt to Cranach to Manet, are represented by linocuts such as Portrait of a Young Girl, after Cranach the Younger, II (1958) and Luncheon on the Grass, after Manet (1968).

Picasso: Encounters is organized by the Clark Art Institute, with the exceptional support of the Musée national Picasso–Paris. Additional support for the exhibition is provided by Margaret and Richard Kronenberg and Marilyn and Ron Walter.

A retrospective of Cécile Reims' reproductive prints of Fred Deux's drawings.

This exhibition brings together two different figures in the history of twentieth century art and architecture. English artist Richard Hamilton is represented by his early series of “Reaper works” (1949), inspired by Sigfried Giedion’s publication “Mechanization Takes Command” (1948) in which the Swiss art historian describes the advancing mechanisation of everyday life. This exhibition is the first to juxtapose the entire “Reaper” cycle with selected visual works from Giedion, clearly addressing the process of academic research behind Hamilton’s creative approach.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi takes visitors on a ramble through the ruins of ancient Rome. His etchings of the remains of a great civilization couple his archaeological interest in detail with his flair for dramatic effect. This intimate exhibition invites you to reflect on a quiet world of grand desolation. Seen through the lens of the mid-1700s, the ruins suggest romance, mystery, melancholy, awesome possibility, and loss.