The Australian Print Workshop acknowledges the overwhelming support and generosity of these leading contemporary artists who all produced a new work specifically for IMPRESSIONS 2016. These artists have generously donated their edition to APW allowing their work to be offered at a very special price for this major fundraising project. The G.R.A.I.N. Store is thrilled to offer these selected works for sale to regional art enthusiasts.

Official Opening
Sunday 9 April 2017 at 2pm

to be opened by Melbourne print maker, Dianne Colk

Over 50 artists including Rick Amor, Dianne Colk, Vicki Couzens, eX de Medici, Katherine Hattam, Chris Ingham, William Kelly, Martin King, Mitch McAuley, Chris O’Doherty (aka Reg Mombassa), Peter O’Doherty and Emmet O’Dywer.
​
Plus additional prints by guest speaker Dianne Colk and local artists from the G.R.A.I.N. Store who attended a printmaking masterclass conducted by APW Senior Printer Martin King in 2015.

Exhibition runs until 20 May 2017. Open 11am–4pm Thurs–Sat

https://www.australianprintworkshop.com/

http://www.thegrainstore.org/exhibitions.html

Planetarium contains work from the Art Center’s permanent collections inspired by space. Stars, planets, comets, and the moon have fascinated humans and artists throughout history, and in these works they are viewed from perspectives infused with spirituality, speculation and scientific analysis. Spanning centuries of work, images show a ship steering though a storm using the stars for guidance, while in another a human looks down through clouds at the tiny lights of a city far below. Albert Einstein, whose theories are indispensable to our understanding of space, time, and distance, is shown in two portraits. Featured artists include Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol.

On view in the JOHN BRADY PRINT GALLERY.

Print has become an important component of recent Russian art practice. The relationship between printing and publishing, strictly controlled under communism, made the new conditions of freedom all the more inviting.

After the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, Russian artists who no longer felt defined by resistance to authority could reflect wistfully, ironically or polemically on utopian concepts like the Ideal City or the New Soviet Man. They also brought a fresh point of view to issues informing the western cultural conversation: architecture and urban living, rationally-planned versus informal settlements, the interplay of aesthetics and ideology, new technology and social change, national and other forms of identity, conflict and migration.

From the days of the early reformers through the twenty-first century, Protestants have made voracious use of printed books and other media to spread a religion of the Word. For its vaunted emphasis on texts, Protestantism remains associated with words, thought, and private reading, as opposed to things, practices, and communal devotion. However, as scholars across the disciplines have demonstrated, texts are never only containers for words. Whether handwritten, printed, or typed on a screen, words and their meanings are entwined with material forms and embodied practices at every stage of their production, circulation, and reception.

The material bases of both Protestantism and textual media have been key sites of inquiry in the larger material turn in the humanities. Interdisciplinary scholars of “material religion” have argued that religious practices are always embodied practices, shaped by their close engagement with material things and spaces. At the same time, the emerging field of “critical bibliography” has united a diverse group of scholars, librarians, and curators around the central axis of the materiality of the book. Critical bibliography pursues an object-based approach to texts, analyzing their material forms—such as paper, images, typography, binding, format, and ownership marks—as primary forms of evidence.

This symposium will feature public talks, hands-on archival sessions, and a works-in-progress workshop. It will bring together a leading group of researchers working across this material turn—including art historians, historians, religionists, literature scholars, anthropologists, librarians, and curators—to examine the role of the materiality of texts among Protestants of all kinds, across lines of period and region.

In celebration of Frank Lloyd Wright’s 150th birthday, the Milwaukee Art Museum presents Frank Lloyd Wright: Buildings for the Prairie featuring a selection of the famed architect’s designs from the Wasmuth Portfolio and examples of his furniture, stained glass and textiles. Named for its German publisher, the Wasmuth Portfolio is considered the most significant collection of Wright’s early work, showcasing the breadth and beauty of his output. The portfolio lends insight into the master’s early development and affords the opportunity to see the evolution of the Prairie School of architecture.

Although highly regarded as one of the best American architects of his generation, by 1909 Wright had reached a professional impasse. Spurred by his inability to gain commercial commissions and his scandalous affair with a former client, Wright left for Italy and Germany in 1910. In Florence, Wright found inspiration in his architectural surroundings, and there he worked on illustrations and text for a monograph on his work to be published by the Berlin firm of Ernst Wasmuth. The Wasmuth Portfolio introduced the architect’s work to his European contemporaries and is largely credited with profoundly influencing the direction of 20th-century architecture. Collectors and museums alike prize the portfolio for its historic importance and for the beauty of the images.

As a medium of communication, the poster has a long history and a wide range of social functions, from selling a product to promoting a cause. Despite the rise of digital media, the print poster remains vital and, oftentimes, radical. Featuring over 80 rarely seen posters from Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s permanent collection, alongside loans from the Merrill C. Berman collection, How Posters Work demonstrates how some of the world’s most creative designers have employed and pushed the boundaries of two-dimensional design, harnessed the mechanics and psychology of perception, and mastered the art of storytelling to produce powerful forms of visual communication. Included is work not only by prominent designers such as Lucian Bernhard, Paul Rand, and Josef Müller-Brockmann but also by a large number of notable contemporary designers. The exhibition dissects design principles and their creative use by designers and underscores, too, the significance of the viewer in completing the design process.

How Posters Work will be complemented by a presentation of work by nationally recognized Wisconsin graphic designers, including posters by Lois Ehlert and John Rieben and catalogues by John J. Reiss. Additionally, Sonnenzimmer, the Chicago-based, internationally known graphic art studio, has designed a limited-edition print, the identity for the exhibition, and graphic interventions as animations within the exhibition.

APS is pleased to announce its second lecture by a distinguished print scholar. This year, Harriet Stratis, Senior Research Conservator at the Art Institute of Chicago, will deliver a talk about her current research into Paul Gauguin’s artistic process. The abstract of her talk can be found below. The talk will be video recorded and posted online for viewing by APS members and the general public.

June of 2017 will mark eighty years since the production of Guernica by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), made in response to the horrific events of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). This exhibition commemorates the anniversary of Picasso’s great painting by showcasing a pair of prints in the Meadows collection that was transformed by the very same events that inspired Guernica.

In January of 1937, Picasso began work on a set of prints titled The Dream and Lie of Franco. The prints were made in support of the Spanish Republican government, caught in a grisly civil war with the conservative Nationalist party headed by Francisco Franco (1892–1975). These prints were the first expressly political artworks of Picasso’s career, designed to satirize Franco and delegitimize his cause. But the bombing of the small town of Guernica on April 26, 1937, would have a radical impact on Picasso’s project. This event interrupted the execution of the second plate and immediately inspired Guernica, among his most ambitious and celebrated works; Picasso returned to his print series only after the painting was completed. The Meadows collection possesses the only near-complete set of proofs of these prints in the United States. These proofs, which signpost the stages of Picasso’s working process from start to finish, before and after the bombing of Guernica, reveal the visible effects of this event on Picasso’s art in response to the Spanish Civil War. The final prints will be exhibited alongside these proofs as a means of dramatizing the impact of the historical moment that this exhibition commemorates on their production and, ultimately, on their final form.

Picasso’s Dream and Lie of Franco were made during a period that witnessed a burst of creative work on paper in the form of posters, cartoons, postcards, and satirical illustrations. The Meadows Museum is in possession of a set of posters from this period that are exemplary of the thematic and visual-cultural context from which The Dream and Lie of Franco emerged. Presented across from Picasso’s prints in this exhibition, these extraordinary artifacts will be on view at the Museum for the first time.

Beginning in the sixteenth century, prints became the primary medium for circulating and preserving images of current events, including public ceremonies and celebrations, battles, and other noteworthy incidents. Industrialization and rapid urbanization during the 1800s created not only the means to quickly print and publish text and images but the market for such news sources as well. Artists relished the opportunity to create original compositions based on recent happenings that would be widely circulated in illustrated weekly and monthly journals and inexpensive books in addition to being issued as independent prints.

The works in this exhibition present images of various Parisian news items from the mid- to late nineteenth century, ranging from mundane political intrigues to serious foreign affairs. Artists took different approaches to presenting such subject matter: the etchers Auguste Lançon and Félix Buhot created highly detailed, documentary scenes, while the caricaturists Cham and Charles Vernier focused on satirizing French government officials. Particularly remarkable are compositions, such as the one by Honoré Daumier, that portray current events in the guise of biblical or mythological subjects that would have been understood by a broad public. In this way, artists presented new ideas within familiar narratives while investing their subjects with historical significance. Near the end of the century, artists became more partisan in their depictions of current events and revealed their personal positions on sensational topics, which included France’s colonial ambitions and the false claim accusing a Jewish army officer of treason now known as the Dreyfus Affair. The works on view were selected from the Zimmerli Art Museum’s rich collection of nineteenth-century French prints and drawings.