The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts announced a generous $500,000 gift from Julie Jensen Bryan and Robert Bryan to name the PAFA Printmaking Shop. This transformative commitment by the Bryans, longtime supporters of PAFA and its students, ensures that printmaking will remain one of the school's core artistic disciplines.

The Bryans' gift bolsters PAFA's ability to provide the highest level of artistic training through its state-of-the-art printmaking shop and innovative programs, continue its legacy of educating generations of artists, and ensure the ongoing relevance and contemporary potential of this vital artistic medium.

Located on the sixth floor of the Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building, the Julie Jensen Bryan and Robert Bryan Printmaking Shop provides students with the equipment and personalized instruction to gain mastery in an array of printmaking forms, including woodcut and relief, etching, dry point and other intaglio processes, plate and stone lithography, as well as screenprinting, letterpress, book arts, and digital media.

The Bryan Printmaking Shop is also home to exciting events and programs, such as the Annual Student Print Sale and PAFA PRESS, which sponsors collaborative edition printing and other experimental print programs in partnership with professional artists and faculty master printers.

The Cincinnati Art Museum has acquired an extraordinary collection of 800 rare 17th–20th century Japanese prints from the late Joel Weisman and his wife Bernice Weisman. Announced at a museum donor event on Jan. 11, the Weisman gift is one of the largest permanent collection additions in the museum’s history.

The Weisman acquisition further strengthens the museum’s Japanese holdings and represents a broad spectrum of artists across the history of Japanese printmaking. The collection spans four centuries and includes colorful Edo and Osaka ukiyo-e woodcuts, shin hanga (new prints) and sōsaku hanga (creative prints). Thematically, the prints represent fine examples of bijinga or beautiful women, theatrical prints of actors, literature and legend, landscape, bird prints and surimono (privately printed prints).

Selections from the Weisman collection will be featured in the upcoming special exhibition "Dressed to Kill: Japanese Arms & Armor". In 2006, the Weismans donated 82 prints, which were featured in the exhibition "Public Spectacles, Personal Pleasures: Four Centuries of Japanese Prints from a Cincinnati Collection."

The Milwaukee Art Museum today announced the promised gift of an extensive collection of work by French graphic master Jules Chéret. This unparalleled group of more than 500 Chéret artworks, one of the largest and most comprehensive of its kind, has been generously promised by Milwaukeeans Susee and James Wiechmann. The gift encompasses the full range of Chéret’s innovative output from his bold, expressive posters advertising theatrical events, social gatherings and a myriad of products; to designs for book covers and menus; to intimate lithographic studies of his models. Often referred to as the “father of the modern poster,” Chéret inspired many other important artists of his time including Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre Bonnard.

“Susee and I are thrilled to add our Jules Chéret poster collection to the Museum’s treasures where it can be shared by all,” said James Wiechmann. “These posters that lit up the streets of Paris in the late 1800s will now shine in the galleries of our Milwaukee Art Museum and those of other Museums as they are exhibited around the country.”

The Wiechmanns were lenders to the Museum’s popular 2012 exhibition, Posters of Paris: Toulouse-Lautrec and His Contemporaries, and from there began an important relationship with the institution. In addition to the promised gift of their Chéret collection, the Wiechmanns have underscored their commitment by underwriting a curatorial position. Thanks to their generosity Britany L. Salsbury will join the Museum in February as associate curator of prints and drawings.

Salsbury comes from the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design where she has been the Andrew W. Mellon curatorial fellow in the Prints, Drawings and Photographs department since 2015. During her tenure she worked on a major exhibition scheduled to open in June 2017 entitled Altered States: Etching in Late 19th Century Paris, which has an accompanying publication. She also developed a number of exhibitions including Inventing Impressionism (2016), and regularly instructed classes from RISD and Brown University on the history of works on paper in the museum’s print study room. Salsbury’s experience includes positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library & Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago.

September 20 through January 11, 2017
Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, New Haven, CT

The Venetian Republic, a prosperous and powerful state in Renaissance Europe, cultivated a mythical image of stability, liberty, and beauty. This image-making is celebrated in a new Yale Law Library exhibition, "Representing the Law in the Most Serene Republic: Images of Authority from Renaissance Venice," on view from September 20 through January 11, 2017.

Drawing primarily on the outstanding collection of Italian law books in the Yale Law Library's Rare Book Collection, the exhibition features 25 objects of remarkable splendor and historical significance. These include illuminated manuscripts, illustrated books, prints, drawings, coins, and medals, eight of which are on loan from the Yale University Art Gallery and three reproduced from an exceptional Renaissance album of watercolors in the Beinecke Library.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Venice played a central role in the political and economic affairs of Europe, ruling an empire that extended from northern Italy, down the Adriatic, to the eastern Mediterranean. By the year 1500, Venice could claim that it had been a sovereign republic for more than a millennium. Indeed, the city was so highly esteemed for its stable government, selfless leaders, and free citizens that it came to be known as "La Serenissima," the Most Serene Republic.

The exhibition introduces the significant offices and symbols of the Venetian state, and explains how laws were crafted, debated, publicized, and broken. Its protagonists are the doge and highest magistrates of Venice, the governors appointed to rule the Republic’s territories, the lawmakers in the Senate, and the lawbreakers consigned to prison or the galleys—all of them illustrated in finely executed illuminations, drawings, prints, and numismatic portraits.

The exhibition is curated by Christopher Platts (History of Art, Yale University) and Michael Widener (Rare Book Librarian, Yale Law Library).

Join the Fitzwilliam Museum’s Department of Paintings, Drawings and Prints for a day looking at the formation of print collections in the 18th century. Speakers include Dr Sarah Grant (V&A), Dr Meredith Hale (University of Cambridge), Kate Heard (Royal Collection Trust) and David Alexander (Honorary Keeper of British Prints, Fitzwilliam Museum). There will be a curator-led tour of the exhibition An Amateur’s Passion and visits to additional material in the Graham Robertson Study Room.

Lunch not included, but tea and coffee provided.
Booking essential, tel: 01223 332904 or email: education@fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk

The Cantor Arts Center is pleased to announce "The Wonder of Everyday Life: Dutch Golden Age Prints," a major exhibition opening November 16 and running through March 20. The approximately 55 works on view, by Rembrandt van Rijn and his Dutch peers, were created during an extraordinary moment in the history of prints, when unprecedented economic prosperity and patronage elevated printmaking in the Dutch Republic during the 17th century, an era known as the Golden Age. While art imported from southern Europe and Dutch colonial outposts in Asia saturated the burgeoning market, newly wealthy collectors also demanded contemporary Dutch prints. Rembrandt and his peers responded with traditional biblical and mythological subjects, but also familiar landscapes and character studies inspired by daily life.

The National Gallery of Australia is presenting an exhibition of works made by the major American abstract artist Frank Stella in collaboration with master printmaker Kenneth Tyler. Tracing their long history of groundbreaking prints, "Frank Stella: The Kenneth Tyler Print Collection" showcases works created by the duo, who contributed significantly to the major developments of twentieth-century printmaking.

"Japanese Impressions" is the first exhibition at the Clark to focus on the Institute’s permanent collection of Japanese prints. The exhibition spans more than a century of Japanese color woodblock printing as represented by three generations of artists who produced prints from the 1830s to the 1970s.

The exhibition features selections from a foundational gift made in 2014 of sixty-three woodblock prints from the Rodbell Family Collection in addition to loans from two private collections.