Albuquerque, NM – Tamarind Institute invites the local community to the opening of Color Coded on Friday, June 17 with a public reception from 5 – 7 p.m. The exhibition will be in the gallery through September 2, open to the public, Monday — Friday, 9 a.m. — 5 p.m.

Color Coded features lithographs by Matt Magee, David X Levine, Susan York, and Jonathan Seliger: all artists who have explored the boundlessness of color and ink during their collaborations at Tamarind Institute. In addition to lithographs, the exhibition includes paintings and other works from the studios of Matt Magee and David X Levine.

Susan York is known less for her use of color, and more for her sculptural works of sensual, graphite blocks and her black and white drawings made from the same material. However, during her residency at Tamarind in 2015, York began to explore color, for the first time in decades, while creating the Achromatopsia series. York consulted with a friend with achromatopsia, a form of color-blindness where the person only sees shades of grey. The resulting Achromatopsia series of lithographs features three shade of grey on the fronts of the prints that corresponds with a color (red, orange, or yellow) printed on the back of the lithographs. The color creates a reflective glow around its corresponding “achromatopsia” grey. The result is a stunning triptych that pushes the boundaries of color and lithography.

David X Levine, known for his rich, dense, colored-pencil drawings (also on view in the exhibition), in which he engages in obsessive mark-making with hundreds of layers of colored pencil, did a residency at Tamarind at the end of 2015. The results of his residency yielded equally vibrant lithographs in which the artist gives the viewer a glimpse of his nostalgia for Mary Tyler more, bad art jokes, and shapes of color that take on their own personalities.

Matt Magee grew up observing a variety of cultural and visual languages as he accompanied his father, an archeologist, in the field. During his second residency at Tamarind in 2016, Magee continued to explore his fascination with symbols. Green Seven, an auspicious number and symbol in most cultures, was inspired by a sign on Albuquerque’s Route 66. Wishlist, Carthew and Proem 1, each seem to convey some sort of itemized message, like a page from an old book or a colorful, stone tablet. Along with his new editions, Magee expanded on the concept of one of his 2013 lithographs with Wall Grapheme I, a site-specific wall painting, created in the foyer of Tamarind's gallery. Wall Grapheme I is an expansion of Magee's first lithographs, the Grapheme series. Magee explains, that the definition of a grapheme is "the smallest unit of a writing system of any given language.” Wall Grapheme I is currently on view during regular gallery hours, M-F, 9-5.

Color Coded will be in the gallery through September 2, 2016.

Tamarind Institute is an internationally recognized fine art lithography workshop affiliated with the College of Fine Arts of the University of New Mexico. Tamarind is dedicated to the preservation and promotion of lithography through education, research, exhibitions, and artist residencies, and is credited with expanding the accessibility to and popularity of printmaking among contemporary artists around the world. Tamarind frequently sponsors programs with diverse populations, locally and internationally, benefitting University, Albuquerque, and New Mexico constituencies. For more information, call 505-277-3901, or email tamarind@unm.edu.

CALLING ALL BROOKLYN PRINTMAKERS!!

The Gowanus Studio Space (GSS) offers space, equipment and support to emerging designers, artists and craftspeople. Located in the historically industrial neighborhood along the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, GSS houses a large industrial arts workshop as well as private studios and exhibition space. By providing training, workspace, tools and resources, GSS encourages cross-pollination between the art/design communities; supports new businesses and design projects; and is a vital arts resource for the surrounding community.

PRINTspirations - Watch artist Matt Magee and his residency at Tamarind Institute.

Share your “PRINT”spirations! What inspires your collecting? Tweet us @IFPDA and use #collectprints. Impressive entries will be featured in future Event Updates and on our FaceBook page.

Twenty-five of the very rare, mammoth Jubilee editions of "Brother Jonathan" have been posted online at the Princeton University Digital Library. These are the largest newspapers published in the United States and include wood engravings 3 x 4 feet in size. An announcement is posted at the link attached.

The scholarly research on early modern printmaking has evolved from a focus on the Romantic concept of the Peintre-Graveur to studies of artists and printmakers in their specific cultural and socioeconomic context. In addition, the idea that publishers played a vital role in artistic, commercial and organisational aspects of printmaking is now widely accepted. Both art-historical and art-technical research on these matters have resulted in reference works and exhibition catalogues of high standard. In these studies, however, the position of the consumer has often been ignored or dealt with only briefly. In addition, print collections in the past have often failed to recognise the importance of contemporary adaptations, signs of usage and collecting conditions.

However, for a proper understanding of early modern culture, it is crucial to study the consumption of printed images and the socioeconomic and artistic processes behind it. Prints were a widespread and artistically diverse medium and the creative process of a print did not stop after printing. Researching the creative afterlife of prints is therefore an essential development in the study of early modern visual culture. Although the consumption and reception of early modern books has received increasing attention in the past decades, only some scholars such as Jan Van der Stock (Printing Images in Antwerp. The Introduction of Printmaking in a City: Fifteenth Century to 1585, 1998), Peter Schmidt (Gedruckte Bilder in handgeschriebenen Büchern. Zum Gebrauch von Druckgraphik im 15. Jahrhundert, 2003), Jan van der Waals (Prints in the Golden Age. From Art to Shelf Paper, 2006), Kathryn Rudy (Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent. Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages, 2011) and Suzanne Karr Schmidt (Altered and Adorned. Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life, 2011) have integrated the consumer’s side of the print market and the concrete use of prints in their research.

In order to stimulate this promising evolution, the Rijksmuseum is organising an international conference on early modern prints, ranging from precious artistic prints that were carefully collected to cheap printed images that were used and discarded. Paragons and Paper Bags. Early Modern Prints from the Consumer’s Perspective will take place at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam on Thursday 9 June 2016. The aim of this symposium is to further develop this new approach in order to achieve new insights on target audiences, the application and usage of prints, and special collection practices.

This exhibition surveys how America and its people have been represented in prints made by American and non-American artists between 1710 and 2010. Early prints of the continent’s indigenous peoples, its landscapes, flora and fauna, its historical events, wars, and citizenry reflect the curiosity of Europeans about a world they perceived as new and strange. At the same time, American artists often turned to prints to present a vision of their youthful democracy.

Prints are well-suited for quickly conveying images of contemporary events to a wide audience, and thus have often been a forum for social commentary or criticism. The exhibition includes works from across the centuries that aim to raise awareness and inspire change. On view, for instance, is an engraving of the Boston Massacre by Paul Revere as well as a broadside from more than two hundred years later by the undercover feminist collective known as the Guerrilla Girls. The exhibition also features works by artists equally drawn to the aesthetic potential of printmaking. From James McNeill Whistler, Mary Cassatt, and others of the late nineteenth century to Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler in the twentieth, vanguard artists have explored printmaking’s unique artistic possibilities. In recent years, radical experiments by artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, and Richard Serra have pushed to the breaking point the very definition of the medium.

The more than 150 prints in this exhibition, mounted on the occasion of the National Gallery’s 75th anniversary, are drawn entirely from the Gallery’s collection, including promised gifts.

Organization: Organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington

Sponsors: The exhibition is made possible by Altria Group in celebration of the 75th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art.

The international tour of the exhibition is sponsored by the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Additional support is provided by The Exhibition Circle of the National Gallery of Art.

Passes: Admission is always free and passes are not required

Other Venues: National Gallery, Prague, October 4, 2016–January 5, 2017
Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City, February 7–April 30, 2017

Edgar Degas is best known as a painter and chronicler of the ballet, yet his work as a printmaker reveals the true extent of his restless experimentation. In the mid-1870s, Degas was introduced to the monotype process—drawing in ink on a metal plate that was then run through a press, typically resulting in a single print. Captivated by the monotype’s potential, he immersed in the technique with enormous enthusiasm, taking the medium to radical ends. He expanded the possibilities of drawing, created surfaces with a heightened sense of tactility, and invented new means for new subjects, from dancers in motion to the radiance of electric light, from women in intimate settings to meteorological effects in nature. The monotype also sparked a host of experiments for Degas, who often used the medium as a starting point from which an image could be reworked and revised. This process of repetition and transformation, mirroring and reversal, allowed Degas to extend his approach to the study of form. The profound impact of his work with monotype can be seen in his variations in different mediums of key motifs, revealing a new kind of artwork that was less about progress or completion than endless innovation.

The exhibition includes approximately 120 rarely seen monotypes—along with some 60 related paintings, drawings, pastels, sketchbooks, and prints—that show Degas at his most modern, capturing the spirit of urban life; depicting the body in new and daring ways; liberating mark-making from tradition; and boldly engaging the possibilities of abstraction.

KADS New York is pleased to announce the release of the spring edition of CELEBRATING PRINT magazine, with exclusive features on art in print and practice of printmaking in Central and Eastern Europe.

The April edition is centered around an essay on printmaking as phenomenon of thinking, placing matrix and its potential image at the beginning of all things. Through the works of three seasoned artists, the edition explores the possibilities that printmaking as a versatile and open art medium offers in artist’s search for visual forms. We also present a project that demonstrates how adapting a traditional printmaking technique, lithography, may lead to a playful and expressive method of printing sought after in contemporary art practice.

In this issue:

Barbora Kundracikova / Modernist Universalism Revived: Linocut Potraits by Joanna Piech-Kalarus
Jiri Lindovsky on the Technical Mystery and Creative Intelligence / in an interview with Katerina Kyselica
Dorota Folga-Januszewska / Printmaking as a Phenomenon of Thinking
Breda Skrjanec / Alems, Tobacco Leaves and Puppets: Zdenka Golob’s Printmaking Journey
Ewa Budka: The Skin I Have Been Living In


CELEBRATING PRINT is a full-color magazine on fine art print and practice of printmaking in Central and Eastern Europe. Articles, essays and interviews by curators, scholars, and printmaking educators explore modern and contemporary prints across the region. CELEBRATING PRINT was founded as an information platform and invaluable resource for collectors, scholars, and print enthusiasts to explore and learn about Central and Eastern European print culture as well as discover artists and their works as they relate to the region’s tradition and the contemporary global art practice. CELEBRATING PRINT is published by New York-based creative studio KADS New York twice a year, in October and April, as both print and digital editions. Available to purchase or subscribe to at: www.celebratingprint.com.

The Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion at Yale University (MAVCOR) is delighted to announce the public launch of our redesigned website (mavcor.yale.edu). MAVCOR is characterized by its subjects of inquiry and by the forms of scholarly, interdisciplinary activity it promotes. The Center is equally about the study of the material, visual, sensory, and spatial “stuff” of religious practice and about multiplying ways of being in conversation, of sharing information and producing knowledge, about this set of subjects.

This collaboration shapes a multidisciplinary scholarly Center for religion and visual/material culture studies at Yale University. From this local base, the Center aims to facilitate a network of institutional and individual partners in varied settings, including higher education, religious communities, arts and architectural professions, museums, and civic life.

As part of the Center's promotion of conversation around its subjects of inquiry, the Center publishes the Material Objects Archive, a growing database of material and visual objects activated in religious practices broadly conceived, and Conversations, a born-digital, peer-reviewed journal. Conversations includes a variety of contribution types, including Object Narratives, Essays, Material Mediations, Constellations, Interviews, and Medium Studies. Scholars at all ranks of training and profession in related fields are encouraged to contribute to Conversations and the Material Objects Archive. Both text and image contributions may be submitted to the Center's peer review process by emailing mavcor@yale.edu

Over the past year, a generous grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, along with additional support from the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, has allowed MAVCOR to complete this work of revision and enhanced functionality. In addition to a more attractive and streamlined interface, the redesign incorporates a number of changes to expand visitor experience of the site. These include a sophisticated search engine specific to MAVCOR’s Material Objects Archive and a global site search engine that allows visitors to search all site content, or to limit searches to our blind-peer-reviewed born-digital journal Conversations. A new Fellows Portal supports MAVCOR’s multi-year project cycles; these center around a specific theme related to MAVCOR’s interests and bring together groups of interdisciplinary scholar/fellows from a range of institutions, national and international.

Two new content types contribute to MAVCOR’s investment in innovative ways of engaging its publics and doing digital scholarship. One of these, Mediations, joins the other content types offered within Conversations. Mediations provides space for theoretical and experimental reflection within the journal.

The second new category, Collections, expands the possibilities of MAVCOR’s Material Objects Archive, allowing individual scholars to curate large, multi-object contributions to the archive. Collections exist both within the Archive and as separate entities, associated with the name of their contributor/author, and accompanied by optional discursive text. Contributors may also divide each Collection into subfields accompanied by further written introductory content. One anticipated use of Collections is to display color images related to print publications, and to do so in numbers that exceed the possibilities of the print format. Such Collections would complement the print publication and include links to the publisher’s page for the volume in question.

MAVCOR welcomes contributions that combine substantial and original scholarship with accessibility to a generally educated public. We look forward to future collaborations and invite you to explore the new site.