Born in Aberdeen, Mississippi, artist Maltby Sykes (American, 1911–1992) grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. While he always considered the South his home, Sykes travelled extensively to places such as Europe, Japan, and Mexico and these trips influenced his work greatly. Sykes’ formative experiences of working as an assistant to Diego Rivera on a mural for the Hotel Reforma in Mexico City in 1936, and interacting with printmaker George C. Miller in New York, provoked a shift in his style from realism to semi-abstraction and abstraction, and in technique, from painting to printmaking.

In fact, printmaking, and specifically lithography, became a lifelong passion for the artist, and one that he would share with many others. After returning to his teaching appointment at Alabama Polytechnic Institute (now Auburn University) following his stint as an Air Force combat artist in WWII, Sykes began a printmaking program at the school. This program allowed Sykes to experiment with different printmaking technologies including adapting commercial lithographic processes for art making. This type of creative thinking and use of alternative approaches is also inherent in Sykes’ approach to his art.

In 1983 the artist donated a large number of works of art to the MMFA. A selection of works from this collection illustrates the arc of Sykes’ career in printmaking. From realism to abstraction, Sykes’s imagery follows a trajectory, illustrating was happening in art and in the world around him. Sykes not only embodies what it means to be a modernist, but also his art reflects the changes that occur over a lifetime, proving that he was indeed a witness to his time.

Spanning three decades of Warhol’s career, this exhibition features some of the artist’s most iconic screenprints, including his portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Mao Zedong, the splashy camouflage series and the controversial Electric Chair portfolio.

This exhibition will feature 19th-century ukiyo-e woodblock prints by artists of the Utagawa School, and 20th-century shinhanga and sōsaku hanga prints, as well as recently acquired contemporary Japanese works.

This exhibition features a variety of portraits by contemporary artists and photographers, from Julian Opie, Grayson Perry and Ellen Heck to Maud Sulter and Bettina von Zwehl. The exhibition shows how artists have adapted historical or conventional modes of portraiture such as silhouettes, portrait miniatures, medals, Old Master paintings and death masks, as well as passport photographs, ID cards and election campaign posters.

Just as the North Star has served as a navigational beacon to travelers, so the career, art, and research of Dard Hunter have served as inspiration for papermakers, toolmakers, printers, artists, historians, and educators. Come join us at the Friends of Dard Hunter 2015 Annual Meeting, Paper Points North, where we will build upon his legacy while also honoring his life’s work in continuing the tradition of education, dialogue, and research.

Embarking northward to the beautiful Alberta Rockies, the conference will be held at the internationally recognized Banff Centre, a well­respected confluence of art, science, and research. The primary focus of Paper Points North is to question how we honor the traditional methods of papermaking while expanding into new methods of research, innovation, sustainability, education, and activism. The beautiful setting and retreat environment of the Banff Centre will encourage community, invigoration, and exchange.

Attendees of the conference will have the opportunity to tour the Banff Centre’s world renowned artist residency spaces, view the library’s extensive collection of artist books, take a scenic walk, and participate in the weekend’s activities. Also included in the program will be the keynote address, lectures, demonstrations, members’ exhibition, banquet, silent auction, and keepsake exchange. Please join the Friends of Dard Hunter at this idyllic location to discover fresh perspectives together. We will celebrate the history of Dard Hunter and continue his legacy by seeking new ways to educate, research, and innovate with hand papermaking leading as our North Star.

2015 marks a very special year for Minnesota Center for Book Arts — not only the fourth convening of Book Art Biennial, and the awarding of The MCBA Prize 2015, but our 30th Anniversary as well! Celebrate this milestone by joining us for this very special series of events.

Through workshops, lectures, panel conversations, exhibitions, and a gala celebration and awards ceremony, Book Art Biennial invites artists, educators, curators and scholars to explore current trends in contemporary artists’ books.

International Print Center New York presents New Prints 2015/Summer, on view at 508 West 26th St, 5th Floor, from June 11 – July 31, 2015. The exhibition consists of forty-six prints by thirty-nine artists, selected from over 2,000 submissions. Showing during IPCNY’s 15th Anniversary year, New Prints 2015/Summer is the fifty-first presentation of IPCNY’s New Prints Program, a series of juried exhibitions organized by IPCNY several times each year featuring prints made within the past twelve months. An illustrated brochure with a curatorial essay by Tom Freudenheim accompanies the exhibition.

This show was selected by: Grayson Cox (Artist, Professor), Jennifer Farrell (Associate Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Tom Freudenheim (Art Critic and Retired Museum Director), Evelyn Day Lasry, (Two Palms, NY), William Steiger (Artist), and Barbara Takenaga (Artist, Professor).

Beginning in the seventeenth century, artists increasingly depicted scenes of everyday life in their work. The doctor’s visit, generally showing a male doctor visiting a female patient in her home, became a popular subject in paintings and prints. As medical knowledge and scientific training progressed over the following centuries, artists presented a wider range of interactions between doctors and patients. Some artists featured doctors as caring, learned professionals, while others showed charlatans promoting dubious remedies. Images often included medical iconography used in symbolic or satirical ways to comment upon political events and social mores.

This exhibition explores the different ways that European artists both documented and interpreted health issues and medical practices of their time. While some works rely on long-established artistic conventions and outdated medical practices, others respond to trends and breakthroughs in treatment or focus on either lauding or lampooning the most famous physicians of the day. Works by the great French printmaker and sculptor Honoré Daumier and his contemporaries demonstrate the wide use of medical imagery to criticize King Louis-Philippe’s government (1830-1848), while works by Hermann-Paul and Charles Maurin consider the public and private aspects of the impact of illness on the average citizen. The exhibition is selected from the Zimmerli Art Museum’s rich collection of European prints from the Renaissance through the twentieth century.

This exhibition features 20 Surrealist-inspired linocut prints by Slovak artist Vincent Hložník (1919–1997) created in Czechoslovakia in 1962. They represent a turning point in the artist's career as his figurative motifs—always related to the exploration of the human condition—began to take on more symbolic and metaphorical meanings.

In the dystopic universe of the prints, detached human limbs, tangled corpses, monstrous figures assembled from eyes and teeth, the Angel of Death, and threatening flanks of silhouetted and stylized archaic warriors signal unspecified danger. Angles and voids activate the space and create an instability marking the very real threat of annihilation, whether from war or nuclear arms. Hložník's approach to art was profoundly affected by his time as a student in Prague during World War II where he witnessed Nazi atrocities. This experience led him to address themes of war, isolation and human suffering in his work.

Tamarind Institute announces New Editions 2015 opening in the Tamarind Gallery May 22 through August 21. The gallery is free and open to the public, Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. — 5 p.m.

This collection of new lithographs released by Tamarind Institute during the past twelve months, typifies the diverse imagery for which Tamarind is known. Among the artists are Garo Antreasian, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Osmeivy Ortega, Hayal Pozanti, Robert Pruitt, and David Row. In addition to recent editions, Tamarind is releasing a suite of fifteen lithographs made with artists of the Kalahari sandveld region in western Botswana, Africa, in 2006.