Studio 3 Gallery is pleased to present Beautifully Obscene: The History of the Erotic Print. Featuring over 30 works from across Europe and Japan and spanning the course of 500 years, the exhibition incorporates the different approaches used by artists in order to explore themes of sexuality, gender roles and power. The show explores Sir Kenneth Clark’s famous distinction between the socially-acceptable ‘nude’, and the socially-pejorative ‘naked’ body, with the majority of the works included arguably belonging to the latter category. Beautifully Obscene will not only present viewers with a comprehensive study of the aesthetics of the human form and sexuality, but will also challenge our deeply ingrained discomfort with erotic visual representations, and suggest that beauty can in fact be found in the obscene.

Prints have historically been affordable ways to rapidly and economically reproduce and disseminate images, and this has created a rich legacy of erotic art. As well as showing how these themes have evolved across centuries and continents, this exhibition will also document how the viewers’ relationship to the image has shifted over time. Many of the older examples in the show come from books or pamphlets where they could be viewed intimately and privately. More recent and contemporary works were intended to be shown in a gallery setting, so expand the scale of the body, confronting the viewer directly.

The featured artists have represented motifs such as the classical nude of Western Antiquity, modern French eroticism, through to the explicit prints of 18th century Japanese Shunga, and contemporary meditations on the human form and sexuality. This exhibition explores what we reveal and what we conceal, and the hidden educational and religious connotations that the erotic can harbor. It questions societal fears of the explicit and the pornographic, tackling themes of sexuality, gender and the role of the erotic in a diverse range of cultures and eras. The principle aim of Beautifully Obscene is to study the aesthetics of the human form and sexuality; in order to challenge the deeply ingrained preconceptions against erotic visual representations, and to emphasize that beauty can in fact be found in the obscene.

Artists include: Pietro Aquila, Pietro Santi Bartoli, Monika Beisner, Jan de Bisschop, Emma Bradford, Simone Cantarini, Stephen Chambers, Marianne Clouzot, Gabriel Dauchot, Angele Delasalle, Roland Delcol ,Amandine Dore, Tracey Emin, Brad Faine, Henri Fantin-Latour, Valentin Le Fevre, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Othon Friesz, Frans de Geetre, Paul Guiramand, Sarah Hardacre, William Hogarth, Anita Klein, Rudolf Koch, Antonio Lafrery, Martin Van Maele , Albert Marquet, Henri Matisse, Patricia Nik-Dad, Pablo Picasso, André Provot, Felicien Rops, Berthommé de Saint-André, Alex Varenne, Marcel Vertes , Denis Volx, Lucas Vorsterman, and Shane Wheatcroft.

This exhibition has been organised by students from the Print Collecting and Curating Module at the University of Kent’s School of Arts. This course gives students the opportunity both to curate a museum-quality exhibition of their design and to acquire prints for the Kent Print Collection. In thinking about this exhibition, this year’s students wished to address the lack of erotic art in the permanent collection and to explore the rich and varied history of sensuality and eroticism depicted in print.

Tyler Printmaking is pleased to present this year’s Print Think conference, titled Mutable Matrix, on Saturday, May 16. Whether they call what they are producing variable editions, mono-prints, drawings, or something else entirely, contemporary printmakers have increasingly found something plastic within the frozen gestures of their plate, stone, block, or screen. This vision of the matrix as mutable has offered artists a new means of exploring the tension between the gestural and graphic. Traditionally, the gold standard of print production has been the edition—a series of identical prints in which the matrix is the means and the map by which artists finesse a number of uncanny duplicates. The mutable matrix allows for a new sense of play, a new found exploration of chance and intuition within the very process of printing the page, while new ways of working often escape the page altogether.

Please join us in this exploration, conversation, and celebration of the ways printmakers have broken rules, hacked procedures, gone off the rails, and/or invented new ways of working in which the sanctity of the copy has been superseded by a curiosity about the possible.

The conference features: Kathan Brown, Founding Director of Crown Point discussing her work with John Cage, Amy Ingrid Schlegel, Director of Galleries at Tufts University discussing the work of Nancy Spero, artists Rob Swaniston, and Ken Wood and a tour of the Richard Tuttle exhibition at the Fabric Workshop.. We will end our day at The Print Center with gallery talks by artist Ken Wood on his work and John Caperton, the Jensen Bryan Curator on the Michael Mazur exhibition. A reception will follow.

The Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM) proudly presents the Philadelphia premiere of Both/And Richard Tuttle Print and Cloth. This unique, mulitfaceted installation of over five decades of work—from the mid-1960s to present—was conceived by Richard Tuttle, offering one of the most comprehensive experiences ever of this influential, contemporary American artist, who has a long history of collaboration with FWM, beginning in 1978 shortly after the Museum was founded by Artistic Director Marion Boulton Stroud. This installation will feature work from Tuttle’s two landmark textile and print surveys that originated in 2014: “Richard Tuttle: I Don’t Know . The Weave of Textile Language,” organized by Whitechapel Gallery in association with Tate Modern, London; and “Richard Tuttle: A Print Retrospective,” Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Maine, as well as the international premiere of new kimono work by the artist.

Currently an Artist-in-Residence at FWM, Tuttle’s new kimono work Extraordinary from this 2014-2015 residency will be on view in this major exhibition. The hand-sewn yukatas, or summer kimonos, are made of Sarashi cloth, a traditional Japanese cotton fabric. There are two editions of 20 plus 4 artist proofs, one for men and one for woman. The design and pattern in this edition of new work are Chusen dyed, a traditional Japanese method of dyeing using stencil paper, by Miyamoto Co., Ltd., in Osaka, Japan. The pattern in the woman’s yukata design is rotated 90 degrees when compared with the man’s design. As Tuttle stated in a conversation with the FWM studio staff, “By changing direction of the bars, dynamic energy is achieved.”

An exhibition brochure with an introduction by Marion Boulton Stroud, and contributions by FWM’s Artistic Advisor Mark Rosenthal and Curators Magnus af Petersens and Christina von Rotenhan, accompanies Tuttle’s dynamic work, which exists in the space between painting, sculpture, poetry, assemblage, drawing, and printmaking. The brochure checklist will pair the works of art on view with poems by the artist that are directly inspired by his pieces.

The Bibliothèque Nationale de France recently posted the text "Les premières gravures italiennes.
Quattrocento-début du cinquecento. Inventaire de la collection du département des Estampes et de la Photographie" online, accessible via the link below. This is the first print-related text of numerous BN publications that have recently been made available via openedition.org.

Centro proudly presents this exhibit highlighting artist Lorenzo Homar’s legacy within the art world. The showcase exhibit Homar: Art Binding Ties from Puerto Rico to NYC features selected artwork acquired through donations made to the archives. Also available for public viewing: an interview with Homar conducted by the Centro Oral History staff in 1983 as well as other documents from our Archives.

The exhibit runs from May 14 to September 30, 2015, and begins with the roundtable discussion on May 14 from 6-7:15 pm

The Puerto Rican Diaspora/Lorenzo Homar y la Diáspora puertorriqueña: 1928–1950.
Participants include Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones, emeritus professor at Princeton University, and Antonio Martorell, artist and Homar pupil, as well as Lena Burgos–Lafuente, professor of Hispanic Languages and Literature at SUNY Stony Brook, and Cristina Pérez Jiménez, a graduate student of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. They will discuss the social, political and cultural evolution that influenced Homar with the following presentations:

Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones Introduction. Lorenzo Homar: What Happens When We Put Diaspora and the Left at the Center?

Lena Burgos-Lafuente Etching Dissent: On Homar’s Ways of Seeing

Antonio Martorell Lorenzo, Larry, Lorenzo in three times

Cristina C. Pérez Jiménez “Esos eran años muy politizados”: Lorenzo Homar's Schooling in Socially-engaged Art

Claire Van Vliet is a fine artist, illustrator, and typographer who founded Janus Press in San Diego, CA, in 1955. Van Vliet has been crafting intricate handmade books in the Northeast Kingdom for decades. Her vision and craftsmanship is internationally respected. For this artist, the medium is the message.

You are invited to join the Association of Print Scholars for a reception during the Salon de l'estampe.

Saturday, April 25
8 pm

Hosted by Donato Esposito
19th arrondissement

Details provided following RSVP by email to Katherine Alcauskas, katherine@printscholars.org

In conjunction with the exhibition, 'A Sense of Place: Modern Japanese Prints,' this symposium will bring together scholars from around the country to put modern Japanese prints into the broader historical, social, and artistic contexts that shaped the work of Japanese printmakers throughout the twentieth century. It will also include a special roundtable session with collectors and dealers specializing in modern Japanese prints.

Please also join us for a reception the evening before: Friday, April 17, 5-7pm, Arthur Ross Gallery, University of Pennsylvania

The subject of “famous places” was one of the most influential topics in the development of landscape imagery in Japan and was initially linked to courtly poetry practices that named and praised significant sites. By the later eighteenth century, savvy commercial publishers adapted the theme to create a new set of famous locales in the city of Edo and more distant must-see destinations. Later, modern print artists referenced the landscape tradition established in ukiyo-e prints when they selected famous sites for their own work, some reflecting the changes of the twentieth century, some promoting sites of national importance, and still others reimagining what constituted “landscape” and the “famous place” in Japan as well as in the world beyond. This exhibition brings together twentieth-century prints on this theme, with works selected from the holdings of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the University of Pennsylvania Library, and private collections.