September–December 2015

Comprised of 100 wide-ranging components, The Print Center's centennial celebration will include exhibitions in their 1614 Latimer Street galleries and at partnering institutions throughout Philadelphia, public art events, new commissions, lectures, publications, a gala and a street party, and a new website including an historical timeline and oral histories.

Books and Print between Cultures investigates the role that books (printed books and manuscripts, including maps, scrolls, etc.), prints, and their associated technologies played in mediating and instantiating cultural difference in the early modern period. It approaches these materials as intermediary (“between”), but also as “flows,” a term borrowed from social-cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, to underscore the fluid and yet chaotic manner in which books and prints proliferated and were circulated, reconfigured, and reconstituted around the globe. Rather than considering books and prints through a strictly semiotic or iconographic lens—i.e., as assemblages of signs and symbols, texts and images—this symposium foregrounds the materiality of these objects qua objects. It asks, for example, in what ways the formal features and physical components of books shaped their reception abroad; how artisans, collectors, merchants, priests, and litterateurs made sense of alien alphabets, inks, type, and handwriting, among other book and print technologies; with what other media—including textiles, sculpture, architecture, and drawing—books, prints, and their makers were in conversation; and how book- and print-making, -collecting, and -viewing practices translated across space, from one locale to another. By framing the history of books and print as meandering and material, this interdisciplinary symposium aims to contribute new dialogues to the study of the global early modern.

Our one-day symposium will present research on the impact of books and print on intellectual contact (broadly construed) within Europe as well as between European and non-European cultures.

The symposium is intended to encourage cross-disciplinary conversation, and is therefore defined by a conceptual framework rather than a strict thematic focus. Its title is an homage to Elizabeth Eisenstein’s seminal book, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, which helped to establish the study of print culture as an area of study in its own right, one that has contributed to – and helped to transform – research in intellectual history, literary studies, the history of science and of visual culture, among others. While Eisenstein’s interest was in uncovering the “impact of print on western society and thought” (as she put it in the title of an early article), this symposium will explore the impact of forms of paper-based media on how western society and culture understood other cultures and societies, how western societies and cultures understood each other, and how non-western cultures and societies understood the west.

Participants will present work on how books and print mediated contact across ethnic, cultural and linguistic boundaries in the early modern period. They will explore how such boundaries were produced and reworked by the formal, material features of print and manuscript, by the structures of the production and circulation of books, texts and images – in other words, on how the materiality of textual and visual artifacts articulated connections, distance and difference between cultures, countries and communities.

In order to allow for a stimulating conversation across disciplines as well as for focused scholarly exchanges, the event will consist of a series of panels of 2-3 participants giving short (10-15 min) presentations based on their pre-circulated work, followed by extended discussion.

This traveling exhibition is juried by Ruth Lingen, a master printer and papermaker at Pace Editions in New York.

A new series of works by Wilma Cruise produced in collaboration with the David Krut etching Workshop (DKW) in Johannesburg.

In January of this year, David Krut Workshop (DKW) welcomed Wilma Cruise in Johannesburg to collaborate with Master Printer, Jillian Ross. During the course of her time at DKW, Cruise created four new drypoint etchings and completed the varied edition, Harrismith – a carborundum etching which she first began work on in 2007.

In Advice from a Caterpillar, the result of this recent collaboration, Cruise explores the human animal relationship and asks the ultimately ethical question, “What happens if the animals were in charge and treated us as we treated them?”

The Cape Town launch will take place at David Krut Projects’ new space at the Association for Visual Arts Gallery (AVA) and includes a bronze sculpture depicting a quirky duo of baboons.

Baboon politics are rife in the Western Cape where man and animal compete for space and resources. The “wars” are hot and fierce with passions running high amongst the divided humans. There are those who want to see the baboons vanquished and those who wish to live in harmony with them. It is a microcosm of human conflict in which the individual animal is often forgotten.

It was Jeremy Bentham (1748 – 1832) who first challenged the orthodoxy that animals were unfeeling, unthinking automata, when he shifted the weight of the question from reason to emotion;

…the question is not can they reason? Nor can they talk? But, Can they suffer? (Kalof and Fitzgerald, 2007)

In an etching titled The End Game a pair of baboons contemplate the conundrum of the end of the world as they know it. The large carborundum and drypoint work, Harrismith, depicts a human female figure, around whose neck is draped a large cat. The cat both presses into the head of the figure and appears to grow out of it. The figure bows her head submitting both to the burden and the comfort of the animal. The All-knowing Pig, like the Cheshire cat, smiles out of her frame, sealed in her hermetic world of ‘pigness’. It is a world closed to us human animals who have no access to her particular epistemology.

Working from images that float up from Cruise’s subconscious almost predisposes them to incomprehension. It is only later that she is able to decipher their meaning. Like a dream that haunts one long after it has passed, these images eventually allow for a decoding of sort.

This new body of work will be presented alongside earlier works by Cruise, produced in collaboration with DKW. In the juxtaposition of old and new work, the perennial nature of Cruise’s preoccupation with the “animal question” is clear.

This special exhibition will highlight M.C. Escher, a renowned artist, whose visual illusions puzzle and delight audiences worldwide, and is best known for his “impossible constructions” and use of tessellation. The robust exhibit will feature 135 works covering Escher’s entire artistic career, including an array of his most recognizable works such as “Drawing Hands,” “Reptiles” and “Waterfall” alongside rarely exhibited early drawings of family members, panoramas of exotic landscapes and historic architecture of Italy and Spain, original preparatory sketches, mezzotints and more.

“Escher, like Dali, played in a serious way with that fundamental question of visual art – What is real? Is the world as it looks to be, or have I constructed an illusion in my mind? Escher delights every viewer with his visual sleights of hand,” said Hank Hine, Dali Museum Executive Director.

“Escher at the Dali” will feature prints, drawings, a sculpture, wood blocks, a lithograph stone and posters drawn by the artist to explain his printing techniques. The exhibit will delve into his exploration of infinity through tessellation, in which shapes fit together perfectly without overlapping, including an enormous woodcut “Metamorphosis” (1939-40) which spans 13-1/2 feet.

To celebrate the opening of the special exhibition Corita Kent and the Language of Pop, on view September 3, 2015 to January 3, 2016, the Harvard Art Museums will host a panel discussion to introduce the show’s primary themes. Jennifer L. Roberts, Harvard’s Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities, will discuss screenprinting and Kent’s reliance on reversal as a printmaking strategy; history of art and architecture graduate student Taylor Walsh will address Kent’s interactions with the pop art movement; and American studies graduate student Eva Payne will consider the influence of Vatican II on the artist. Exhibition organizer Susan Dackerman, the former Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints at the Harvard Art Museums, will moderate the discussion.

Before the 6pm talk, visitors will have an opportunity to view the exhibition, which opens to the public that day. Attendees are invited to return to the exhibition after the discussion, as well as to enjoy a reception in the Calderwood Courtyard.

Free admission; seating is first come, first served.

The panel discussion will be held in Menschel Hall, Lower Level.

Corita Kent (American, 1918–1986) was a Roman Catholic nun, an artist, and an educator. From 1936 to 1968 she lived, studied, and taught at the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles, and headed the art department at the college there from 1964 to 1968, developing many aspects of her signature style while working alongside her students. The screenprints she created during the 1960s are typical examples of pop art, embodying the vivid palette, focus on everyday subjects, and mass-produced quality of ephemeral objects. Corita Kent and the Language of Pop examines Kent’s screenprints as well as her films, installations, Happenings, and her 1971 mural painted on the Boston Gas (now National Grid) tank—a roadside landmark in Boston. The exhibition frames Kent’s work within the pop movement while also considering other prevailing artistic, social, and religious movements of the time. In particular, the exhibition explores how Kent’s work both responded to and advanced changes then facing the Catholic Church, brought about by the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II). More than 60 of Kent’s prints will appear alongside over 60 works of art by her prominent contemporaries such as Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol, along with a selection of films, books, drawings, photographs, sculpture, and a textile.

The accompanying catalogue, published by the Harvard Art Museums and distributed by Yale University Press, offers nearly 90 illustrated entries and four essays by distinguished scholars and fills a gap in the scholarship about Kent’s work. The exhibition will travel to the San Antonio Museum of Art (February 13 through May 8, 2016) after its time in Cambridge.

Organized by the Harvard Art Museums and curated by Susan Dackerman, the former Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints at the Harvard Art Museums (2005–2014) and current consultative curator of prints.

The project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Additional funding for the project is provided by Barbara Ketcham Wheaton and the late Robert Bradford Wheaton, the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, Jeanne and Geoff Champion, John Stuart Gordon, Marjorie B. and Martin Cohn, Ellen von Seggern and Jan Paul Richter, the Rosenblatt Fund for Post-War American Art, the Anthony and Celeste Meier Exhibitions Fund, and the Harvard Art Museums Mellon Publication Funds, including the Henry P. McIlhenny Fund.

Modern and contemporary art programs at the Harvard Art Museums are made possible in part by generous support from the Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art.

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.