The annual Smoky Hill River Festival in Salina, Kansas, began in 1976--one of the many community undertakings across the country that bicentennial year. Intended as a celebration of the arts, the festival regularly commissions public art works to be temporarily installed around Oakdale Park as well as providing booths for exhibiting artists. In 1981, the tradition of commissioning a limited print edition was established and currently the set of all 40 past screenprints, lithographs, blockprints, etchings, and monoprints are on display at the Birger Sandzén Memorial Gallery in nearby Lindsborg. Salina Arts & Humanities has generously made available for sale remaining impressions from some of the past editions.

For more information please visit the external link below.

New Approaches to Piranesi: A Virtual Roundtable
Event date: 16 July 2021

Join us on July 16 for a roundtable of lightning talks on interdisciplinary approaches to the works of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78). Recent scholarship by Heather Hyde Minor, Carolyn Yerkes, and Susan Dixon, as well as the current bestselling novel Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, have started to open the field of Piranesi Studies to new avenues of research and potentially wider audiences. This roundtable consists of two panels of short presentations of 5-7 minutes followed by ample time for discussion. Papers engage with a wide range of disciplinary fields and methods including globalism, reception, collecting, virtual reality, exhibition curation, book history, archaeology, history of design, and architecture. We hope the themes and format of the roundtable will encourage lively conversation and prompt new critical perspectives that will continue to broaden the interpretation of Piranesi’s works.

Organized by Jeanne Britton and Zoe Langer
digitalpiranesi.org | Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections | University of South Carolina

Sponsored by HECAA (Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art & Architecture)

Questions? Email hecaaevents@gmail.com

Panel 1: 10:00am – 11:30am (EST)

Hélène Bremer (Art Historian and Independent Curator), “For the Love of the Master, 25 Artists Fascinated by Piranesi”

Erik Herrmann (Ohio State Univ.), “Another Campo Marzio”

Mireille Linck (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen), “Watermark Research: The Beginning of a Research Tool”

Ari Lipkis (Tyler School of Art & Architecture), “Imprisoned in the Fold: Piranesi and the Video Artist”

Jason Porter (Univ. of South Carolina), “The Virtual Piranesi: New Methods of Immersive Literacy”
Carla Scagliosi (Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria), “Exploring ‘the Dark Brain of Piranesi’”


Panel 2: 1:00pm – 2:30pm (EST)

George Dodds (Univ. of Tennessee), “Giambattista Piranesi, Modernity, and the Continuous Avant-Garde”

Sara Hayat (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), “What We Can Learn from 18th-Century Global Histories of Architecture”

Helen Marodin (Univ. of South Carolina), “The Magnificence of Rome in the Carceri: Flashes of Light into Piranesi’s Shadowy Prisons”

Thomas Mical (India), “Scanning for Duration and Intensity in Piranesi’s Carceri”
Aleksander Musiał (Princeton Univ.), “Beyond the Capriccio: Piranesi’s Candelabra, Classical Transgression, and their Reception in Warsaw and St. Petersburg”
Kate Retford (Birkbeck, Univ. of London), “Piranesi and the Print Room”

Betsey Robinson (Vanderbilt Univ.), “Tunnel Visions: Rendering Conventions and Process at the Alban Lake”

To register, please visit the external link below.

The print archive of Stewart & Stewart, a printer and publisher of fine art prints since 1980, has been acquired by the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) for the museum’s permanent collection. The Stewart & Stewart Archive represents more than forty years of printmaking and publishing in Michigan. It brings 199 newly acquired prints together with seventeen prints previously in the DIA’s collection for a total of more than two hundred prints by thirty-four artists.

Established in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan in 1980 by Master Printer Norman Stewart and his partner and wife of 53 years Susan Stewart, Stewart & Stewart produces primarily screenprints and more recently archival pigment prints, in collaboration with artists of national and international renown. The artists include Jack Beal, Richard Bosman, Nancy Campbell, Susan Crile, Martha Diamond, Connor Everts, Janet Fish, Sondra Freckelton, Jane E. Goldman, Keiko Hara, John Himmelfarb, Sue Hirtzel, Yvonne Jacquette, Hugh Kepets, Catherine Kernan, Daniel Lang, Don Nice, Mary Prince, Jonathan Santlofer, Jeanette Pasin Sloan, Hunt Slonem, Steven Sorman, Richard Treaster, and Titus Welliver. Also represented are Detroit area artists Judy Bowman, John Glick, Dennis Guastella, Clinton Kuopus, Ann Mikolowski, Jim Nawara, Lucille Procter Nawara, Mel Rosas, Norman Stewart and Paul Stewart.

Over the decades, the prints by Stewart & Stewart have been featured at the DIA in two focus exhibitions and two commissioned print editions. Ellen Sharp, then Curator of Graphic Arts, curated the exhibition Collaboration in Print, Stewart & Stewart Prints: 1980-1990 (1991), celebrating the first ten years of publications. In 2005, Nancy Sojka, then Curator of Graphic Arts, organized The Art of Screenprint (2005) with the associated catalog, Collaboration in Print, Stewart & Stewart Screenprints 25th Anniversary. The DIA Graphic Arts Council (now Friends of Prints, Drawings and Photographs) commissioned Stewart & Stewart to create two limited editioned prints: Treille, 1996, by Janet Fish and Mirage, 1982, by Norman Stewart. In May 2021, the long relationship between the DIA and Stewart & Stewart culminated in the acquisition of the Stewart & Stewart Archive, making the museum a unique resource for the study of a significant chapter in the history of American printmaking.

"I am absolutely delighted to welcome the Stewart & Stewart Archive to the DIA,” says Clare Rogan, Curator of Prints and Drawings, “Norm and Susan have together created more than forty years of the most sophisticated printmaking. Starting in the 1980s, Norm expanded the technical range of screenprinting by using transparent inks to create an incredible range of precise color choices, as many as 4,000 distinct permutations. The precision and attention to color have appealed especially to Neo-Expressionist artists like Richard Bosman and Photo-Realist painters including Janet Fish, Sondra Freckelton, and Jane E. Goldman. The Stewart & Stewart Archive represents Norm and Susan’s more than forty-year contribution to the arts in both Michigan and the United States.”

The Stewart & Stewart Archive prints will be viewable online on the DIA website and by appointment in the Ina M. Clark Study Room at the DIA. This will preserve the Stewart & Stewart Print Archive as a cornerstone in American printmaking for posterity.

Typewriters around the world: machines, practices, cultures

We invite you to a series of distinguished presentations that situate typewriters, typewriting, and related communities of practice within a rich diversity of languages, interactions, and interfaces. Each presentation in this series offers a glimpse of critical historical enquiry around everyday technologies for different writing systems around the world.


Upcoming talk • 14 July 2021

THOMAS S. MULLANEY (Stanford University)

A typewriter with no keys: the letterpress-typewriter-computer transition in global, comparative perspective

The transition from movable type to typewriting, and then from typewriting to computing, was experienced in dramatically different ways depending on the language in question. For English, the transition from letterpress to typewriting was marked by a technological schism. With the introduction of the keyboard, and with metal typefaces being moved largely out of sight, and into the chassis of the machine, typewriting bore little resemblance to the act of movable type composition. The transition from typewriting to computing, by contrast, was a relatively seamless one for English speakers. Not only did the keyboard stay the same, but so did the logic of textual production: to produce the letter ‘X’ on an IBM PC monitor, one depressed the letter ‘X’ on the keyboard – just like one did in the age of Remington. What you type is what you get.

These same transitions were completely different in the context of Chinese. Chinese typewriters continued to feature metal character slugs, with the exact same dimensions as those found in Chinese movable type. There was no keyboard on a Chinese typewriter, moreover, with typists looking directly at a tray bed of approximately 2500 metallic slugs, each a Chinese character or symbol in mirror image. For Chinese, that is to say, the letterpress-typewriting transition was marked by continuity, so much so that some referred to Chinese typewriters as ‘tabletop printing presses’. The transition from typewriting to computing, by contrast, was one of rupture for Chinese. Not only did Chinese computing introduce the mechanism of the keyboard for the first time, but it introduced an entirely new logic of textual production: input, where what you type is never what you get.

In this talk, Stanford historian Thomas S. Mullaney will provide an overview of the letterpress-typewriter-computer transition in global, comparative perspective.

Lonely Hearts: New Prints 2021/Summer presents 42 new artworks selected by Christiane Baumgartner. “My selection is my very personal statement about the time we are living in,” Baumgartner commented, noting the relative scarcity of human presence and sense of desolation that emerged in her selection of works, all of which were made since the COVID-19 pandemic began. “There is work showing empty streets or empty billboards, for instance—but there is also abstract or non-figurative work that contains a certain concentration or contemplation.”

This in-person and online exhibition brings together works by 36 artists across the country and internationally. Baumgartner’s selection includes a wide variety of classic printmaking techniques such as woodcut, drypoint, and mezzotint, as well as mixed-media works and print-based videos, reflecting her interest in works that present traditional techniques in a contemporary context.

The radical, inventive art of Jasper Johns (b. 1930) continues to influence today’s artists like few others. In an unprecedented collaboration, the Whitney and the Philadelphia Museum of Art will stage a simultaneous retrospective—the largest of Johns’s seven-decade career—that offers a fresh take on the living legend. From his iconic flags to lesser-known and recent works, the exhibition will feature paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints—nearly 500 artworks across the two museums, many of which are from Johns’s personal collection and will be shown publicly for the first time.

Inspired by the artist’s long-standing fascination with mirroring and doubles, each half of the exhibition will act as a reflection of the other, inviting viewers to look closely to discover the themes, methods, and coded visual language that echo across the two venues. A visit to either museum will provide a vivid chronological survey; a visit to both will offer an innovative and immersive exploration of the many phases, masterworks, and mysteries of Johns’s still-evolving career.

In 1952, Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) transformed abstract art with her first soak-stained painting, Mountains and Sea, which she made by pouring and brushing thinned out oil paint over raw canvas placed on the floor. Her deliberate movements from above resulted in abstract works that seem both intentional and spontaneous. A key figure in the development of color-field painting, she was a tireless experimenter with color, form, and technique over the course of her life.

When Frankenthaler began creating prints in 1961, she had to adapt to a medium that would involve collaboration and a new language of printmaking techniques. Asking questions that began, ‘Suppose I do…’ or ‘Suppose I try…’ she approached lithographs, screenprints, etchings, and woodcuts with curiosity and vision. Frankenthaler achieved the same balance of control and chance she cultivated in her painting practice through many annotated proofs, or trial prints, that traced her progress towards the final impression. She, along with other artists, contributed to a printmaking renaissance in the mid-20th-century, collaborating with master printmakers at studios like Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) in Long Island, Mixografia in Los Angeles, and Tyler Graphics, Ltd. in Bedford Village and Mount Kisco, New York.

Without Limits: Helen Frankenthaler, Abstraction, and the Language of Print celebrates the generous gift from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation of ten prints and six proofs that span five decades of the artist’s career. Her work is joined by that of other artists in the Blanton’s collection using the medium of print to capture and translate their own abstract visions.

From the artist's first drypoint etching, created in 2008 to raise funds for Senator Obama's presidential campaign, to monumental multi-colored aquatints, this survey presents every edition that Mehretu has created in collaboration with Gemini G.E.L., the renowned artists' workshop.

For more information please visit the external link below.

New Tamarind releases by Inka Bell and Ellen Lesperance, and favorites by Stuart Arends, Jim Dine, Louise Nevelson, Rashaad Newsome, Danielle Orchard, Deborah Remington, Fritz Scholder, Judy Tuwaletstiwa, June Wayne and Susan York.

On view by appointment or by chance, June 4 — 13
Make an appointment online at tamarind.unm.edu
Public closing reception, Sunday, June 12, 5—7 PM
Gallery hours, 11 AM—6 PM (closed on Mondays)

Introducing a new podcast called Platemark, a Podcast about Art and Ideas, with Ann Shafer and Ben Levy.

In season one over eight episodes, Ann and Ben and talk about issues facing the artworld with a focus on museums, curatorial work, critiques and studio visits, value (market and conceptual), redefining the art historical canon, and prints, printmaking, print fairs, and print publishing.

Our goal is to share our thoughts on the state of the sector including issues of decolonization and social justice, what it meant to us to be able to teach young artists in the print study room, why prints are the best, and how we did what we did. These conversations are meant to demystify the idea of the curator in the white tower and the museum as an imposing marble edifice.

To listen, please visit the external link below.