Since its founding, the Brandywine Workshop has served as an epicenter for multiethnic artists to exchange a wide variety of thought and concepts through the collaborative process of printmaking. Working together with master printers, artists have pushed the boundaries of the creative process and embraced the possibilities of printmaking. Allan L. Edmunds, Brandywine’s founder and recently retired director, emphasizes the importance of collaboration and the “multiple forces and circumstances that allow art-making to thrive at a particular time and in a particular place.”

Roll, Press, Pull: Contemporary Prints from the Brandywine Workshop & Archives will present the forces of time and place as a unifying component within the artwork of this collection. This important gift provides PAFA the unique opportunity to examine the impact of Philadelphia and Brandywine Workshop on a range of diverse forms, images, and stylistic approaches that artists examined within the span of four decades into the present.

Selected by Black Women of Print (LaToya Hobbs, Jennifer Mack-Watkins, Angela Pilgrim, Stephanie Santana, and Tanekeya Word), this in-person and online exhibition features new works by 40 artists representing 15 states and 9 countries. This exhibition explores “the varied ways printmakers and book artists exist in space and how they associate meaning, via their lived experiences, to inform place,” said Tanekeya Word, founder of Black Women of Print. In conjunction with the exhibition, IPCNY will host online public programs including two artist talks and a conversation with Black Women of Print. Free and open to the public on Zoom. More information coming soon.

ABOUT NEW PRINTS
Mapping Narratives: New Prints 2021/Winter is the 63rd presentation of IPCNY's New Prints Program, and will be on view January 28–April 3, 2021. Established in 2000, the New Prints Program is a biannual, juried open call for prints and print-based work created in the preceding twelve months. Artists selected for the exhibition will also be invited to apply for IPCNY's New Prints Artist Development Program consisting of three opportunities: artist residencies, mentorships, and sponsored coursework. Learn more about New Prints and the Artist Development Program here.

Artists
Adrianna Adams, Chloe Alexander, Kendyl Boyd, Tyanna Buie, Rachel Burgess, Alicia Calbet, Scout Cartagena, Babette Cooijmans, Caoimhe Dalton, Dexter Davis, Nancy Diessner, Deja Echols, Kyle Goen, Donté K. Hayes, Sara Hess, Justine Highsmith & Kalaija Mallery, Mu-Tien Tammy Ho, Lisa Hunt, Musa Kunene, Geneviève L'Heureux, Julie Lapping Rivera, Logan Larsen, Scott Magin, Louise Mandumbwa, Spriha Maurya, Michelle Melo, Diego Morales-Portillo, Diyah Najah, Rod Nelson, Karen Revis, Yelaine Rodriguez, Kristina Rogers, Birgitte Rubæk, Kaitlin Santoro, Jueun Shin, Robbie Sugg, Rhiannon Skye Tafoya, Alex Thompson, and Linda Whitney.

About the Jury
Black Women of Print (BWoP) was founded in October 2018 by Tanekeya Word, a Black woman, visual artist, art educator, scholar and fine art printmaker who resides in Milwaukee, WI. Word was interested in creating an equitable safe place for Black women printmakers who were underrepresented in the discipline of printmaking, a space that is eulogized as democratic. Black Women of Print is an African diaspora centered platform, a digital homeplace for independent, mid-career and established skill level Black women printmakers. The organization serves as a place to support and promote the visibility of Black women printmakers and as a professional directory of Black women printmakers who practice within the field.

The Technologies of Print Symposium: Geographies of Meaning explores the migration of imagination to word to object and the influence of place in historical and contemporary letterpress and bookmaking traditions. Hosted by the San José State University Departments of Art & Art History and English, this symposium provides undergraduates, graduates, and professionals at SJSU and beyond the opportunity to attend a day-long event featuring a series of panels lead by nationally renowned artists, printmakers, book arts librarians, scholars and interdisciplinary designers. Presentations and discussion will focus on the significant impact letterpress and bookmaking technologies have had on the distribution and communication of ideas about culture, place and politics since the time of their invention.

Additionally, two small run books, one poetry collection for SJSU literary periodical Reed Magazine and an artist book made by SJSU printmaking students with Professor Irene Carvajal are being printed and designed in collaboration with The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts printmaking department at Washington University in St. Louis and St. Louis based interdisciplinary design studio WORK/PLAY. These books and the details of their production will be presented as part of the symposium.

Participating speakers include master printer and co-founder of The CODEX Foundation Peter Koch in conversation with H. Rafael Chacón Ph.D. Professor of Art History and Criticism at the University of Montana and Director of the Montana Museum of Art and Culture, Professor Irene Carvajal from San José State University, Assistant Professor of English Kirstyn Leuner from Santa Clara University, UC Berkeley Bancroft Librarian Amelia Grounds, master printer Tom Reed of Washington University in St. Louis, Danielle and Kevin McCoy from the design studio WORK/PLAY, Chelsea Thompto Assistant Professor of Digital Media Arts at San José State University and Artist Carla Torres.

This symposium was organized by Coordinator and Assistant Professor of Pictorial Arts, Shaun O’Dell, with assistance from Lucia Znamirowski and Dr. Katherine D. Harris Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San José State University and with the support of an Artistic Excellence Programming Grant.

Please visit the external link below for more information and to register.

“We regarded ourselves as engineers, we maintained that we were building things…we put our works together like fitters.” So declared the artist Hannah Höch, describing a radically new approach to artmaking in the 1920s and ’30s. Such wholesale reinvention of the role of the artist and the functions of art took place in lockstep with that era’s shifts in industry, technology, and labor, and amid the profound impact of momentous events: World War I, the Russian Revolution, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the rise of fascism. Highlighting figures such as Aleksandr Rodchenko, Lyubov Popova, John Heartfield, and Fré Cohen, Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented demonstrates the ways in which artists reimagined their roles to create a dynamic art for a new world.

These “engineers,” “agitators,” “constructors,” “photomonteurs,” “workers”—all designations adopted by the artists themselves—turned away from traditional forms of painting and sculpture and invented new visual languages. Central among them was photomontage, in which photographs and images from newspapers and magazines were cut, remixed, and pasted together. Working as propagandists, advertisers, publishers, editors, theater designers, and curators, these artists engaged with expanded audiences in novel ways, establishing distinctive infrastructures for presenting and distributing their work.

Engineer, Agitator, Constructor marks a recent transformative addition to MoMA from the Merrill C. Berman Collection, one of the great private collections of political art. Illuminating the essential role of women in avant-garde activities while mapping vital networks across Europe, the exhibition presents the social engagement, fearless experimentation, and utopian aspirations that defined the early 20th century, and how these strategies still reverberate today.

Written from day 60 of quarantine, early in the days of the pandemic:

I can’t really write about this year’s Screenprint Biennial without adding in some background information. I’m in my makeshift basement home studio writing this essay, because my wife is in her small upstairs office having an online departmental meeting, and my 12-year old son is in the other room having internet school. Like everyone else in the country, we’ve been on lockdown, relatively lucky that no one in our house is:

- Sick

- A toddler

For this 4th Screenprint Biennial, a team of jurors selected the artworks that make up this exhibition. The jury pool included artist and printmaking professor Althea Murphy-Price, print scholar, writer, and curator Christina Weyl, master printer and printmaking instructor Luther Davis, and myself. We worked to put together a diverse, exciting, and challenging exhibition bringing together a fusion of color, expression, ideas, and innovation.

The biennial exhibit highlights innovation with works like Justin Diggle’s laser-engraved screenprints. By building up layers of screenprint ink and excavating it with a laser, he is able to create his Dada-like surveillance creatures. Building upon this surveillance narrative, Dana Potter mines the facial-recognition of our online systems for imagery that starts digital and becomes very physical through intensive ink layering and flocking (dusting a wet ink layer with a colored powder to add dimension to the print). Artist Yoni Asega pushes technical innovation in another direction, creating a piece using thermochromic ink (ink that changes color when you touch it) to create his “Certain Blacks,” exploring blackness in contemporary African American culture.

Conceptual ideas, from the personal to the political, pervade the exhibit. Robert Tillman’s brilliant over-the-top ode to the 1968 French student protest posters makes the case for screenprinted communication, then and now. In a similar vein, Ruthann Godellei’s “Bunting” uses vocal satire to call attention to attitudes and ideas damaging the social fabric of our communities. Other pieces in the exhibit work on a quieter level, like Arron Foster’s lyrical cyanotype/screenprint landscape, evoking a message of conservation, or Nicolas Ruth’s masterful “Watch This Space” series, in which he creates a personal vocabulary of signs and signifiers dotting a delicate, textured landscape.

A number of artists in the show create mind-blowing visual experiences. Both Travis Janssen and Robert Howsare work the line between geometrics and moiré to create psychedelic, illusionary playgrounds. The masterful work of Ann Aspinwall balances the same kind of hyper-dense mark-making with calming landscape-like fields, a perfect optical frission. Both Ayshia Taskin and Sophia Isaak take the gestural possibilities of screenprint to new levels, the former folding screenprint imagery into trippy animation, the latter adding in sculptural elements to compliment her patterned, biomorphic world.

There are scores of other amazing art works in the exhibit that use screenprinting to make us think and feel. They act as both a timestamp of what artists were thinking about before the pandemic, and act as a map moving forward to show us the state of the art in the years to come.

Nathan Meltz

Founder, Screenprint Biennial

Thursday, January 21, 2021, 7:00 – 8:15 pm EST

Please join Print Council of America's Shelly Langdale and Jan Howard, along with Brandywine workshop founder Allan Edmunds, and Brandywine Advisory Committee member, website designer John Cardone, and head of Artura Content Committee Tatiana Reinoza, as they introduce a new resource under development by the Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia, the Artura database of diverse contemporary prints (https://www.artura.org/). For a full schedule of the presentation, see external link below.

Topic: Introduction to Artura.org Contemporary Print Resource

Time: Jan 21, 2021 07:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

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This presentation is offered to APS and PCA members.

This year, due to the developing global epidemic, "International Academic Printmaking Alliance" and the International Printmaking Institute of Central Academy of Fine Arts overcame many difficulties and successfully organized this online exhibition. We have invited artists from more than 40 academies in nearly 30 countries around the world to participate in the exhibition, with an increase of more than 10 academies over the previous two exhibitions, and with more than 470 pieces of printmaking works including installations and other new forms of arts, representing the latest level of international printmaking development. At the same time, an academic symposium was also held, in which more than 30 printmaking scholars and artists from all over the world will conduct academic discussions and exchanges through online conference meetings. Providing a brand new platform for exchanges and exhibitions for Chinese and foreign artists in this special period is of great significance for the prosperity of print art and the market, improving the level of creation and appreciation, and enhancing the artistic influence of prints.

To view this exhibition virtually please use the external link below.

Nkame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón presents forty-eight prints and audiovisual materials that encompass a wide range of the artist’s graphic production from 1986 until her untimely passing in 1999. Ayón mined the founding narrative of the Afro-Cuban all-male fraternal society called Abakuá Secret Society to create an independent and powerful visual iconography. She is highly regarded for her signature technique of collagraphy, a printing process in which a variety of materials are collaged onto a cardboard matrix and run through a press. Her deliberately austere palette of subtle black, white, and gray adds drama and mystery to her works. By joining multiple printed sheets she made large-scale works which are all included in the exhibition.

Ayón’s choice of subject matter—the history and mythology of Abakuá—was a direction she took in 1985, while still a high school student at the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts. This brotherhood arrived in the western port cities of Cuba in the early nineteenth century, carried by enslaved Africans from the Cross River region of southeastern Nigeria, and since then became a nucleus of protection and resistance for its members. A brief synopsis of the founding myth of Abakuá begins with Sikán, a princess who inadvertently trapped a fish while drawing water from the river. She was the first to hear the unexpected and loud bellowing of the fish, the mystical “voice” of Abakuá. Because women were not permitted this sacred knowledge, the local diviner swore Sikán to secrecy. Sikán, however, revealed her secret to her fiancé and because of her indiscretion was condemned to death. In Ayón’s work, Sikán remains alive, and her story and representation figure prominently.

Nkame, a word meaning praise and salutation in the Abakuá language, defines the character of the exhibition. Cristina Vives, a Cuba-based independent researcher, art critic, and curator of the exhibition, states, “Nkame is not simply an homage to Belkis Ayón but a possibility to dialogue with her work in quest of that affirming message of life and future that humanity needs.”

Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939) was an outstanding figure on the art market at the turn of the century. He distinguished himself by his audacity which made him support modern artists such as Cézanne, Gauguin or the young Picasso and Rouault. With this exhibition, the Petit Palais has chosen to focus on his major role in the specific field of print and illustrated book publishing. Beneficiary of numerous gifts and bequests from Vollard himself and his heirs, the Petit Palais will highlight this exceptional collection of prints, enriched by numerous loans from other institutions and collections.

Passionate about this publishing activity, Vollard invested the profits he made from the more lucrative trade of the paintings of the modern masters that he had under contract. He is involved in the choice of special papers, typographic research, printers, among other aspects of production of these works of great luxury. A particularly new chapter of the exhibition will focus on the activities of Henri Marie Petiet (1894-1980), the merchant who bought the Vollard gallery collection at the end of the war. He was also a discoverer of talents and a support for personalities as diverse as Jean-Émile Laboureur, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, Aristide Maillol and Marie Laurencin. The development of the central figure of Henri Marie Petiet benefits from recent research and discoveries that shed new light on the question of the French printmaking market in the 20th century.

The exhibition is designed to help people gain a better understanding of the techniques of printmaking
and publishing. It includes printmaking tools and a copper printing press on loan from the French national printing works (Imprimerie nationale), which will be activated during live demonstrations. Lastly, visitors can enjoy a lively guided tour of the exhibition by downloading the museum app, due to launch in tandem with the exhibition. The app, whose contents will also be available on the museum’s video guide, takes visitors through several key works and offers a glimpse of the unique and endearing personalities of Vollard and Petiet themselves through several anecdotes. There will also be a small area dedicated to creating a printed page with typeface and ornamental patterns.

Please join us for the Washington Print Club's online conversation with artist and WPC member Soledad Salamé on Wednesday, January 13, 2021, 11:00 am EST.

Soledad is a Chilean-born, Baltimore-based artist, printmaker and owner of Sol Print Studio. Soledad will be joined in conversation by Dr. Ksenia Nouril, Jensen Bryan Curator at The Print Center, Philadelphia and Amy Eva Raehse, Executive Direct and Partner at the Goya Contemporary Gallery, Baltimore. Together they will address topics of climate change, immigration and activism as reflected in Salamé’s work as well as her many artistic collaborations with other printmakers.

Soledad's work is represented in public and private collections throughout the world including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; and the World Bank.

Please visit the 'External Link' below to register for this free program.