IPCNY is moving to a new, ground floor space at 535 West 24th Street that will house our exhibition and office spaces. We will be closing our 26th Street space on March 26, the final day of unfinished: New Prints 2022/Winter, an exhibition juried by Queer.Archive.Work (QAW), and will reopen this fall with our inaugural exhibition Visual Record: The Materiality of Sound in Print curated by Elleree Erdos.

IPCNY has marked many milestones on 26th Street, but we have long dreamt of innovating and expanding. We are doubling the size of our current exhibition space and increasing our wall hanging space nearly threefold. Architect Markus Dochantschi of studioMDA is designing our new home to be welcoming, ADA accessible, and climate-controlled. Best of all, the move from a fifth floor gallery to the ground floor of a highly-trafficked street in the heart of New York's busy Chelsea art district will completely transform our reach.

But this is not just about larger quarters—it’s about advancing print as a primary artistic, cultural, and social medium that is all about creativity, access, and communication. We will be looking to our devoted supporters to help us meet this moment as we diversify our artistic and curatorial voices, and increase the breadth and ambition of our exhibitions. You can look forward to even more daring exhibition ideas that foster discovery and put new scholarship at the center of our activities. IPCNY will become a hub where critical monographic shows will share the calendar with an annual showcase of artists “on the cusp.”

We hope you are as excited as we are by our vision for the future. More information will be shared in the coming months. Meanwhile, thank you for being a part of our community, and for your support and partnership in all things print.

This may be of interest to those of you who work on incunables and early modern print.

Alex da Costa (University of Cambridge), Aditi Nafde (Newcastle University), Devani Singh (Université de Genève) and Kathleen Tonry (University of Connecticut) are launching a network for print scholars, called Print Exchanges.

In a nutshell: Print Exchanges is a network designed to facilitate research into incunable and early modern print culture and to support early and mid-career academics, especially those who may be marginalised. It aims to help scholars make their current research more visible to others in the field through its website and to create world-wide opportunities for collaboration.

It’s unique in its emphasis on collaboration and supporting work in progress.

You can find more about it here: https://printexchanges.org

Join Us
We’d love to have you on board if you’d like to join us. If that appeals and you want to add your details to the website, please send Alex at ad666@cam.ac.uk:

• 100 words stating your affiliation (if relevant), broad research interests and current research project; and
• a picture of yourself (jpg or png) OR, if you prefer, something relevant to your research

Launch Event
We also have an informal launch event on 31st March by zoom, 3-4.30pm BST:

This launch event is a chance for network members to meet each other virtually and share work in progress. After a brief welcome, we will split into 3-4 breakout rooms based on attendees’ broad interests. Everyone will have 3-5 mins to introduce themselves, their latest research, and research goals for the next 6-12 months, before continuing with informal conversation. We hope this ‘cafe’ might help members to:

• clarify research questions
• share experience and knowledge
• connect with scholars working in similar areas or methodologies
• provide a motivational boost to research plans
• generate writing partnerships

If you’d like to attend please register by 25th March: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0vcempqzMvGde-T24MWacOUL5r24r9gw1u

Christina Weyl is an independent scholar and curator with expertise on twentieth-century American printmaking. She received her BA from Georgetown University (2005) and completed her MA and PhD in art history at Rutgers University (2012, 2015). Her recent book, The Women of Atelier 17: Modernist Printmaking in Midcentury New York (Yale University Press, 2019), which grew from her dissertation, highlights the nearly 100 women artists who advanced modernism and feminism at Atelier 17, the avant-garde printmaking studio located in New York City between 1940 and 1955. With the support of a major grant from the Getty Foundation, she is currently co-curating an exhibition with Lauren Rosenblum for the International Print Center of New York focusing on Margaret Lowengrund and her pioneering effort to establish The Contemporaries as a hybrid printmaking workshop/gallery. She has published in Art in Print, Print Quarterly, and Archives of American Art Journal and contributed to several anthologies and exhibition catalogues. From 2014–2018, she served as Co-President of the Association of Print Scholars, a non-profit professional organization she co-founded in 2014. Prior to her graduate studies, she worked for IFPDA member Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl, which represents the publications of the Los Angeles–based artists’ workshop Gemini G.E.L.

From arabesques to grotesques and from sphinxes to snails, French printmakers combined ancient decorative motifs with newly invented ones to create designs for everything from jewelry to architectural façades. Beginning in the mid-sixteenth century with ornamentation for the royal hunting lodge of Fontainebleau, through garden designs at the palace of Versailles, to patterns for eighteenth-century home furnishings, prints were important sites of invention and served as vehicles for the proliferation of decorative motifs across a variety of media. Drawing primarily from the Blanton’s extensive holdings of French prints, this exhibition invites visitors to look closely at exquisite details, marvel at fantastic forms, and take delight in ornate embellishments that celebrate the creativity of artistic imagination across three centuries.

Founded by Allan Edmunds in Philadelphia in 1972, the Brandywine Workshop and Archives provides a fertile environment for artists from diverse backgrounds to create cutting-edge prints. At Brandywine, collaboration and the exchange of ideas feed a culture of experimentation, in which master printers and artists continually challenge conventions of the creative process and push the technical boundaries of printmaking to produce compelling new works.

This exhibition marks the first presentation of a group of works acquired by the Harvard Art Museums from the Brandywine Workshop in 2018. Comprising prints and proofs by nearly 30 artists, the acquisition itself was a cooperative effort between curators and other museum colleagues as well as Harvard students and professors, who selected works that highlight collaboration and innovation, values at the core of Brandywine’s pioneering approach. The collection spans the history of the workshop, from the early 1970s to today, and includes works by artists who had not yet found representation in the marketplace or museum collections when they arrived at Brandywine—a key constituency of the organization, which seeks to create opportunities for such artists. The exhibition honors that mission by incorporating the perspectives of Brandywine artists, students, and members of the greater Boston community in interpretive materials and associated programming.

Artists in the exhibition: Pedro Abascal, Danny Alvarez, John Biggers, Andrea Chung, Louis Delsarte, Allan Edmunds, Rodney Ewing, Sam Gilliam, Simon Gouverneur, Sedrick Huckaby, Hughie Lee-Smith, Ibrahim Miranda, Tanya Murphy, Kenneth Noland, Odili Donald Odita, Janet Taylor Pickett, Howardena Pindell, Robert Pruitt, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Eduardo Roca Salazar, Juan Sanchez, Clarissa Sligh, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Hank Willis Thomas, Larry Walker, Stanley Whitney, Deborah Willis, and Murray Zimiles

Prints from the Brandywine Workshop and Archives: Creative Communities and its associated programming were developed by colleagues in the museums’ Division of Modern and Contemporary Art: Hannah Chew, Summer 2021 SHARP Research Fellow and 2021–22 Student Assistant; Jessica Ficken, Cunningham Curatorial Assistant for the Collection; Sarah Kianovsky, Curator of the Collection; and Joelle Te Paske, Curatorial Graduate Student Intern; together with colleagues in the Division of European and American Art: Elizabeth M. Rudy, Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints; and Natalia Ángeles Vieyra, Maher Curatorial Fellow of American Art.

Artists have explored many facets of darkness over the centuries using the rich black-and-white contrasts central to printmaking. Some have depicted physical spaces like nocturnal landscapes and dimly lit rooms. Others have adopted the dark as a metaphor for despair or grief. In many of the works you will see on view, darkness contains the possibility of creation: it represents primordial states from which life emerges, and quiet moments pierced by spiritual revelation, artistic inspiration, or dreams.

In the Dark features 20 prints from between the early 1600s and the early 1900s by artists including Paul Gauguin, Francisco de Goya, Käthe Kollwitz, and Rembrandt van Rijn; all are drawn from the Museum’s collection. Together, the works provide an opportunity to reflect on the generative potential of darkness during some of the shortest days in Wisconsin.

IMPRINTING RACE: ARTIST TALK BY CURLEE RAVEN HOLTON

THURSDAY, MARCH 17, 2022
5:30 PM–6:30 PM

Master printmaker Curlee Raven Holton, who also serves as executive director of the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland, College Park, discusses his artistic practice, with an emphasis on the intersections of race and printmaking.

Presented live in the Clark's auditorium. This program will also be livestreamed; advance registration online (https://www.clarkart.edu/event/detail/1989-88540) to receive the livestream link is required.


IMPRINTING RACE: A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION ON THE MATERIALITY OF PRINT AND THE MAKING OF RACE

FRIDAY, MARCH 18, 2022
3:00 PM–4:00 PM

This roundtable explores the role of printmaking in tangibly shaping and challenging ideas of racial difference. Motivated by colonial encounters and the later, widespread institution of chattel slavery in the Atlantic world, early modern Europeans and their inheritors sought to materialize race to ground social hierarchy in physical, bodily difference. The participants of this conversation will consider two important strands of recent art-historical scholarship on materiality and the production of race, exploring the question: how have the constitution of matrix and print shaped different conceptions of surfaces and bodies?

Participants include Horace Ballard (Harvard Art Museums), Layla Bermeo (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Jennifer Chuong (Harvard University), Jase Clark (Raven Fine Art Editions), Thadeus Dowad (University of California, Berkeley), Kailani Polzak (University of California, Santa Cruz), and Curlee Raven Holton (Lafayette College and Raven Fine Art Editions).

Presented live in the Clark's auditorium. This program will also be livestreamed; advance registration online (https://www.clarkart.edu/event/detail/1988-88539) to receive the livestream link is required.

Additional support provided by the Association of Print Scholars and The Rare Book School.

The great Ghanaian-born, Nigeria-based sculptor
El Anatsui has donated a major new artwork—Wade in the Water, 2021 (8' x 8'), which was assembled at Brandywine Workshop and Archives over several months in 2021. It will be sold at the evening auction at Sotheby's London to benefit the establishment of the El Anatsui Fellowships in Printmaking at BWA. Planning is underway to initiate the Anatsui Fellowships, which will further the artistic, professional, and personal development of artists living and working on the continent who exhibit talent, commitment to a career as a visual artist, are disadvantaged by socioeconomic factors, and/or have limited access to the art market, gallery representation, and institutional support due to location.

All proceeds from the auction will be invested in a newly established, specially designated endowed fund that—pending auction results—will underwrite travel and living expenses, provide an honorarium, and deliver all the creative and technical resources and opportunities of a month-long residency at BWA for two artists each year. During the artists' concurrent residencies, they will visit artist studios and art museums in Philadelphia, New York City, and Washington, DC. The first year of residencies is planned for fall 2023. Hannah O'Leary, Sotheby London’s Director/Head of Modern and Contemporary African Art, is coordinating the sale.

As part of the Hammer’s ongoing, $100-million renovation and expansion project at its Westwood building, a new Grunwald study-storage facility for works on paper is nearing completion, expected in early spring.

A 3,100-square-foot exhibition gallery dedicated to the paper medium was publicly unveiled on Sunday February 13, 2022 — a Hammer first. It launched with part one of a two-part survey of acquisitions from the last decade.

The gallery and the Grunwald are now front and center on the museum’s third floor, adjacent to the Hammer’s main galleries, rather than being tucked away. Call it a coming-out party for works on paper, as an exceptional collection sees a new light of day.

Source: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2022-02-11/commentary-hammer-grunwald-center

Sacred/Supernatural explores some of the methods European printmakers—including Rembrandt van Rijn and Albrecht Dürer—used to convey extraordinary events and individuals in intaglio and relief prints from 1450 to 1900. The exhibition includes works by Dutch, English, Flemish, French, German, Italian, and Scottish printmakers.

Many of the prints in the exhibition relate to Judeo-Christian theology: such as how and whether to portray God, Christ, the Passion, saints, prophets, the devil, witches, and demons. The exhibition also includes mythological and pagan subjects, including Greek and Roman gods and goddesses, sacrifices, and beings such as satyrs.

While the themes may be otherworldly, these prints had a real-world impact. Many are devotional, helping the faithful strengthen their piety. Others guided the viewer toward a good life through example or counterexample, showing moral exemplars or the consequences of bad behavior. However, even if some works had a devotional or didactic purpose, they were nonetheless intended to entertain and delight.

Artists of the period devoted significant creative energy to representing otherworldly subjects. They invented creative solutions to convey to viewers that something or someone in their images was not part of our day-to-day reality, portraying everything from divine beings and miracles to witches and demons.

Printmakers were also eager to demonstrate their abilities as designers and draftsmen. For many, the variety, beauty, and skill of the marks they made was as much a subject of their prints as whatever they were representing. For instance, the quick, gestural marks in the top third of Rembrandt’s etching of Saint Jerome might look like squiggles and scratches at first glance, but upon closer inspection they evoke a rocky landscape dotted with vegetation. This print, like others in Sacred/Supernatural, exploits this duality of the mark as index and icon, offering persuasive images that are obviously the product of an accomplished hand.