Join moderator Lisa Blas for a conversation with Alice Centamore, the Paris-based art historian and writer who will present on Simone Forti's "Newspaper Animations," and Silvia Benedetti, the New York-based curator and writer who will present on the relationship between the media and the artwork of Beatriz González.

To register please visit the external link below.

The Princeton Print Club will be the focus of a free webinar on Zoom at 2:00 EDT on Friday, May 28, 2021. Julie Mellby, Graphic Arts Curator, will present an illustrated history of the organization, joined by Marilyn Kushner, New York Historical Society, who will talk about the explosion of interest in printing and print collecting at that time, and by Alexandra Letvin, from the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, where they continue to circulate fine art prints to the students each semester as part of their Art Rental program.

This year we present the first major UK exhibition of woodcuts by leading Abstract Expressionist, Helen Frankenthaler.
Frankenthaler (1928–2011) is recognized among the most important American abstract artists of the 20th century, widely credited for her pivotal role in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting. She experimented tirelessly throughout her six-decade long career, producing a large body of work across multiple mediums. Opening ten years after her death, this exhibition shines a light on the artist’s groundbreaking woodcuts, which appear painterly and spontaneous with expanses of colour and fluid forms. It will reveal Frankenthaler as a trailblazer of the printmaking movement, who endlessly pushed possibilities through her experimentation.

Exhibition highlights include East and Beyond (1973), created by printing onto multiple blocks to avoid negative space and Cameo (1980) in which Frankenthaler introduced a new layered approach to colour using her ‘guzzying’ technique where she worked surfaces with sandpaper and dentist drills to achieve different affects. Frankenthaler’s masterpiece, Madame Butterfly (2000) is also not to be missed – sharing its title with the 1904 opera by Giacomo Puccini, the triptych’s light pastel colours and stained marks show Frankenthaler at her most expressive and lyrical. Created in collaboration with Kenneth Tyler and Yasuyuki Shibata from 46 woodblocks and 102 colours, the work measures over two metres in length and will occupy an entire room in the exhibition, along with a work proof and study to explore the complexity of its evocative title.

For more information please visit the external link below.

Sarah Kirk Hanley, leading expert on Enrique Chagoya's prints, will give a special presentation on Enrique Chagoya's etchings, artist's books, monotypes, and lithographs. Chagoya was the 2008 Des Moines Art Center Print Club Commissioned Print Artist, and The Art Center holds several Chagoya prints in the permanent collection.

Enrique Chagoya is a Bay Area painter and printmaker and a professor of Art Practice at Stanford University, and he uses political satire to question the nature of historical events, American history, and contemporary politics. Hanley has published several essays on the artist's editioned work and organized a retrospective of his prints in 2014. Hanley will discuss Chagoya's ongoing series of artist books and other print projects which are reinterpretations of Old Master images that tackle contemporary issues. This timely discussion lays the groundwork for the Goya work that will be featured at the Art Center this summer.

Sarah Kirk Hanley is an independent consulting expert and critic in the greater NYC area; and she writes extensively for Art21 Magazine and Art in Print.

For more information and to register for this free event please visit the external link below.

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 • 10 June 2021

DAVID ARNOLD (University of Warwick)

The typewriter as protagonist: India’s new age of technology, 1890–1920

Typewriters are special kinds of ‘things’: they have a voice, a signature, a generative power of their own. They are ‘things’ that produce ‘things’. They are also harbingers of a transformative techno-modernity, in which from the mid-nineteenth century onwards a cluster of small machines — the camera, bicycle, sewing machine, gramophone, typewriter — began to isolate, mimic, and augment specific human functions. Combining ‘thing theory’ with the discursive and material idioms of modernity, this presentation asks what makes typewriters special and in particular poses this question in relation to society, politics, and the techno-culture of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India. It ponders the semantic significance of the hyphenated hybrid ‘type-writer’ and the use (before the rise of the ‘typist’) of the term ‘typewriter’ to designate both the machine and the person who operates it. The presentation further examines how, in contrast to standard notions of ‘colonial knowledge’, India reacted to an assertive American take on modernity — with typewriters as the stylish exemplars of speed, uniformity, and efficiency, from the re-gendering (and re-racializing) of office work, through technological mobility and physical portability, vernacularization and commercialization, to newspaper advertising and brand recognition. The typewriter spawned a new pedagogy, with secretarial courses, business schools, instruction manuals, and sales leaflets. It stimulated new levels of functional literacy, office and business skills. It also necessitated new forms of technical expertise, from the typewriter repairman to the handwriting and typewriter specialist of the Criminal Investigation Department. These overarching dynamics are read against two specific episodes — the Parsi postcard case of 1915 and the Lahore conspiracy case of 1914 — which highlight the internal tensions and contradictory impulses in India’s emergent typewriter culture.

David Arnold is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Warwick and a Fellow of the British Academy. His principal contribution to typewriter scholarship is Everyday technology: machines and the making of India’s modernity (2013), which also considers bicycles, sewing machines, and rice mills. His earlier work has ranged widely over the history of medicine, science, technology, and the environment in modern South Asia, including Colonizing the body: state medicine and epidemic disease in nineteenth-century India (1993) and The tropics and the traveling gaze: India, landscape, and science, 1800-1856 (2005). His latest book, Burning the dead: Hindu nationhood and the global construction of Indian tradition (2021), discusses cremation in India and the South Asian diaspora, but the ‘everyday’ in technology remains an abiding interest.

For more information and to register please use the external link below

Copying was an omnipresent practice throughout the early modern period. Touching on all domains of pictorial, sculptural, architectural, and craft production, it was foundational to workshop practice, the training of artists, and the transmission and circulation of artistic knowledge long before the rise of mechanical reproduction. Printing, nevertheless, looms large over discussions of copying from the late fifteenth century to the early seventeenth century. Its emergence has led scholars to promote dichotomies between the manual and mechanical as well as the artistic and indexical, often casting reproductive practices as derivative and banal. Focusing on Western Europe as well as broader cross-cultural and transregional exchanges, this conference, originally planned for May 2020, seeks to redress this issue and shed new light on practices of graphic copying. Specifically, it aims to go beyond the classic framework of emulation and imitation and the connoisseurial topos of replica and forgery to look at how copying was a fundamental constructive act, epistemic operation, and generative practice, one that spawned new thinking and ideas, as well as new modes of artistic engagement. The conference also seeks to interrogate the essential physical processes of reproduction themselves, which have often fallen outside traditional investigations of meaning, and to understand how different realms of graphic production came to be mutually informed through a complex range of reproductive modes.

Organized by Jaya Remond (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) and Michael J. Waters (Columbia University), participants include Shira Brisman (University of Pennsylvania), Aaron Hyman (Johns Hopkins University), Elizabeth Merrill (London), Kathryn Blair Moore (University of Connecticut), Stephanie Porras (Tulane University), Cara Rachele (ETH Zürich), Femke Speelberg (Metropolitan Museum of Art), and Madeleine C. Viljoen (New York Public Library).

For more information, including the schedule and registration instructions, please visit the external link below.

Works of art made on unexpected materials, like postage stamps, newspaper, and plants, can produce curious and beautiful visual effects. Sometimes an artist uses uncommon elements to provide a playful take on what they create, challenging the definition of art. At other times, the choice of surfaces provokes sober commentary on race, gender, and materialism.

This installation considers an overlooked component of prints, drawings, and photographs—the support or base layer—juxtaposing works from the collection that are rarely seen together.

Material Effects
Artists can achieve distinct visual effects—like shape, texture, color, luster, and transparency—by working on unorthodox materials. Silk provides a shine not possible with matte paper. Plastic also has a reflective quality. Materials typically discarded can be transformed into a base for a collage. Traditional surfaces can also be manipulated to become a work of art with no additional media applied.

Everyday Materials
Many artists adapt familiar paper and packaging products for use as a support. While they sometimes use these materials because they are readily available, many choose to work with found objects, elevating commonplace things to the realm of fine art.

For more information please visit the external link below.

Fit to Print is a group exhibition exploring the use of newspapers in art from the post-war era to the present day. Across three thematic sections - Circuits of Print, Prints as Transposition and Print Interventions - it addresses how artists work with the medium of newsprint as a nexus where the studio, everyday life and current events perennially merge and collide. This exploration is particularly timely in an age when truth in news is fractured and suspect, due to the proliferation of sensationalist stories pitted against traditional sources of journalism.

Fit to print features Lisa Blas, Jennifer Bolande, Chryssa, Laura Fields, Jef Geys, Beatriz Gonzalez, Helena Hernmarck, Rita Maas, Dan Perjovschi, Donna Ruff, Soledad Salame and Paul Thek. The works of these twelve modern and contemporary artists reveal slippages between everyday life and what is depicted and recounted on the printed, published page. In this exhibition, they present visual spaces of rupture as sites for re-inscription, socio-political critique and material transformation. In each artwork, image and language oscillate, stretching notions of time and triggering memories. When someone says "newspaper," a very specific image is conjured in the mind. Every day, we skim or read the news and interpret images simultaneously, as if through automatic bodily function. The artists in Fit to Print redefine the newspaper as we know it. They highlight the urgency and implications of our engagement with the news, asking viewers, "What do you read? What do you retain? What do you share?"

In conjunction with Fit to Print, Lisa Blas has been commissioned to create a site-specific installation for The Print Center's series Windows on Latimer. Conceived in response to our temporary closure due to COVID-19, it utilizes our building's iconic bay window in Center City Philadelphia as an exhibition space, providing safe and easy access to art from the street.

For more information about this exhibition and to see the included works, please visit the external link below.

Highpoint is extremely excited to welcome a selection of prints from The Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts archive. Crow’s Shadow is nestled within the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation at the foot of the Blue Mountains just outside Pendleton, OR. They are a non-profit organization offering a fully equipped studio for contemporary fine art printmaking, an artist-in-residency program, and workshops in Indigenous Arts.

For more information please visit the external link below.

May 1-8, 2021

Across London there will be exhibitions and displays in galleries, printmaking studios and other premises, with a simple booking system to schedule visits. The majority of the shows are in Mayfair and St James’s: there are also participants in Hampstead, Bermondsey, Pimlico, Bloomsbury, Kings Cross, Kensington, Soho and Isleworth.

We are also pleased to include a viewing room for the British Museum, allowing them to show off their recent acquisitions, chosen by their curators. It is a fascinating insight into their work over the past year.

For more information, including lists of participants and booking information, please visit the external link below.