Master Printer Robert Blackburn (1920–2003) made a tremendous impact on printmaking in the United States. Over a career that spanned six decades, his avant-garde ideas propelled American modernism forward and affirmed printmaking as fine art.

An heir to the Harlem Renaissance, an influential teacher, celebrated collaborator, and pioneering artist, Blackburn embraced democracy in terms of the creative process and access to art. In 1947, he founded a printmaking workshop as a welcoming and inclusive space where artists of all levels could learn and create together.

Robert Blackburn & Modern American Printmaking situates Blackburn beside his teachers, friends, and collaborators with whom he engaged throughout his life. It features approximately 60 prints and related materials by Blackburn and the artists with whom he collaborated, including Grace Hartigan, Robert Rauschenberg, Elizabeth Catlett, and Romare Bearden, among others.

In the late 1960s, Japanese artist Noda Tetsuya began a series of prints that continues to this day, over 50 years later. The prints, each titled Diary followed by a date, capture the large and small moments of the artist’s life, from the intimate and personal—his Israeli-born wife and their children and simple gifts from friends—to the public and far-reaching, such as young environmental activists in 1970s New York or the devastation that followed the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

Each of these moments Noda depicts in prints are created through a unique and multilayered method he himself developed. He begins by selecting a photograph, taken on the day of the title, that he manipulates in various ways. First he adds drawn elements—such as lines or shading—and whites out other aspects of the image. The altered photo is then scanned in an old-fashioned mimeograph machine, a process that creates a stencil of the image. Next Noda takes a sheet of handmade Japanese paper which he uses for all of his prints and applies subtle color through traditional woodblock technique. Finally he silkscreens his manipulated photo over the top and adds his signature, his name along with an inked thumbprint. The resulting images feel both eerily familiar and hauntingly distant, seemingly capturing the impermanence of time and the faultiness of memory.

Today Noda’s Diary images number well over 500, and he has become renowned as one of the most innovative Japanese print artists working today. This exhibition—the largest presentation of the artist’s work in North America—brings together key works from across his career: recent acquisitions to the Art Institute’s collection as well as those lent by the artist and local collectors.

This study day explores the history of the Society of Wood Engravers from its beginning in 1920 and will provide background to the choice of prints shown in the Scene through Wood exhibition. Learn more about the practice and the personalities that have chosen engraving as an art form.

Saturday, May 30, 10:30am–4pm
Lecture Theatre
With Anne Desmet RA, Colin Harrison, Senior Curator of European Art, and Simon Lawrence of the Fleece Press

£50/£45/£40 Full, Concessions, Members.

Bruegel may be best known to us now for his paintings of peasants, but he was also a prolific draftsman and designer of prints, and those prints after his designs brought him widespread fame during his day. This talk will examine the work of this masterful, wildly imaginative, and influential graphic artist whose works on paper led contemporary viewers through expansive landscapes and into hellish worlds.

Lecture by Dr. Nadine Orenstein, Drue Heinz Curator in Charge of the Department of Drawings and Prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum include "Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints" (2001); "Hendrick Goltzius (1558 – 1617): Prints, Drawings and Paintings" (2003); and "The Renaissance of Etching" (2019-2020).

Free with general museum admission. (Note: General museum admission is free for residents of Macomb, Oakland and Wayne counties.)

This panel discussion is organized with the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) on the occasion of the exhibition Ulises Carrión: The Big Monster currently held at ISLAA. Ulises Carrión (1941, Mexico–1989, Netherlands) was a pioneering figure in mail art, a movement and a medium that produced a unique international network of creative exchange in the 1970s and 1980s. Throughout his life he developed an important oeuvre that spanned performance, video art, and books.

This program invites Felipe Becerra (Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University) Mónica de la Torre (Madelon Leventhal Rand endowed Chair in Literature, English, Brooklyn College), and Zanna Gilbert (senior research specialist, Getty Research Institute) to discuss Carrión’s work and legacy. The panel will be moderated by Aimé Iglesias Lukin (Director and Chief Curator of Visual Arts, Americas Society and Curator of Ulises Carrión: The Big Monster.)

Please visit the 'External Link' below to register.

Rembrandt van Rijn’s (Dutch, 1606–1669) name is synonymous with the greatness–even genius–of artistic expression that transcends time and space. After four centuries, his continuing recognition as one of the giants of art history resides in the masterful technique and content of his work, which embodies shared human beliefs and emotions. Producing well over 200 print compositions, his reputation as a printmaker was secured in his lifetime and has only been enhanced over time.

The seventeenth century in Holland and Western Europe was a time of rapid change in the spheres of class structure, economics, politics, and religion. Communication and trade across borders precipitated the spread of ideas that transformed societies, nurturing the earliest seeds of modernization. As an artist of that period, Rembrandt’s renown as a painter was heightened and spread by the prints he disseminated through impressions and etchings.

This exhibition of 42 etchings from the Museum’s collection will focus on images of people and places that convey the state of the seventeenth-century Dutch society as it evolved from a feudal, agrarian-based state to one informed by advances in commerce and technology.

Organized by the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama.

Explore a selection of woodcuts—from the 1500s to the present—that illustrates the many ways that artists have pushed the boundaries of the medium.

Focusing on line, color, and the block of wood itself, this exhibition encourages us to look at how a print was made as well as what’s depicted. The variety of works—by artists like Albrecht Dürer, Kerry James Marshall, Helen Frankenthaler, and more—reveals a multitude of possibilities for negotiating the relationship between material and process.

Artists in France during the nineteenth century increasingly turned to printmaking as a form of original expression. They were inspired to explore the artistic possibilities of new mass-printing processes, such as lithography and wood engraving, and they sought to reinvigorate the etching process by developing innovative techniques. Prints by artists such as Félix-Hilaire Buhot, Eugène Delacroix, and Félix Vallotton demonstrate the extensive experimentation that was central to printmaking during this era.

The twenty-five prints in Experimental Ink are drawn from a group of works that local collector Ethel K. Hockerman and her charitable trust donated to the Museum over thirty years. The Hockerman Collection is a testament to the appeal that these experimental prints still have today.

Raphael (1483–1520) was one of the greatest artistic figures working in the Western classical tradition. In celebration of the 500th anniversary of his death, the Gallery presents 25 prints and drawings in an intimate installation. The works will illustrate how the combination of artistic traditions, wide range, and immediate influence of Raphael’s art shaped the standard of aesthetic excellence for later artists, connoisseurs, and scholars. The exhibition features four drawings by Raphael: the sheet from which the design of his painting Saint George and the Dragon (c. 1506, National Gallery of Art) was transferred; the cartoon for the so-called Belle Jardinière (La Vierge à l'Enfant avec le petit saint Jean-Baptiste, 1507 or 1508, Louvre Museum, Paris); a detailed representation of the prophets Hosea and Jonah; and a well-known study for part of the frescoes in the church of Santa Maria della Pace in Rome. Nine drawings by his closest collaborators and followers—Giulio Romano, Polidoro da Caravaggio, and Perino del Vaga—are also on view.

The exhibition includes 10 engravings, as well as a chiaroscuro woodcut, by the earliest interpreters of Raphael’s designs: Marcantonio Raimondi and his followers Agostino Veneziano and Marco Dente da Ravenna as well as Ugo da Carpi. The Gallery’s five paintings by Raphael—the largest and most important group outside a few European collections—represent the central decade of his activity and will be on view on the main floor of the West Building to complement this exhibition.

“I believe in the alchemy of the word, the iconography of the text, the labyrinth of the book.”—Harriet Bart

Harriet Bart is a nationally prominent conceptual artist whose multidisciplinary work explores themes of commemoration, remembrance, and loss. Books and language lie at the heart of her practice, one informed by an abiding fascination with the personal and collective expression of memory. Bart is a self-described cultural storyteller who draws on historical events, literary sources, and other narratives to shape meaning and engender empathy for her subjects. Conceptually rich and aesthetically refined, her books and works on paper are highly original evocations of the human condition. This solo presentation of features more than 25 artist books, drawings, collages, editioned prints, and related objects selected from Mia’s permanent collection and the artist’s private holdings.

“Harriet Bart: Artist Books + Works on Paper” was organized by Mia associate curator Dennis Michael Jon in collaboration with the artist. It is presented in conjunction with the Weisman Art Museum’s concurrent retrospective exhibition “Harriet Bart: Abracadabra and Other Forms of Protection.”