In conjunction with the major exhibition, "After Michelangelo, Past Picasso: Leo Steinberg’s Library of Prints," art historians will assess Steinberg’s scholarship and impact on the study of prints from the Renaissance to the contemporary period.

11:00 – 11:05 AM
Opening Remarks
Carter Foster, Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Prints and Drawings, Blanton Museum of Art

11:05 AM– 12:30 PM
The Circulating Lifeblood of Ideas: Leo Steinberg’s Library of Prints
Holly Borham, Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings, Blanton Museum of Art

Crushing It: The Flatbed Picture Plane and the Pressure of Print
Jennifer Roberts, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities, Faculty Director for the Arts, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University

12:30 – 1:00 PM
Break

1:00 PM-2:30 PM
Lines of Fate: Leo Steinberg’s Use of Prints to Interpret Michelangelo’s Work
Bernadine Barnes, Professor of Art History, Wake Forest University

The Sexuality of Virtue in Renaissance Prints
Patricia Emison, Professor of Art and Art History, University of New Hampshire

Veronica Peselmann, University of Southern California/University of Bielefeld 
"Welcome and Introduction" 

Anne Royston, Rochester Institute of Technology 
“Among the Threads in Jen Bervin’s Silk Poems” 

Zanna Gilbert, Getty Research Institute 
“The Inside is the Outside: The Ontology of the Object in South American Art & Poetry” 

Jana Dambrogio/Daniel Starza Smith, MIT Cambridge/Kings College London 
“Letterlocking: Communication Security Without Envelopes” 

Chair: Lisa Pon, University of Southern California 

BREAK 

Natalia Lauricella, University of Southern California 
“Crafting the Limited Edition Print in Fin-de-Siècle France” 

Amy Knight Powell, University of Southern California 
“Boxes and Strings” 

Brittany Webb, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts 
“Taking Space: Contemporary Women Artists and the Politics of Scale” 

Chair: Michaela Rife, University of Michigan 

CLOSING REMARKS AND DISCUSSION 

For more information, email Veronica Peselmann at vp_811@usc.edu
Register via Zoom by using the external link below.

On the occasion of Print Club’s 40th Anniversary, this virtual exhibition presents all of the 76 prints, drawings, and photographs— 49 purchased and 27 commissioned—given to the Des Moines Art Center since the Club’s founding. It also presents 22 prints that have been conserved with funds donated by the Print Club.

The 76 Gift and Commissioned Prints are displayed in chronological order of their creation. After, you will see the 22 works from the Permanent Collections that have been conserved, with Print Club’s support.

Beginning in 1982, Print Club has made annual gifts of works of art to the Permanent Collections, ranging from early 16th-century to contemporary prints. With the director and curators, Print Club researches prints for consideration. Some years, the focus is on finding works that fill a gap in the Art Center’s holdings of a particular time period, printmaking technique, historic style, or individual artist. The Club prepares an educational presentation about the proposed prints and then at the Annual Meeting, members vote to select one or more of the prints to donate to the Art Center.

Since the tenth anniversary year, Print Club has commissioned 27 contemporary artists to create prints in editions of 50 to 60 prints. Members have priority before sales are open to the public. Proceeds from the sales support the purchase of Gift Prints, conservation of prints, print exhibitions, and related publications. Available prints can be purchased in The Shop at the Art Center.

For more information and to view the virtual exhibition please visit the external link below.

Remote Contact is a student-led virtual printmaking symposium intended to provide a forum for students in printmaking. During this global pandemic, many of us are cut off from our friends and colleagues in the printmaking world. “Contact” is essential to printmaking – whether it is the contact that takes place between the inked matrix and a sheet of paper, or the ways that the printed multiple fosters contact with fellow artists and the public more broadly. Even as we cannot meet in person, our social need for contact is at the core of printmaking and our experience as humans. With “remote” technologies we can still make contact while ensuring public health and safety. During our current health crisis, this virtual printmaking symposium seeks to help students make artistic, cultural, technical, philosophical, and creative contacts with one another.

The symposium will bring together a tremendous variety of current and recent students, from undergraduates to PhDs from Australia, Canada, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The symposium will be free of charge, but will be limited to 300 attendees.

The International Association of Paper Historians (IPH) is pleased to open registration for its upcoming 35th Biennial Congress on June 7-11, 2021. The much-anticipated event, entitled “Investigating American Collections on Paper” will be co-hosted by the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art and the National Archives and Records Administration. The Washington DC organizers have transformed the original in-person Congress into an online colloquium that will enable greater participation by paper historians, scholars and students from around the world.

The Congress will open with a keynote address from the eminent paper historian John Bidwell, Astor Curator and Head of the Department of Printed Books and Bindings at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York, and will feature talks given by 35 other outstanding international scholars. Presentations will cover a wide variety of topics, including the international paper trade from the 17th century to the present; technical studies of papers used by artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Durer, Pablo Picasso and Jasper Johns; early handmade papers imported, fabricated and used in North, Central and South America; historical papermakers’ equipment; papers used in incunabula, illustrated books and manuscripts, including those associated with the First US Federal Congress; papers used by the Inuit printmakers of Canada and the print publisher Currier & Ives.

Presenters will also discuss international watermark databases, new methodologies of paper studies, and toolkits for paper and watermark identification. In addition to the pre-recorded formal presentations with live question and answer sessions, workshops will allow participants to gain greater familiarity with watermark imaging tools and international watermark databases, guided by their creators. The IPH Congress 2021 offers an unprecedented assembly of experts available for interactive discussion.

Beginning in late May 2021, registered participants can view the pre-recorded presentations at their convenience on the conference website. The live Congress week, June 7-11, 2021, will be devoted to dialogue between registered participants and speakers in live question and answer sessions. The Congress week will also include live workshops on watermark databases and short videos from the host institutions. The IPH Business Meeting, for IPH members only, will be held on June 11, 2021.

Registration:
Please see the attached Registration Instructions for essential information about the Prekindle page and the Pay.gov payment form. Be prepared to enter the Event ID 14267, the Event Name 35th IPH Congress, and the Event Date 06/07/2021 on the Pay.gov form. Categories of registration are General Admission ($150) for IPH members and non-members, and Student ($50). The Payment Type is Event Registration. Make sure that the email you provide is correct as it will be used for all future conference communications. After April 1, 2021, registered participants will be contacted via email to reserve places in the workshops. For any questions, contact the 2021 IPH Congress Planning Committee at IPH35thcongress@gmail.com.

We hope you will join us on June 7-11!

This presentation marks the inaugural project of CPM Editions—the publication of a suite of four drypoint prints by Pooneh Maghazehe, exhibited in conversation with four drypoint prints by Louise Bourgeois from 1993-2000.
The pairing of these two artists is presented as a dialogue between two approaches to figuration, taking place on a common material ground—a case study about how the depiction of the body and the concept of figuration has been expressed in different eras, cultures, and aesthetic traditions. This show is also about how the notion of the multiple informs the way we see and process the figure. Equally, this is a study of the historical figure of the artist and how discourse about and between artists evolves.

The four Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911- d. 2010) prints chosen for this show depict the body in various states of pain. The titles: Dismemberment, Arched Figure, Head on Fire, and Hanging Figure all describe violence or mutilation imposed upon the body. The figures are laid bare, presented succinctly on a stark, vacant background. The overt imaging of external physical trauma in these works functions as a gateway into an internal, non-physical condition, into memory and the subconscious—a territory often explored by Bourgeois throughout her career.

In Maghazehe’s prints the figure also sits at the boundary between physical and psychological space, but the bodies exist more as an absence than a presence; a starting point from which a complex process of encryption and erasure unfolds. The initial steps in the making of these works involved applying a vinyl stencil of the artist’s enlarged figure drawings to the surface of the copper plates, sanding the entirety of the negative space, and dissolving the vinyl stencil, leaving its ghost image unmarked. The imagery comes out of a memory that has fueled much of Maghazehe’s sculptural works in recent years—a visit to Miami beach in the summer of 2014, in which she observed two identical twin girls carefully measuring and sharing sips of a diet coke, passing the bottle back and forth, then throwing it out, still mostly full. Elements of this story float within the pictorial landscape and are abstracted by ornamental marks and patterns that allude to a range of ideas, from Islamic Architecture and textiles, to Euclidean Geometry.

To welcome a wider viewership, the works on paper collection is coming to the fore at MAH. Now highlighted, it can take part in the dynamic dialogue that has been launched between artwork from different fields. This initiative responds to director Marc-Olivier Wahler’s wish to investigate the transversality that characterises the museum’s multidisciplinary collections.

Several galleries located on the first level of the Rue Charles-Galland building have been converted into semi-permanent exhibition spaces with thematic installations that echo the museum’s current presentations. Two wide overviews are on display : portraiture in England and Scotland in the early eighteenth century, as expressed in prints and medals; and the notion of space, as re-transcribed on paper and in contemporary jewellery. As for the fine pastel portraits by Jean-Étienne Liotard and Georges de La Tour, which are seen alongside engraved versions – both painted on enamel and stamped in medal –they are on view until the end of the year.

The first museum exhibition dedicated to David Hammons’s pivotal early works on paper, David Hammons: Body Prints, 1968–1979 brings together the monoprints and collages in which the artist used the body as both a drawing tool and printing plate to explore performative, unconventional forms of image making. More than a half century after they were made, these early works on paper remain a testament to Hammons’s desire to reinterpret notions of the real; his celebration of the sacredness of objects touched or made by the Black body; his biting critique of racial oppression; and his deep commitment to social justice.

Hammons’s body prints represent the origin of his artistic language, one that has developed over a long and continuing career and that emphasizes both the artifacts and subjects of contemporary Black life in the United States. Hammons created the body prints by greasing his own body—or that of another person—with substances including margarine and baby oil, pressing or rolling body parts against paper, and sprinkling the surface with charcoal and powdered pigment. The resulting impressions are intimately direct indexes of faces, skin, and hair that exist somewhere between spectral portraits and physical traces. Drawn, silkscreened, and collaged American flags, maps, pieces of clothing, and other found objects complicate the narratives of these works, as do their often-punning titles that offer pointed commentary. In a decade that was an inflection point for racial tension and racial justice in the United States, Hammons chose to use his own body to depict the quotidian joys and entrenched injustices of living as a Black man in midcentury America.

Born in 1943 in Springfield, Illinois, Hammons moved to Los Angeles in 1963 at the age of twenty and began making his body prints several years later. He studied at Otis Art Institute with the great draftsman Charles White and became part of a younger generation of Black avant-garde artists who were loosely associated with the Black Arts Movement. In the development of his technique of using a body to make a one-to-one likeness, Hammons was inspired by a number of sources including the use of naked female models as living brushes by the French artist Yves Klein; the assemblage and collage practices of Angeleno artists Noah Purifoy, John Outterbridge, John Riddle, and Betye Saar; and the performance work of Studio Z, a cohort of artists that included Senga Nengudi, Maren Hassinger, Houston Conwill, and others. Hammons was also deeply affected by Marcel Duchamp’s readymade art object and use of the pun to expose language as the unstable information system that it is. Following his move to New York in 1978 Hammons’s work became more three dimensional, but the fundamental tenets expressed in the body prints remain in his work to this day.

This exhibition will feature works by Delita Martin, whose work deals with reconstructing the identity of Black women by piecing together the signs, symbols, and language found in what could be called everyday life from slavery through modern times. Martin’s goal is to create images as a visual language to tell the story of women that have often been marginalized, offering a different perspective of the lives of Black women. Delita Martin is an artist currently based in Huffman, Texas. She received a BFA in drawing from Texas Southern University and an MFA in printmaking from Purdue University. Formerly a member of the fine arts faculty at UA Little Rock in Arkansas, Martin currently works as a full-time artist in her studio, Black Box Press. Martin’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. Most recently Martin’s work was featured in a Calling Down the Spirits, a solo exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. Her work is in numerous portfolios and collections. Delita is represented by Galerie Myrtis in Baltimore, Maryland.

Galerie Myrtis collaborates with master printmaker Susan J. Goldman, owner of Lily Press in presenting “Black & Blue: Prints in the Time of COVID.” Curated by Goldman, the exhibition features prints by artists expressing through the use of colors black and blue, their response to the individual and universal crisis our culture is experiencing during the political revolution and the plague of the 21st century. Black & Blue’s title refers to being beaten up and bruised by the constant barrage of the terrifying events and news of the day. Artists find solace and security in the safety of their studios, creating works of art that record, protest, protect, grieve, soothe, offering hope and beauty for humanity.