Ashcan School Prints and the American City, 1900–1940 presents prints of city life made by urban realists during a time of rapid demographic, social, and economic change to America’s cities. With New York City as an epicenter of change—packed with vibrant new communities of immigrants from Europe and Latin American countries, and Blacks migrating from the American South—artists responded to the everyday lives and experiences of city dwellers, incorporating advertising and mass media techniques into their depictions of the lower classes, immigrants, working women, and social elites alike.  

The first two decades of the 20th century saw an explosion of visual culture in America’s cities, from advertising placards, painted storefronts, and newsstands stocked with illustrated magazines and comics to decked-out shop windows, vaudeville shows, and penny arcades. The city’s public spaces were also packed with people. In New York City, the vibrant street culture was the result, in part, of crowded living conditions, as the booming population sought to escape cramped tenement housing. The Ashcan School artists (a term coined for their apparently dingy subject matter) rejected academic artistic traditions and instead fed on the visual feast of the city, observing the interactions between people and the places they inhabited. John Sloan and George Bellows captured private moments in New York City’s public spaces, such as parks, streets, subways, bars, beaches, and amusement parks, largely overlooking any tensions in favor of positive, sometimes humorous spins on city life. By the 1920s and through the Great Depression, a new generation of urban realists including Edward Hopper, Isabel Bishop, and Benton Spruance took an often more skeptical or introspective approach to the changes and pressures of the American city. Others, such as Reginald Marsh, celebrated the visual decadence and the escapist delights that the city offered to all races, classes, and creeds.  

Drawn from the CMA’s holdings and a local private collection, the works in this exhibition evoke a bygone era, yet one in which visitors might recognize some of the social and economic tensions that persist in America’s cities even today.  

This exhibition is presented in conjunction with A New York Minute: Street Photography, 1920–1950 on view in the Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Gallery from April 18 to September 12, 2021. 

How does someone start collecting art? When is a print an original work of art? The happy confluence of two events offer a prime opportunity to explore these questions. At the Blanton, the exhibition Off the Walls: Gifts from Professor John A. Robertson celebrates the voracious eye of one print aficionado. From January 15 to February 15, 2021, the exhibition coincides with the annual fair organized by PrintAustin, an artist-led nonprofit organization working to showcase traditional and contemporary approaches in printmaking. Together, these shows spotlight the incredible richness that prints have to offer—both technically and aesthetically. In advance of PrintAustin’s February 6th fine art print fair, PrintExpo, Annalise Gratovich and Pepe Coronado, two artist leaders on PrintAustin’s board, will offer their insights on contemporary printmaking, publishing, and collecting. Genevra Higginson, a co-curator of Off the Walls and Curatorial Assistant for Prints and Drawings, will host the discussion. Join them for a dive into the wonderful world of prints.

In its foundational years, The Block Museum of Art gained a reputation for presenting groundbreaking exhibitions that considered the unique roles prints and printmaking have played within visual culture. Printmaking stands apart from other artistic media in its capacity for reproduction and dissemination and is an ideal medium for telling stories about human experience to the broadest audiences. The Block began to build its collection around etchings, lithographs, screen prints, and other printed media. While the museum’s mission has evolved over time, prints continue to resonate with its aspiration to present art across time, cultures, and media and to inspire interdisciplinary discussions relevant to our lives today.

On the occasion of The Block’s 40th anniversary, For One and All: Prints from The Block’s Collection celebrates prints and printmaking by bringing together a diverse range of artwork from the permanent collection. The exhibition considers print production through various lenses layering complex histories of reproduction, circulation, collecting, and social activism.

For One and All places highlights from The Block’s collection, many of which have not previously been on view, into conversation with one another. The exhibition includes examples of works that have been in the collection since the founding of the Block in 1980, along with recent acquisitions and gifts. From early modern European prints, to Depression-era and social activist prints, and those produced at print workshops throughout the United States, the exhibition surveys the depth and breadth of the Block’s print collection and showcases the vital role that prints serve within the context of academic art museums.

Out of Print: Innovations of 19th- and 20th-Century Printmaking from the Collection of Phoenix Art Museum and the Schorr Collection explores the history of printmaking in Europe and the United States through more than 50 works by Paul Klee, Louise Nevelson, Robert Rauschenberg, Käthe Kollwitz, Mary Cassatt, Faith Ringgold, Fritz Scholder, Keith Haring, Paul Cézanne, Edvard Munch, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and more.

Amassed over four decades by the Lewis family, the United Kingdom-based Schorr Collection is considered one of the most important collections of Old Master and 19th-century paintings in the world. The collection features more than 400 works, including tender 15th-century devotional images, 19th-century French Impressionist landscapes, works by 20th-century Modern Masters, and a wide selection of prints. To increase access to these significant artworks, the Lewis family often shares them with public museums on a long-term basis, and in 2017, Phoenix Art Museum welcomed a selection to bring to Arizona audiences.

This exhibition showcases an assortment of works from the renowned Schorr Collection in conversation with those from the European and American art collections of Phoenix Art Museum, a wide selection of which have never before been exhibited.

The Cincinnati Art Museum presents a major re-evaluation of the work of Frank Duveneck, the most influential painter in Cincinnati history, with the first comprehensive exhibition in more than thirty years. This exhibition dives deep into Duveneck’s artistic development, his working methods, and the historical and social context of his subjects. Presenting abundant new research, the exhibition upends many common misconceptions and reveals the artist’s accomplishments across subjects and media, including oil paintings, drawings, watercolors, pastels, etchings, monotypes and sculpture.

Through his brilliant and inspiring work as a painter and printmaker and as a charismatic teacher, Duveneck’s impact on the international art world of his time was substantial and enduring. More than ninety examples across media from the holdings of the museum, the leading repository of the Covington native’s work, and thirty-five pieces on loan from collections across the United States will provide a fresh, in-depth look at this important artist.

Elsewhere in the museum, Duveneck will be celebrated with a free display, Grand Experiment in Italy: Etchings by Duveneck and His Students on view through April 4, 2021 (G213). Curated by Kristin Spangenberg, the special feature showcases 18 rare etching by Duveneck and his students, including a trial proof of The Riva, a previously unrecorded early etching by the artist in 1880. In addition, Duveneck’s art in the Cincinnati Wing has been freshly installed with More Duveneck! Paintings from the Vault, which presents 35 paintings by the artist from the museum’s renowned collection, hung salon-style in the Museum's Otto M. Budig Family Foundation Gallery.

APS invites you to join Jan Howard (RISD) and Shelley Langdale (National Gallery of Art), along with Brandywine workshop founder, Allan Edmunds, and Brandywine Advisory Committee member and website designer, John Cardone, who will be hosting an introduction to an exciting new resource under production by the Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia -- the Artura database of diverse contemporary prints (https://www.artura.org/).

Thursday, January 21, 2021, 7 pm EST/ 6 pm CST / 5 pm MST / 4pm PST

A Zoom link will be sent out with a reminder in January, but we anticipate that our January calendars will fill up quickly after the holidays and wanted to be sure to let you know about this exciting opportunity

This presentation is offered to members of the Print Council of America and the Association of Print Scholars specifically.

We hope you will join us!

Gabinetti Disegni e Stampe is a new online resource that aims to gather together all the Italian Gabinetti Disegni e Stampe in order to promote and enhance the Italian heritage of prints and drawings. Each Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe is accompanied by an up-to-date description and by contacts and related links.

Visit the Instagram (@gabinettidisegniestampe) to view images of the gabinetti and the prints and drawings collections they preserve.

Robert Blackburn & Modern American Printmaking celebrates both the artist and the democratic and diverse creative community he developed. Blackburn was an African American artist born to Jamaican immigrants in 1920 and raised in Harlem, New York. The exhibition highlights his life and work, revealing how his innovative printmaking expertise helped define the aesthetic of the American graphics “boom.” An influential teacher and master printer, Blackburn explored avant-garde ideas, while promoting a new collaborative approach to printmaking. The exhibition contains over 80 works, including lithographs, woodcuts, intaglio prints, and watercolors by Blackburn and the artists with whom he collaborated, including Elizabeth Catlett, Grace Hartigan, Robert Rauschenberg, and Charles White.

Blackburn was raised in Harlem, New York, during the Harlem Renaissance, an unparalleled flourishing of the arts centered in New York City’s Black community. The arts were considered crucial to the well-being of society as well as a fertile medium for activism and these values resonated with Blackburn throughout his life and work. In 1947, he founded a printmaking workshop as a welcoming space where artists of any level and from any background could learn and create together and it remains in operation to this day.

Over six decades as an artist, Blackburn gradually shifted from figurative work to highly colored abstraction. His early work reflected the powerful example of the Mexican muralists and the activist view of Social Realists addressing poverty and race in the 1930s. By the 1940s, like many other young artists, Blackburn had turned to abstraction, focusing on the exploration of color, composition, and mark making.

Please join the Association of Print Scholars for "The Graphic Conscience", the APS-sponsored session convening at the 2021 CAA Annual Conference in New York.

“The Graphic Conscience” calls for papers addressing transhistorical and transnational case studies of print as a tool for raising public consciousness. This session critically considers the ethics of print, inherent in the medium’s daily use-value beyond its function as a rarified fine-art object in a museum. Democratic in nature, print communicates through text and/or image as well as through its multiplicity. In considering the “graphic conscience” – or the social responsibility – of print, this session will celebrate the medium’s impacts on everyday life. The framework for this session responds to the thesis of the 2011 publication Philagrafika: The Graphic Unconscious, which reflected on the formal characteristics of print and argued for its assimilation within art at large. Papers can address a wide range of art historical as well as visual and material culture examples, including but not limited to Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses of 1517; the seventeenth century etchings of Jacques Callot’s Les Grandes Misères de la guerre; the didactic agitprop of Taller de Gráfica Popular in late 1930s Mexico; and the commercially-produced postcards mailed to Americans by the Centers for Disease Control in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Prints of all techniques – from Renaissance woodblocks to contemporary risograph zines – are eligible. Papers engaging post-colonial critique and/or topics from outside North America and Europe are strongly encouraged. Practice-based papers by artists, giving us a perspective from inside the studio or printshop, are particularly welcomed.

Session Chair:
Ksenia Nouril, PhD, Jensen Bryan Curator, The Print Center, Philadelphia

Presentations:
"Conscience and the Market: Frans Hogenberg's Current Events Prints and their Legacy"
Thomas Brown

"The Violence of the Cut: Wood Engraving, Illustrated Newspapers, and the Rendering of Civil War Atrocity"
Anne Strachan Cross, University of Delaware

"Graphic Solidarity: Krakow's Antibiennale of 1984"
Wiktor Komorowski, The Courtauld Institute of Art

"Re-Telling the Story: A Collaboration with Alberta Whittle"
Sandra De Rycker

"Expanding the Boundaries of Printmaking: Nuria Montiel’s Imprenta móvil (Mobile Press)"
Alberto McKelligan Hernandez

Please visit the 'External Link' below for more information about attending this online session.