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.

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.

onal 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.

Colonial and Postcolonial Publishing strand of the Elements in Book and Publishing Culture series:

Reading Spaces in South Africa, 1850 -1920s  by Archie L. Dick
Publishing against Apartheid South Africa: A Case Study of Ravan Press by Elizabeth le Roux
African Literature and the CIA: Networks of Authorship and Publishing by Caroline Davis
Underdevelopment and African Literature: Emerging Forms of Reading  by Sarah Brouillette 

Following an introduction to the new books by each of the authors, there will be a panel discussion about the 'decolonisation' of print culture and reading studies, which reflects on the possibilities, difficulties and challenges in this process. The event is being organised by Cambridge University Press as part of its Literature and Performance Festival 2020.

To register for the event, please sign up at the 'External Link' below. If you would like to attend but are unable to make this date, please register anyway and you will be sent a link to the recording after the event.

nd overlaps of historic and contemporary practices in the field of graphic design. As design disciplines shift to increasingly orient towards digital products, human-computer interfaces, and virtual experiences, there is also a sustained interest in physical, tangible, design objects. Graphic design programs across the country are—at the same time—equipping themselves to support new media platforms (AR/VR), and digital fabrication (3D printing), as well as experiencing a renewed interest in analog processes like RISO printing, letterpress, and calligraphy.

This session intends to bring together design educators and practitioners whose methodologies integrate both the digital and material; who make use of both high- and low-tech tools; and/or both virtual and physical experiences. We invite proposals that respond to the following questions:
- How does an understanding of analog and manual production methods support exploration into digital fabrication methods and/or designing virtual experiences?
- How might we contextualize analog processes, like printmaking, bookbinding, and calligraphy, for students whose career paths will most likely be characterized by designing interactive digital experiences?
- How have you supported a “both/and” approach to analog and digital production methods?

Session Chair:
Diane Lee, San Jose State University

Presentations:
"Office Offset"
Jan Blessing

"Making to Transgress, Risograph Printing as the Practice of Freedom"
Elaine Lopez, Maryland Institute College of Art

"Applying Variable Font Design to Letterpress Type Production"
Ryan Molloy, Eastern Michigan University

"Both Analog and Digital Syntheses"
Tricia Treacy, Dartmouth College

"Migrating Dimensions: The Book Space and Sculptural Typography"
Rebecca Leffell Koren, Washington University in St. Louis

ssion will focus on the production and reception of such books between the widespread adoption of the printing press in Europe, circa 1500, and the nineteenth-century rise of public museums and libraries, with their increasingly standardized and discrete organizational systems. Papers may address any books into which independently printed images have been incorporated, whether these books include text and whether they are analyzed as unique items or as products of broader creative or curatorial practices. This session seeks papers that consider both the material and the conceptual aspects of these complex volumes. Themes may include the agendas of specific creators; the codex as a structure and ways in which prints were designed for, or adapted to it; or how these works inform histories of reading, book and print production, or book and print collection. Papers may also address how these books relate to those of earlier centuries. Themes addressing subsequent reception are also welcome. Such themes include interpretive and practical challenges that the books present, and opportunities they offer, to the evolving institutional and media landscapes of the twenty-first century.

Session Chair: Jeanne-Marie Musto, Program Committee, Bibliographical Society of America

Presentations:
"Reading Between the Lines: Passion Prints in a Hybrid Book of Hours, ca. 1480-1490"
Larisa Ann Grollemond, Getty Museum

"Bibles Unbound: The Material Semantics of Nineteenth-Century Scriptural Illustration"
Sarah C. Schaefer, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

"Crossed Gazes: Prints in Books in Parma and Berlin"
Silvia Massa, SMB-Kupferstichkabinett

"Making Paper Windows to the Past: Extra-Illustration as the Art of Writing"
Julie Park

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

ations, but also for ornamental initials and other decorative elements.The collection of nearly 14,000 woodblocks has remained relatively invisible for a long time. In the early 1960’s the woodblocks were treated with a poisonous anti woodworm product, which makes consultation substantially difficult. With the support of the Flemish government the Plantin-Moretus Museum has now digitally photographed the entire collection. By putting online these digital pictures, linked to basic descriptions in the online catalogue, this exceptional and unique collection is now available for use by the international research community and the wider public alike.

The webinar intends to stimulate interest and research in woodblock collections in general and this extremely valuable collection in particular. The seminar is aimed at book and art historians, students, curators and anyone with a keen interest in the wonderful world of woodblocks.

PROGRAMME
16.00 - 16.05
Welcome

16.05 – 17.25
Session 1: Digital approaches to woodblock collections

Jolien Van den Bossche (Museum Plantin-Moretus)
The Digitization Process of the 14,000 Woodblocks

Bruno Vandermeulen & Hendrik Hameeuw (Imaging Lab KU Leuven)
Advanced Imaging of Woodblocks with the Portable Light Dome System

Michael Goodman (Cardiff University)
Things to Make and Do: Making the Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive

17.25 – 17.30
Short break

17.30 – 19.00
Session 2: Describing woodblocks stimulates new historical research

Joost Depuydt (Museum Plantin-Moretus)
The Challenge to Describe a Diverse Corpus of 14,000 Woodblocks

Lisa Voigt (Ohio State University)
Tall Tales and Crocodile Tails in Plantin’s Illustrated Travel Accounts

Stephanie Leitch (Florida State University)
Woodblocks and their Afterlives

Moderated discussion after each session.

Please visit the 'External Link' below to register for this free event.

rom the collections of the Kunstbibliothek and the Kupferstichkabinett, some of which are being shown for the very first time.

An exhibition catalogue will be published by E.A. Seemann Verlag. Leipzig, 144 pages, 135 colour illustrations, ISBN 978-3-86502-443-5 (German edition), 978-3-86502-444-2 (English edition), RRP: €27.

makers" on Thursday, November 19, 2020. Please visit the 'External Link' below for a recording of this special program.