The history of new, radical art in the twentieth century and the history of struggle for social change, equality, and human rights are inexorably linked. This principle has long guided my curatorial and collecting practice. It is reflected in my focus on areas such as the Russian Revolution, Spanish Civil War, American Anti-War, and Pride. I acquired portraits, paintings, and political works by Black artists and activists over many years. Black Panther materials that I collected prior to 2014 were published here. A selection of these and other works were displayed in the exhibition Art as Activism: Graphic Art from the Merrill C. Berman Collection at the New York Historical Society in 2015. Since that time, my collection of works by Black artists has continued to grow and evolve. Recent events prompt us to present this modest survey, which offers a historical context, a sense of déjà vu, and simultaneous feelings of frustration and hope. -- Merrill C. Berman

A main thread in the history of art is the centuries-long conversation between artists. Many paid attention to what others had done or were doing and then responded— sometimes obviously, sometimes not; sometimes approvingly, sometimes not. Rembrandt was an avid participant in the discussion. He had a tremendous knowledge of historical art. He also had a competitive streak. This exhibition takes a sample of Rembrandt’s prints and puts them in the company of art that triggered his interest. Also included is the work of other artists reacting to Rembrandt. We can almost hear the ideas bouncing around the room.

Please visit the 'External Link' below to access a virtual presentation of the exhibition.

In celebration of Taller Boricua’s 50th anniversary, El Museo del Barrio is pleased to present Taller Boricua: A Political Print Shop in New York, the first monograph exhibition in three decades about the East Harlem-based Nuyorican collective workshop and alternative space, from March 25 to June 28, 2020. Best known for its cultural empowerment and political activism, the organization commonly known as ‘The Puerto Rican Workshop,’ which began as a printmaking studio, produced and circulated hundreds of prints by artists. The prints, produced mainly in the 1970s, centered on issues of Puerto Rican independence, workers’ rights, and anti-imperialism both locally and in the Caribbean and Latin America, issues that remain relevant today.

Curated by Rodrigo Moura, Chief Curator of El Museo del Barrio, the exhibition will be comprised of more than 200 works and ephemera, including serigraphs, lithographs, linocuts, paintings, assemblages, collages, and drawings by founding and early members, including Marcos Dimas, Carlos Osorio (1927-1984), Jorge Soto Sánchez (1947-1987), Nitza Tufiño, and Rafael Tufiño (1922-2008), among several others. Works in the show draws from El Museo’s Permanent Collection, Taller’s extensive archives, as well as other collections.

A recognized space for political activism, Taller Boricua is one of several Puerto Rican organizations created in New York City around the same time, as the Young Lords and El Museo del Barrio, and has mentored several generations of artists, art historians, and curators. The space served as a focal point for the affirmation of identity as it relates to artistic production in the diaspora, as well as its connections with non-Western art history narratives. Focused on its first decade of existence, the exhibition will also examine the close relationship between Taller Boricua and El Museo del Barrio, examining their common members, ethos, and the artists’ role in the creation of a visual identity for the Museum’s programs and exhibitions in its early years.

This exhibition surveys works by three early 20th-century masters of woodblock printmaking. Clare Leighton illustrated her own books and those of other authors while also depicting her gardens and travels. J.J. Lankes likewise illustrated books for renowned authors—including four volumes by poet Robert Frost—while also portraying his favorite country scenes. Herschel Logan’s childhood memories inspired the stories he told in his prints and miniature books.

Although each developed a distinctive style, the three artists are united by their ability to relate intricate and compelling stories in deceptively simple black-and-white images.

Leighton, Lankes, and Logan were all members of the Prairie Print Makers, a Wichita-based print society founded in 1930. Telling A Story is guest curated by Barbara Thompson, granddaughter of Prairie Print Maker founder C.A. Seward.

The exhibition is part of an ongoing series at the Wichita Art Museum that celebrates the Prairie Print Makers and their continuing legacy.

Internationally-celebrated artist and arts activist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith is Tamarind’s 2020 Collectors Club artist and will take part in a conversation with Tamarind Master Printer Valpuri Remling. As this year’s Collectors Club Artist, Smith is actively creating a special lithograph for members.

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

Professors and art educators, curriculum leaders and school administrators, and parents are invited to join a free webinar to introduce the new Artura.org database, a digital image-library of 2,000+ artworks created by Native American, African, African American, Latin, Latin American, Asian, Asian American, Caribbean, White American, and European artists of the Post-Modern era. The collection specializes in fine-art printmaking processes.

The virtual Institute for Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity in Education and the Arts (IIDEEA) is partnering with Brandywine Workshop and Archives to present a brief video tour of the website and its many images and features for instruction and learning. The free program is focused on sharing ideas and tools to advance cross-curricular and cross-cultural learning.

Participants will include Richard Siegesmund, PhD, University of Northern Illinois; Tatiana Reinoza, PhD, Associate Professor, University of Notre Dame; and national leaders in Art, Art History, and Art Education will share during a short question and answer period.

The 45-minute webinar is being offered twice at 1:00 PM EST, Tuesday, August 11th and at 1:00 PM EST, Thursday, August 13th.

Space is limited, so register early to secure your spot in this free webinar.

Please visit the 'External Link' below to register.

Tamarind Gallery Director Nancy Zastudil will facilitate an online conversation with artist Hayal Pozanti whose work is informed by her ongoing exploration of “cyborg anthropology,” statistical data, and a personalized encryption system or “alphabet” of abstracted character forms.

Pozanti made her first lithographs during her first residency at Tamarind in 2014. She returned in 2018, creating an exquisite set of monotypes as well as a limited edition for Tamarind’s Collectors Club. Since receiving her MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University in 2011, Pozanti has had solo exhibitions around the world. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Broad Art Museum in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the San Jose Museum of Art and JP Morgan. 

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

This exhibition surveys the work of Frances H. Gearhart, one of the leading color woodcut artists of the early 20th century. Renowned for her dramatic landscapes of the California mountains, deserts, and shoreline, Gearhart’s use of saturated color and bold compositions reflect her pioneering interest in modern art and design. Gearhart, a Californian, was an important member of the Prairie Print Makers, the Wichita-based print society founded in 1930 by some of Kansas’ best artists. Organized by the Wichita Art Museum and guest curated by Roger Genser.

The Norton Simon Museum presents Unseen Picasso, a small exhibition featuring 16 exceptional prints made between the 1930s and 1960s that illustrate Pablo Picasso’s bold experiments, technically and stylistically, in the graphic arts.

For most of his long career and life, Picasso (1881–1973) engaged in printmaking with a gusto and freedom of expression that is thrilling to experience. No print medium intimidated him, and his prodigious facility in intaglio (etching, drypoint and aquatint), lithography and linocut inspired him to deconstruct and reinvent customary practices. Unseen Picasso examines a select group of iconic and lesser-known prints of enduring subjects from the artist’s repertoire, including his muses and the nude. The exhibition looks at the singular characteristics that make these prints rare or unique and therefore infrequently seen in exhibition or publication. Further, it invites visitors to look closely at the characteristics in each impression that distinguish the Norton Simon print from others produced in the edition.

Though prints are usually produced in multiples, one-of-a-kind impressions are sometimes pulled in the course of a print run. They may be proofs or undescribed states in an edition (a state is any stage in the development of a print at which impressions are pulled). A telling case is the 1946 lithograph Two Nude Women, a consuming subject for Picasso that compelled him to transform a recognizable subject into a minimalist abstraction. The Museum’s unique impression of the eighth state—Picasso created 21 states exploring this composition—is also noteworthy as the sole print from this campaign to be printed in color. Picasso’s ambitious four-color lithograph Woman with a Hairnet illustrates another critical classification in printmaking. Here, the artist’s inscription “Bon à tirer” (ready to print) authorizes the printer to “pull” an edition. Picasso’s signature identifies this trial proof as the model of perfection that the small edition would have to match.

At work in the printer’s studio, Picasso used whatever papers were on hand to evaluate his progress. For one proof representing his lover, Dora Maar, the artist used japan paper. Though it is unknown whether he chose this support for aesthetic reasons, the proof occupies a singular status on account of it. Japan paper has long been prized among printmakers for its thickness, slight sheen and ecru coloring, and for Dora Maar (1939), it provides a suitable foil to the Prussian blue ink adopted for this aquatint (an intaglio technique that produces effects similar to a wash drawing). By annotating this print “epreuve d’état” (artist’s proof), Picasso indicated that it was to be reserved for his own use.

In 1958, Picasso dove headlong into producing linocuts, a type of relief printing that uses a linoleum block. The pliant nature of linoleum offered little resistance to cutting, and it served as a good vehicle for Picasso’s impulse to create compositions in which color and line were nearly inseparable. Over time, pigments can change, lighten or darken, affecting the artist’s original intent for the linocut. This is the case with certain blues. Bacchanal with Goats and Spectator (1959) is a standout in this context on account of the stability and vigor of its palette. The royal blue—seen in the mountain lake and the sky that peeks through the decorative pattern of clouds—remains vibrant. This vitality is important in an animated composition in which color forms communicate a sense of spatial depth.

In the 1960s, activist Chicano artists forged a remarkable history of printmaking that remains vital today. Many artists came of age during the civil rights, labor, anti-war, feminist and LGBTQ+ movements and channeled the period’s social activism into assertive aesthetic statements that announced a new political and cultural consciousness among people of Mexican descent in the United States. ¡Printing the Revolution! explores the rise of Chicano graphics within these early social movements and the ways in which Chicanx artists since then have advanced innovative printmaking practices attuned to social justice.

More than reflecting the need for social change, the works in this exhibition project and revise notions of Chicanx identity, spur political activism and school viewers in new understandings of U.S. and international history. By employing diverse visual and artistic modes from satire, to portraiture, appropriation, conceptualism, and politicized pop, the artists in this exhibition build an enduring and inventive graphic tradition that has yet to be fully integrated into the history of U.S. printmaking.

This exhibition will be the first to unite historic civil rights era prints alongside works by contemporary printmakers, including several that embrace expanded graphics that exist beyond the paper substrate. While the dominant mode of printmaking among Chicanx artists remains screen-printing, this exhibition will feature works in a wide range of techniques and presentation strategies, from installation art, to public interventions, augmented reality and shareable graphics that circulate in the digital realm. The exhibition will also be the first to consider how Chicanx mentors, print centers and networks nurtured other artists, including several who drew inspiration from the example of Chicanx printmaking.

Artists and collectives featured in the exhibition include Rupert García, Malaquias Montoya, Ester Hernández, the Royal Chicano Air Force, David Avalos, Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock, Sandra Fernández, Juan de Dios Mora, the Dominican York Proyecto GRAFICA, Enrique Chagoya, René Castro, Juan Fuentes, and Linda Lucero, among others.

¡Printing the Revolution! features more than 120 works drawn from SAAM’s pioneering collection of Latinx art. The museum’s Chicanx graphics holdings rose significantly with an important gift in 1995 from the renowned scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto. Since then, other major donations and an ambitious acquisition program has built one of the largest museum collections of Chicanx graphics on the East Coast.

This exhibition is organized by E. Carmen Ramos, curator of Latinx art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, with Claudia Zapata, curatorial assistant. The museum will publish a major catalogue with essays by Ramos and Zapata, as well as contributions by Terezita Romo and Tatiana Reinoza, leading scholars of Chicanx and Latinx graphics.

Please note: The exhibition was previously set to open on September 11, 2020. Following an announcement from SAAM on the new, late 2020 opening date, this post will be updated -- please check back soon!