This exhibition explores the role of sport and physical culture in the lithographs of George Bellows (1882–1925). Bellows, an esteemed early 20th-century realist, is often classified as an Ashcan artist due to the gritty subject matter he usually portrays. Well known for paintings that capture the dynamism and prosaic aspects of urban environments with dark palettes and painterly modeling of form, he achieved similar compositional effects in his vast body of work in lithography. In 1916 he installed a lithography press in his studio, and from then until his untimely death in 1925, he created just under 200 lithographs. Bellows understood that the monochromatic nature of the medium—its striking contrasts of light and shadow—made it an effective means through which to explore the strenuous activities and pastimes so prized by the artist. The strenuous activities of Bellows’s bodies in motion are enhanced by the unique aesthetic of lithography that shows the results of the artist’s hand at work.

When Jasper Johns’s paintings of flags and targets debuted in 1958, they brought him instant acclaim and established him as a critical link between Abstract Expressionism and Pop art. In the ensuing 60 years, Johns (US, b. 1930) has continued to astonish viewers with the beauty and complexity of his paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints. Today, he is considered one of the 20th century’s greatest American artists.

In celebration of the artist’s 90th birthday, An Art of Changes surveys six decades of Johns’s practice in printmaking, highlighting his experiments with familiar, abstract, and personal imagery that play with memory and visual perception in endlessly original ways. The exhibition features some 90 works in intaglio, lithography, woodcut, linoleum cut, screenprinting, and lead relief—all drawn from the Walker’s comprehensive collection of the artist’s prints.

Organized in four thematic sections, the exhibition follows Johns through the years as he revises and recycles key motifs over time, including the American flag, numerals, and the English alphabet, which he describes as “things the mind already knows.” Some works explore artists’ tools, materials, and techniques. Others explore signature aspects of the artist’s distinctive mark-making, including flagstones and hatch marks, while later pieces teem with autobiographical imagery. To underscore Johns’s fascination with the changes that occur when an image is reworked in another medium, the prints will be augmented by a small selection of paintings and sculptures.

In this episode of The Print Cast, APS co-founder Christina Weyl discusses her new book, The Women of Atelier 17: Modernist Printmaking in Midcentury New York. Weyl is an independent scholar who focuses on American printmaking and women artists.

About the Podcast
The Print Cast is a podcast about the expanding world of printmaking today. Host Nick Naughton talks with some of the best contemporary printmakers working today, including designers, illustrators, collaborative print artists, commercial printers, letterpress, foil stampers, and even book binders. Nick and his guests talk shop sharing anecdotes, business ideas, and technical tips with listeners everywhere. It’s about the print shops, the artists, the process, and why we make all the prints that we make. Naughton is an artist who has devoted two decades to various roles as a printmaker, and he brings his depth of experience to his role as host. He’s been a professor, non-profit shop manager, studio owner, and has practiced every technique from screen print and letterpress to relief, intaglio, installation and everything in between. The show drops a new episode every two weeks featuring some of the best minds working in multiples today.

Literature, language, and philosophy are at the core of Buzz Spector’s work. He is a contemporary Conceptual artist who explores the aesthetic possibilities of language, paper, and books. Buzz Spector: Alterations spans the artist’s career from the 1970s to the present and includes drawings, altered books, postcard assemblages, collages, and more.

A master at tearing paper, Spector brings a constructive energy to that otherwise destructive act. Sometimes he alters found books by methodically tearing their pages. At other times, he creates his own blocks of printed texts or images that he also transforms by tearing. Through this refashioning of existing printed materials, he poses questions about authorship, the history of art, and the written word. His works are at once deeply literate and slyly humorous.

Spector is internationally recognized for his contributions to the field of contemporary art. He taught painting, sculpture, and two-dimensional design at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis for a decade before retiring in 2019. This is the first presentation of the artist’s work at a St. Louis museum.

The art historian and print expert François Gérard Waller (1867-1934) is one of the Rijksmuseum’s greatest benefactors. During his life he donated to the museum his extensive collections of decorated papers, ex libris prints and catchpenny prints; and at his death he bequeathed a veritable treasure trove of paintings, drawings and prints. His most important gift, however, is the fund that bears his name: a resource that enables the Rijksmuseum to purchase hundreds of prints each year. An exhibition of the most exceptional of these acquisitions from the last ten years in two galleries on the ground floor of the museum’s Phillips Wing.

This exhibition includes highlights from early printmaking includes Madonna with Child (c. 1470) by Master I.A.M. of Zwolle and Crucifixion with Four Angels (c. 1485) by Martin Schongauer – Waller allocated much of his wealth to the acquisition of prints from this period. Italian, Dutch, German, and French masterpieces from the 16th to the 19th century will also be on display. They include two drawings: a 1599 design sketch by Karel van Mander and a landscape by Claes van Beresteyn, from 1670. Both drawings were part of the Van Regteren Altena collection, and they were purchased with the support of the Rembrandt Association and the F.G. Waller Fund.

Waller specified that his fund could be used ‘in exceptional cases’ for the acquisition of drawings. The exhibition also includes modern works, such as the results of experiments with a variety of printing techniques conducted in 1870 by Ludovic-Napoléon Lepic, mentor to Edgar Degas, and a 1924 print by Hendrik Werkman.

Since 1938 the F.G. Waller Fund has annually disbursed a sum that is used to further enhance and complement the collections of the Rijksmuseum’s Print Room. Thus far, the Rijksmuseum has Wallers’ generosity to thank for the addition of 55,000 works to its collection.

Crown Point Press announces Landforms, a group exhibition featuring six new black and white etchings by Wayne Thiebaud. Other artists included in the exhibition are Darren Almond, Mamma Andersson, Robert Bechtle, John Chiara, Jane Freilicher, Yvonne Jacquette, Per Kirkeby and Pat Steir. This exhibition focuses on each artist’s interpretation of the natural features of the earth’s surface: mountains, plateaus, valleys, plains, deserts, and rivers.

In 1964 Wayne Thiebaud was the first artist I invited to work at Crown Point Press with the intention of
publishing his work. At the time, Richard Diebenkorn was already engaged with Crown Point’s weekly
“Live Model Group,” a workshop in which artists drew from a model on copper plates. The press was in
the basement of my home in Berkeley; we worked with my young son (now in his fifties) underfoot.
Crown Point’s first publication (after my own art) was Diebenkorn’s 41 Etchings Drypoints in 1965.
Diebenkorn lived in Berkeley. Thiebaud would drive from Sacramento (where he still lives) to work with
me in the studio. In 1965, I printed and published his Delights, seventeen etchings presented in both
book and portfolio forms. Since then, Wayne Thiebaud has created in the Crown Point studio more than
112 different images, including (in 2019) the six new ones now being released. He will be one hundred
years old before the end of this year. -Kathan Brown, founder of Crown Point Press

MMFA’s Cassandra Cavness will connect via Facebook live with two artists from the Museum's current exhibition Personal to Political: Celebrating the African American Artists of Paulson Fontaine Press. Artists Radcliffe Bailey and Lava Thomas will discuss their work, the themes of the exhibition, and the widespread peaceful protests and turmoil surrounding current events.

To submit a question in advance of the livestream, visit: https://forms.gle/5SV34TFDEtWqwqjf9

About the Participants
– Cassandra Cavness recently joined the Museum’s development team after working at Alabama State University. Among other aspects of her job, Cassandra strives to develop initiatives that foster conversations and engage communities in their history.
– Radcliffe Bailey is based in Atlanta, Georgia. He works in layers, incorporating items from his own past and reflections on race, memory, and migration.
– Lava Thomas is based in Berkeley, California. She explores various aspects of identity, including gender, race, and individuality, through varied media and expressions.

About the Exhibition
Personal to Political: Celebrating the African American Artists of Paulson Fontaine Press features works by African American artists who have helped to shape the contemporary art conversation throughout the US. Presenting a wide range of prints, paintings, quilts, and sculptures, the works include an array of abstract and formal imagery depicting narratives that speak to personal experiences and political perspectives. At the heart of this show is Paulson Fontaine Press, a print studio that over the past two decades has developed an unparalleled roster of internationally-celebrated artists including Martin Puryear, Kerry James Marshall, and the Gee’s Bend Quilters.

The exhibition Personal to Political: Celebrating the African-American Artists of Paulson Fontaine Press was organized by Carrie Lederer, Curator of Exhibitions, Bedford Gallery, Lesher Center for the Arts, Walnut Creek, CA

An online exhibition of recent Tamarind lithographs highlighting moments and accounts of release—of energy, expectations, control, or constraint. Included in Sweet Release is a special focus on prints by recipients of the Frederick Hammersley Artist Residency.

Featured Artists include Judy Chicago, R. Luke DuBois*, Michael Krueger, Harold Mendez, Mark Mulroney, Aaron Noble, Danielle Orchard,* Hayal Pozanti, and Shinique Smith. (*Frederick Hammersley Artist Residency recipient)

See how a work of art comes to life. In Proof of Concept, drawings, paintings, and proofs reveal the progress of an artwork prior to the final prints made in etching, drypoint, screenprint, and woodcut. The exhibition title plays on the “proof” in printmaking through selections by Louise Bourgeois, Brice Marden, Anselm Stalder, and the art collective General Idea.

After World War II, as the postwar print renaissance flourished in the United States, countless new print shops were founded across the country, including now-venerable institutions such as Universal Limited Art Editions, Crown Point Press, and Gemini G.E.L. These studios paired master printers with artists—many of whom had never worked in printmaking—to realize innovative and experimental projects. Such efforts continue today as artists further push techniques.

Collaborative printmaking enterprises typically comprise a small team of printers and publishers, engaging with an artist to produce an edition. Often, proof prints and other working materials are also generated as part of the artist’s process. Proof of Concept: Artistic Process in Contemporary Printmaking presents proofs and preparatory works from the Museum’s Peter Blum Edition Archive, 1980–1994, placed alongside their corresponding final prints.

Like many Chicago artists in the first years of the 20th century, Gustave Baumann discovered the beauty of rural Brown County in Indiana. While living in Nashville from 1910 to 1916, he produced his first important set of color woodcuts. In 1917 he headed east before traveling the next year to New Mexico, where he spent the rest of his life. Exhilarated by the state’s natural beauty, he settled in Santa Fe and over the next five decades produced complex color woodcuts that captured the area’s intense sunlight and arid atmosphere. Baumann’s prints portray not only stunning mountain scenery but also indigenous adobe architecture and scenes representing Native American and Hispanic cultures. Over the years, Baumann made numerous trips around New Mexico, Arizona, and California searching for additional picturesque venues, such as at the Grand Canyon and among giant sequoias, all of which became the subjects of beautiful color woodcuts.

The exhibition also illustrates how Baumann worked. He began by making tempura drawings in front of the subject. The outlines of the main forms were transferred to woodblocks, one for each color. The museum owns a set of blocks for his print Summer Clouds (1926) and the proofs, allowing visitors to understand how he printed layers of color to achieve rich effects.