Museum closed until April 6, 2020 due to COVID-19. Online exhibition.

Cuba has a rich history of traditional printmaking, with multiple print shops and artists working across the country.

The Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro is the oldest and most prestigious fine arts school in Cuba, founded in 1818. The Taller Experimental de Gráfica de La Habana, is the most internationally well-known Cuban print shop. Movements and groups such as La huella múltiple (The Multiple Imprint) and Haciendo presión (Making Pressure) were created by artists looking to expand the boundaries of printmaking, as well as encourage printmaking’s importance in modern Cuban art. Artists from all of the above will be featured in the show. They range from established artists, such as Eduardo Hernández, who is “perhaps the most important gay artist in Cuba and a professor of printmaking influencing and teaching for the past 30 years,” according to Steven Daiber, to emerging artists, which includes artists Hernández himself has taught.

The subject matter and printing techniques vary while one constant strength remains: “Cuban art stands up to adversity with humor and resolve.” (Steven Daiber) The artists are not afraid to discuss politics, such as the impact of the Trump Administration’s Cuba policy on the printmaking community, which causes acute shortages of materials like paper. While other work, such as Lamothe’s, discusses the Malecon, a 7 kilometers stretch of sea wall that borders Havana, often called the sofa on the city, in a 50 - print series. Highpoint invites you to join us for this exhibition celebrating Cuban Printmaking.

ABOUT RED TRILLIUM PRESS
Red Trillium Press/ Aquí en la lucha is the work of Steven Daiber based in Massachusetts. Daiber has worked with books for more than twenty years. He has been to Cuba regularly since 2001 and has facilitated dialogue between Cuban and foreign artists. His books create real, metaphorical objects: palaces of the memory in which each element underscores a meaning. The collaborations with Cuban artists tell their stories of the lived reality of Cuba in the 21st century.

INCLUDED ARTISTS
Ivan Basulto, Yamilys Brito Jorge, Janette Brossard, Anyelmaidelin Calzadilla Fernández, Yerandee Durán, Aliosky García, Yordanis García Delgado, Edgar Hechavarria, Eduardo Hernández, Osmel Herrera, Luis Lamothe Duribe, Yainiel Marínez, Norberto Marrero, Ibrahim Miranda, Marcel Molina, Aaron R. Moreno, Osmeivy Ortega, Hanoi Perz, Alejandro Sainz Alfonso, Adislain Reyes, Jessica Vázquez Quintana, Lisbet Corvo Alderete

In October 1956, a vibrant group of contemporary etchings, relief prints, and lithographs went on display in a Tokyo gallery. This was the debut exhibition of Japan’s first printmaking society for women artists, the Joryū Hanga Kyōkai, or the Women’s Print Association. It provided a crucial vehicle for talented female printmakers working in a crowded field of male maestros. For the next decade, the nine professional women artists who founded the society would continue to stage exhibitions of their work—culminating in a triumphant show in New York City in 1965—before going on to pursue successful solo careers. Drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection and important private collections, this exhibition unearths a critical, dynamic, and understudied episode of modern printmaking history.

This exhibition presents a timely look at the careers of the group’s founding members and others who joined in successive years. Many of the works by these female printmakers are now extremely rare. Only a few of the artists, mostly in their 90s, are alive today. Yet their collective body of work is as diverse as it is visually captivating. In Joryū Hanga Kyōkai, 1956–1965, works by artists like Iwami Reika (b. 1927), Kobayashi Donge (b. 1926), Shima Tamami (1937-1999), Uchima Toshiko (1918–2000), and Yoshida Chizuko (1924–2017) demonstrate the expansive and fiercely creative vision of Japan’s first women printmakers association.

The early days of printmaking were punctuated by several important innovations that ended up giving rise to a multitude of technical processes by 1500. In this context, the emergence of the etching during the late 15th century along with its subsequent swift spread during the early 16th century represents one of the most important turning points. Following development of this technique’s basic elements in the workshops of armor decorators, German printmaker Daniel Hopfer began using etched (i.e., acid treated) metal plates to produce prints on paper. Etching proved so easy to do that artists from the most varied fields found themselves able to produce their own prints— and among this new medium’s pioneers were central artistic figures of the Renaissance such as Albrecht Dürer, Parmigianino, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

The present exhibition at the ALBERTINA Museum focuses on the first 70 years of the etched print: from its beginnings in Dürer’s time to Breugel’s era, which already saw numerous famous and less-famous artists in Germany, Flanders, Italy, and France working in this technique. Approximately 125 etchings will be shown along with drawings, printing plates, and illustrated books.

This exhibition has been conceived in cooperation with the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The artists of Personal and Political capture the many personal narratives and political battles of African American artists across the country, reflecting a collective experience expressed in uniquely individual ways. Drawing on the experiences and conceptual interpretations of 15 artists, this exhibition includes a large collection of prints from Paulson Fontaine Press, a long-time time supporter of African-American artists like Kerry James Marshall, Martin Puryear, the Gee’s Bend quilters, among others.

Aptly situated in Berkley, California—a city well-known for civil rights advocacy—and drawing on the San Francisco Bay Area’s rich history of fine art printmaking, Paulson Fontaine Press (PFP) has a long tradition of supporting both established and under-represented artists. PFP’s hands-off approach and philosophy to facilitate rather than direct is evident in the wide array of resulting work that is both broad in media and conceptual approaches. Interesting fusions like abstract expressionism and formal imagery, or transforming a traditional medium—like a quilt—into a print creates an interesting dialog between the artist and viewer. Personal to Political honors the stories and wisdom of African American artists that Paulson Fontaine Press has cherished for decades.

The Chrysler Museum of Art presents its first-ever exhibition of Edvard Munch’s iconic works in Edvard Munch and the Cycle of Life: Prints from the National Gallery of Art. On view February 28 – May 17, 2020, the show consists of 50 prints, including The Scream and Madonna. It will include images Munch developed for his 1902 exhibition Frieze of Life, as well as the entire 1908–1909 series Alpha and Omega, his invented story of the first humans. The exhibition also offers Munch’s satirical look at his own life and failures at love. “The work of the Norwegian artist has come to symbolize the crisis of modern life. The Chrysler’s exhibition is an original concept that focuses on Munch’s career-long obsession with the theme of the cycle of life, from the seeds of love and the passing of love to anxiety and death,” said Lloyd DeWitt, Ph.D., the Chrysler’s chief curator and Irene Leache Curator of European art.

Munch’s early years were marred by illness, tragedy and death as his mother and sister both succumbed to tuberculosis. He suffered from anxiety and depression as well as chronic bronchitis yet developed a successful avant-garde artistic career in Kristiania (present-day Oslo), Norway. While the many lonesome figures in his work suggest he was a solitary figure, he was highly involved in the bohemian and artistic life of Kristiania, as well as Paris and Berlin, as the first section of the Chrysler’s exhibition explores. He illustrated programs for the renowned Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen and made a portrait of the leading French poet Stephan Mallarmé.

The second section looks at the cycle of life and includes prints connected to Munch’s 1902 exhibition, Frieze of Life. The project grew out of images from the mid-1890s on the theme of love, like Madonna and Attraction. Munch expanded these into the Frieze first exhibited in Berlin in 1902. Included were images on death, such as In the Land of Crystals of 1897, and anxiety displayed in The Scream of 1895. The lithograph version in the exhibition is one of only 25 impressions of the print that exist today. The iconic image documents a dusk stroll in Kristiania during which the sky turned bright red and Munch experienced the “scream heard through all nature.” The unusual face of the screaming figure may have been based on an ancient Peruvian mummy he saw at the Universal Exposition of 1889 in Paris.

The focus on the cycle of life allowed Munch to process the many traumas and psychological challenges he faced, principally anxiety and addiction, which led to his 1908 hospitalization in Copenhagen. His psychiatrist used modern treatments, including a version of electroshock therapy. During his eight months of treatment, he produced Alpha and Omega. Often revisiting themes in the Frieze of Life that focused on love, separation and death, Alpha and Omega chronicles the story of “the first humans” who live and die on an island. The characters are inspired by Munch and Tulla Larsen, a much younger woman with whom he had a disastrous affair that terminated in Munch’s suicide threat and gunshot wound that disfigured one of his fingers. Munch frequented the Copenhagen Zoo while under treatment and satirized Larsen’s friends as different zoo animals that ultimately attack and kill Alpha, ending the story and closing the cycle of life. The works in this exhibition show a remarkable side of Munch, who unflinchingly confronts his failures and inner demons through his powerful imagery.

“These are fragile prints that can only be exhibited every few years in order to protect them against light exposure so that future generations can enjoy them,” said DeWitt. “The National Gallery of Art and the Epstein family have been exceptionally generous in lending an astounding 50 sheets so that our audience can experience the full range of work of one of the most well-known and powerful artists of the 19th and 20th centuries.”

From January 2021 until January 2022, the BMA’s Prints, Drawings & Photographs Department will enact an external loan moratorium and the Samuel H. Kress Study Room will be closed in anticipation of an inventory and collection move. If colleagues require object loans for exhibitions during this period, initial requests must be made in writing to the PDP department (pdp@artbma.org) by June 30, 2020.

The retrospective exhibition Mirror Mirror: The Prints of Alison Saar features over 30 prints and six sculptures to showcase Alison Saar’s extraordinary 35-year career as a printmaker. Consistent with Saar’s sculptures that often incorporate found objects, the artist’s vibrant graphic work centers upon a strong, single female figure portrayed in a manner reminiscent of African deities and woodcarvings to address racial identity and related issues of gender, heritage and spirituality. Employing a visual strategy informed by her sculptural practice, Saar’s unconventional printmaking approach combines historical references and methods offered by her materials in association with every day, personal experience. These highly inventive images that combine larger, collective narratives including African art and ritual, Greek mythology and the sculptural tradition of German Expressionism with individual memories exemplifies how Saar’s rich artistic practice across media challenges cultural and historic references and stereotypes.

Surimono was a deluxe, privately published type of Japanese woodblock print that flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In Edo (present-day Tokyo), artists of the ukiyo-e school, including luminaries such as Katsushika Hokusai, Utagawa Kunisada, and Kubo Shunman, received most of the commissions for these clever illustrations to commemorate special occasions, particularly the arrival of spring. A characteristic unique to surimono produced in Edo was the inclusion of one or more 31-syllable witty poems called kyōka, which translates to “mad verse.” While members of poetry clubs used these poems primarily to exchange wishes for the New Year, a closer examination of these poetic texts reveals the poets’ deep awareness and shared admiration of East Asian literary classics, especially of esteemed poetry collections. In this lecture, John T. Carpenter, the Mary Griggs Burke Curator of Japanese Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, explicates the text-image interaction at work in surimono, especially the visual punning that erudite artists of the ukiyo-e school often brought to the poems in these delightful prints. Generously sponsored by the Martin A. Ryerson Lectureship Fund.

Following the lecture, celebrate the Gallery’s latest publication, The Private World of Surimono: The Virginia Shawan Drosten and Patrick Kenadjian Collection, by Sadako Ohki, with Adam Haliburton.

For Picasso, paper was both a tool to explore his ideas and a material with limitless possibilities. He experimented with everything from newsprint and napkins to decorative wallpaper. He spent decades investigating printmaking techniques, sourcing rare and antique paper from as far as Japan – and all without losing his compulsion to draw on every last scrap.

From effortlessly expressive drawings that led to towering sculptures to the colossal collage, Femmes à leur toilette, Picasso’s work with paper spans his entire lifetime and showcases his constant drive to invent and innovate.

You will see Picasso’s creative process first-hand in remarkable documentary footage of the artist at work, studies for Guernica, and sketchbooks where the seeds of revolutionary masterpieces first took shape, including Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Letters, illustrated poems and photographic collaborations with Dora Maar will also offer glimpses into the artist’s life.

Immerse yourself in Picasso’s world of paper and discover how – with this everyday material we know so well – he found the means to explore the furthest reaches of his creativity.

Exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London and the Cleveland Museum of Art in partnership with the Musée national Picasso-Paris.