Kiki Smith has been known since the 1980s for her multidisciplinary practice relating to the human condition and the natural world. She uses a broad variety of materials to continuously expand and evolve a body of work that includes sculpture, printmaking, photography, drawing, and textiles. For this talk she will focus on her work as a printmaker. Following the talk, which takes place in Taylor Hall 203, we will move to the Art Center's Focus Gallery exhibition Metal, Acid, Line: Etchings from the Loeb to discuss her stunning print Bird with Stars (2005), printed by Harlan and Weaver.

Please join the Association of Print Scholars for "Registering the Matrix: Printing Matrices as Sites of Artistic Mediation", the APS-sponsored session convening at the CAA Annual Conference in Chicago on Friday, February 14, 2020 at 4:00pm.

Session Chair:
Jun Nakamura, University of Michigan

Session Description:
Printing matrices often have storied pasts. Rembrandt’s plates were reprinted, reworked, otherwise altered, and sent under the roller until little of the artist’s hand remained. One eighteenth-century printer etched over a Rembrandt plate in the name of restoration before cutting it down into smaller plates; another printed Rembrandt’s plates with masks, plate tone, and in combination with other plates in order to create new compositions; and Rembrandt himself repurposed a plate by Hercules Segers. Beyond Rembrandt, Gauguin’s woodblocks were printed in editions by himself, by printer Louis Roy, and posthumously by Pola Gauguin. The resulting editions vary widely in inking, coloring, and support. Contemporary artists’ prints produced by publishers like Gemini G.E.L or Crown Point Press are often as much a product of collaboration with the printers as of the artist’s singular hand. While the Blocks, Plates, and Stones conference held at the Courtauld in 2017 did much to shed light on the matrix itself, examining the contributions of printers and publishers adds complexity to notions of authorship and illuminates processes particular to the medium; and looking at the afterlife and reuse of matrices provides evidence of artistic encounters, exchanges, and processes. This session addresses the printing matrix as site of mediation, across time and geography.

Presentations:
"Restrike as restoration: a Diachronic Analysis of The Triumphal Arch of Maximilian I"
Jesse Noah Feiman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"'With ink, a rag, and his two arms': Inking the Matrix in Nineteenth-Century France"
Laurel Garber, Northwestern University

"Edouard Manet's The Absinthe Drinker: The Evolution of an Etched Plate and Prints"
Elissa Watters, Yale University

""The Machine That Makes the Art": Printmaking as Conceptual Practice at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design Lithography Workshop"
Rachel Lena Vogel, Harvard University

Conference Room:
Hilton Chicago - 3rd Floor - Williford B

Please visit the 'External Link' below for more information.

Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) is one of the most renowned artists of the twentieth century. Louise Bourgeois: Ode to Forgetting, From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation focuses on prints and textile works the artist made in her eighties and nineties. Many of the works incorporate fabrics and embroidery, reflecting a lifelong interest in textiles connected to Bourgeois’ childhood years in her family’s business of tapestry restoration in Paris. Explorations of time and memory were of importance throughout her life and career, and are especially palpable in these late works.

In the late 18th century, British artists embraced the medium of aquatint for its ability to produce prints with rich and varied tones that became even more striking with the addition of color. At the same time, the expanding purview of the British empire created a market for images of distant places. Book publishers seized on these two trends and began producing travel books illustrated with aquatint prints of Indian cave temples, Chinese waterways, African villages, and more. This talk examines how the medium of aquatint shaped the message of British imperialism. By remaking the world in aquatint, traveling artists and printmakers simultaneously remade what it meant to be British.

The lecture will be presented at 5:30pm on January 30th in Room 250 of the James Branch Cabell Library, 901 Park Ave. This lecture is free and open to the public.

Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet presents pivotal moments in the artist's career as a painter and printmaker. Painted portraits, luminous landscapes, and interior narratives that pulse with psychological tension join the exhibition from more than two dozen lenders. Swiss-born and Paris-educated, Vallotton (1865–1925) created lasting imagery of fin-de-siècle Paris.

Witness to the radical aesthetics that gripped Paris in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Vallotton developed his own singular voice. Today we recognize him as a distinctive artist of his generation. His lampooning wit, subversive satire, and wry humor is apparent everywhere in his artistic production. Vallotton's trenchant woodcuts of the 1890s solidified his reputation as a printmaker of the first rank while boldly messaging his left-wing politics.

For the first time ever, this exhibition displays Picasso's legendary portrait of Gertrude Stein, from The Met collection, alongside Vallotton's rendering of this formidable collector, which was painted a year later. Vallotton finished his portrait in a matter of weeks and gave it to Gertrude Stein.



The exhibition is made possible by the Janice H. Levin Fund, The Florence Gould Foundation, and the Robert Lehman Foundation.

Additional support is provided by the Marlene and Spencer Hays Foundation and the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.

It is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in collaboration with Fondation Félix Vallotton, Lausanne.

Featuring works made from a variety of printing processes, including woodcuts, lithographs, etchings, and serigraphs, Lasting Impressions explores highlights from the Everson’s collection of twentieth century prints.

Francisco Goya used the privilege provided him as portraitist of the monarchy and aristocracy to create a series of etchings critiquing Spanish life at the end of the eighteenth century. With them, Goya took aim at what he saw as backward thinking: a church that hunted heretics, peasant superstitions, and the upper class’s brutal treatment of the poor. Goya is considered the first Modern artists, for his innovative painting techniques and social commentary.

This exhibition showcases the work of artists who have harnessed printmaking techniques, including David Hockney, Bridget Riley, Patrick Caulfield and Henri Matisse.

The exhibition features the work of nearly 60 artists who have all used techniques to exploit the potential of the printed line, from the thick velvety line of drypoint and the heavy cross-hatching of etching to delicate wood engraving and boldly coloured screenprints.

The use of colour will be explored in screenprints by Bridget Riley and Kenneth Martin, as well as Simon Patterson 's witty lithograph, which reworks the lines of the London tube map.

The show also features work by a number of celebrated artists, spanning the 20th century to the present day, including: Walter Sickert 's masterly cross-hatched etching The Old Middlesex (c1910), Ben Nicholson 's rich drypoint Halse Town 1949 (1949), a bold etching by Eduardo Chillida and David Hockney 's pared-down linear etchings.

All the prints in this exhibition are from the Arts Council Collection, which is the largest loan collection of modern and contemporary British art and includes fine examples of work by all of this country’s most prominent artists.

In 2020, as Crown Point Press moves into its fifty-eighth year, the first exhibition in its gallery looks back to the 1980s. In the ’80s women had big hair and shoulder pads. John Lennon was shot; the Iran-Iraq war began; the fax machine, Pac Man, and domestic camcorders appeared. Ronald Reagan, a Republican, replaced Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, as President. The economic unrest of the 1970s had gradually shifted toward an era of extravagance. In the ’80s, many artists worked in large-scale. Painting was influenced by advertising and entertainment.

Crown Point Press in the ’80s includes etchings made at Crown Point in the ’80s and also woodcuts from the Japan and China programs. The artists are: Vito Acconci, Robert Bechtle, John Cage, Francesco Clemente, Tony Cragg, Elaine de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Eric Fischl, Joel Fisher, Helen Frankenthaler, Hamish Fulton, April Gornik, Hans Haacke, Al Held, Robert Hudson, Bryan Hunt, Shoichi Ida, Joan Jonas, Anish Kapoor, Alex Katz, Joyce Kozloff, Robert Kushner, Sherrie Levine, Sol LeWitt, Tom Marioni, Robert Moskowitz, Judy Pfaff, Janis Provisor, Rammellzee, Ed Ruscha, David Salle, Italo Scanga, José Maria Sicilia, Richard Smith, Pat Steir, Wayne Thiebaud, David True, and William T. Wiley.

Delita Martin (b. 1972, Conroe, Texas) creates large-scale prints onto which she draws, sews, collages, and paints. Martin claims space for her subjects, particularly black women, creating a powerful presence that simultaneously highlights the historical absence of black bodies in Western art.

Through her work, Martin aims to create a new iconography for African Americans based on African tradition, personal recollections, and physical materials. A recurring theme throughout Martin’s work is exploring interconnections between past and present generations. She conveys these connections through symbols such as circles, a shape representative of the moon and symbolic of the female, and birds, which represent the human spirit. Masks, inspired by the Sowei and Ife masks of West Africa, appear in many of Martin’s works, signifying transition between this world and the spirit world. Her use of color is also symbolic, particularly the color blue, which she associates with spirituality.

Additionally, Martin incorporates materials and imagery linked to her personal memory, and likens this process to quilting, a skill she learned from her grandmother. Expertly layering all of these elements, Martin visualizes the liminal space between the physical and spiritual worlds.

Delita Martin: Calling Down the Spirits showcases seven monumental works combining tradition with innovation. Through her rigorous and meticulously layered process, Martin creates striking images that bridge time and space between generations.