Dimensions of Form: Tamayo and Mixografia addresses the artistic legacy of modern master Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991). In this display of boundary-breaking work, fifty prints on loan from Mixografía® studio in LA depicting celestial bodies and serpent-gods accompanies an 1,800-pound lithographic stone plate, revealing the innovation behind Tamayo’s three-dimensional masterpieces.

The Mixografía printmaking technique is a unique fine art printing process that allows for the production of three-dimensional prints with elements of relief, texture and very fine surface detail. Since its inception, the mixografia process has been utilized by many contemporary artists including John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, Analia Saban, Jonas Wood, Alex Israel, and more.

This exhibition celebrates the ten years of the Trinkett Clark Memorial Fund. Established in honor of Trinkett Clark (1951–2006), curator of American art at the Mead from 2001 until her untimely death, her family’s gift helped create an innovative annual program in which curators and educators work with Amherst College students to help select a contemporary print for the museum to purchase. Thanks to the Trinkett Clark Memorial Student Acquisition Fund, students have helped choose nearly forty works for the Mead thus far, and this exhibition showcases some of those diverse acquisitions.

Robert Blackburn's workshop was started in 1948 with the help of Bob's teacher and mentor, artist Will Barnet. From its first beginning, with one lithography press, Blackburn's workshop was shared with artist-printmakers, pioneering new techniques with artists such as Will Barnet, Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden throughout the 1950's. In 1957, while still maintaining the workshop, Blackburn became the first Master Printer for Universal Limited Art Editions where he collaborated with and introduced printmaking to artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell. Bob Blackburn took this professional experience back to his expanding workshop and shared it with many artists, encouraging more and more artists to use the medium. Blackburn's innovative spirit and generosity made him an excellent collaborator and teacher. His welcoming, egalitarian encouragement of artists of all ages, backgrounds and expertise created a unique community workshop where traditional techniques were honored even as experimental methods were explored.

By 1971, the workshop was incorporated as the not-for-profit Printmaking Workshop (PMW) and Blackburn continued to expand the reach and the goals of the workshop. Fellowship programs to bring in artists from around the globe changed the dynamic of the studio and helped to spread printmaking workshops in the U.S. and to South Africa, Morocco, Ghana, and Australia. The workshop served as the training ground for many printers working in the premier publishing printshops and gave many artists their first introduction into the New York City art scene. PMW served as the model for community based cooperative printshops in the United States and abroad.

In 2001 the Printmaking Workshop closed its doors for the last time. The closing of PMW left many artists without the support, access to facilities, and expertise they needed. Although Blackburn's health was failing his dedication to printmaking and his innovative spirit were strong. Robert Blackburn challenged The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (EFA) to create a program to serve the needs of the printmaking community in New York City much like his Printmaking Workshop had done. The EFA Board of Directors accepted Blackburn's challenge and with the guidance of Blackburn and other community arts leaders, EFA began working toward opening a community space modeled on Blackburn's vision.

Blackburn passed in 2003 and never got to see the fruits of his tireless labor on behalf of underserved artists of New York City: A new community printshop. The Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (RBPMW), a program of The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, opened its doors in September of 2005 with the expressed purpose that the workshop would live up to Blackburn's vision of community access, professional level printmaking, and support for all artists regardless of race, gender, creed, or socioeconomic background. EFA's RBPMW has accepted Blackburn's challenge and continues to honor his spirit with a mission focused on supporting artists' creative risk taking and innovation through print. The workshop serves more than 8,000 people per year from the United States and countries all over the world.

--from the "Mission/History" page of the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop Program website. Please visit the Brandywine Workshop and Archives website for more information about the exhibition, available soon.

iMprint exists to disseminate appreciation and awareness of original printmaking as an artistic medium. It has established itself as Malta’s only exhibition dedicated to showcasing original prints by some of the best Maltese artists and foreign printmakers. Founded by Jesmond Vassallo in 2013, iMprint has now become a biennial appointment which is eagerly awaited by Malta’s artists and public.

This year’s fourth edition of iMprint presents a treat to its enthusiastic audience with a once in a lifetime opportunity to see in Malta the works of the renowned post-war German artist Horst Janssen whose works can be found in major museums worldwide, loaned for the exhibition by Janssen’s family. He worked exclusively on paper and experimented with a number of printing techniques. Janssen’s work is at the same time full of life and dark, erotic and sentimental, enigmatic and relatable. Visitors will be able to appreciate his originality in style and method in around 30 works at this year’s iMprint.

Another highlight of the exhibition will be a collection of prints by one of Malta’s pioneers of modern art Frank Portelli, a contemporary of Janssen. His paintings are well known to local art lovers, but few know he was a very good printmaker.

Twenty-eight contemporary artists will also exhibit their original prints, showing that printmaking is a favoured medium among local artists. This exhibition is the only outlet that many of these professional printmakers have to showcase their excellent works.

A catalogue with essays and exhibit entries will accompany the exhibition.

Following in the wake of other great painters and printmakers such as Rembrandt and Goya, Mariano Fortuny y Marsal (1838−1874), an unquestionable master of Spanish nineteenth-century painting, put his virtuosic skills to exploring the expressive possibilities of printmaking – chiefly etching and aquatint – in 30 or so compositions depicting Orientalist themes, customs and classically-inspired subjects. Their fine quality makes him the most important Spanish printmaker of the second half of the 19th century.

In 1860, having produced a few illustrations for books in the previous years, Fortuny began making independent prints after his first trip to Morocco. Himself a collector – of prints by Rembrandt, Ribera and Goya, among many other art objects and antiques – he published only a few of his own during his lifetime through Adolphe Goupil, his Parisian dealer from 1866.

Although printmaking was a sporadic and secondary activity for Fortuny – he practised it at night, as his first biographer Baron Charles Davillier recalled in 1875, and as part of a commercial contract with his dealer – his etchings, an eclectic group of works created in barely 10 years, are a first-rate artistic corpus. Giving free rein to his creativity, the artist produced his most personal and experimental output in which, as his friend and devoted admirer Théophile Gautier pointed out, ‘he lends a mysterious and fanciful appearance to the truest reality’.

This exhibition brings together the artist’s main prints, which come from the collection of Enrique Juncosa Darder. They attest to his technical mastery at imbuing his graphic work with subtle painterly effects, his imaginatively devised compositions, and his attention to detail – the result of his painstaking work carried out on the original plates, seeking the desired effects through various state proofs.

Unlike their belle époque contemporaries who depicted the bustling boulevards and lively nightlife of Paris, artists Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard crafted intimate interiors and domestic scenes. This lecture examines Bonnard’s and Vuillard’s prints and paintings against the wider backdrop of the arts of privacy in fin-de-siècle Paris.

The MFAH hosts the debut presentation of Jasper Johns: 100 Variations on a Theme. Originally created by the artist in 2015 with the intention of accompanying his Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings and Sculptures, published in 2017 by the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, the monoprint series will be on view in Houston September 29, 2019, through February 16, 2020 before traveling on to the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany.

“This extraordinary suite of unique prints allows us to look back at the whole of Jasper Johns’s career,” commented MFAH director Gary Tinterow. “Their visual language expresses the many autobiographical details that have been so important to his identity as an artist.”

“This series provides the opportunity to see Johns’s creative process at work, as he manipulates the imagery in a playful and spontaneous manner. Each print informs the next,” said Dena M. Woodall, associate curator of prints and drawings. “We are delighted to share Johns’s monoprint series for the first time with our audience in Houston.”

Beginning in the early 1950s, Jasper Johns painted flags, targets, alphabets, and other everyday objects, creating a visual vocabulary that has recurred in his art for the nearly six decades since. At a time when abstraction was at its height, Johns’s selection of ordinary objects as his subject matter was a radical departure that quickly established him as one of America’s most influential artists. Jasper Johns: 100 Variations on a Theme exemplifies Johns’s innovation, displaying a series of 100 monoprints that incorporate elements from throughout his career.

As a prolific printmaker, Johns has worked with every technique, exploring the creative potential of each. Though printmaking is characteristically known for its ability to create a repeatable image, monotype and monoprint methods are known for their uniqueness: monotypes are typically made by applying viscous ink onto a smooth, nonabsorbent, unmarked metal or plastic plate, while monoprints use a plate with some fixed, repeatable carved, etched or engraved lines. The plate is then topped with paper and run through the press. For Johns, monotypes and monoprints are placed in the same category because of their changeability in printing. Both are unique during the printing process, leaving behind one strong impression that cannot be replicated exactly.

Johns created this series of 100 monoprints in 2015, over the course of 10 days in his Connecticut studio. The artist used an experimental intaglio plate—related to the 2007 etching titled Within—as the basis for the monoprint. Reworking the plate numerous times, Johns added an etched imprint of his hand and symbols of American Sign Language (ASL) and proceeded to transform the image 100 times. Each print informs the next, forming a narrative chain anchored by reoccurring elements from throughout his work: handprints, stenciled numbers, the alphabet, ASL symbols, and the string from his Catenary series of 2001. Johns also creatively wove the word raisonné into each print, using both letters and ASL symbols.

Other works on paper by Johns, including the artist’s Savarin (1977–81), Land’s End (1979), and Untitled (Red, Yellow, Blue) (1984), from the Museum’s collection and private collections, will be presented alongside the monoprint series to give context to the artist’s recurring themes and motifs.

This exhibition is the first to highlight the museum’s collection of works on paper produced in Latin America over the past century. Representing a wide range of countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, and Mexico, the works survey how artists have explored national and cultural identity during periods of political upheaval and dramatic social change. In particular, prints and drawings provided artists such as Roberto Matta, José Clemente Orozco, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Rufino Tamayo with a means of self-expression well suited for formal experimentation and reaching the broadest possible audience.

A Graphic Revolution begins with the realist style of Mexican muralists such as David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera. Artists in their generation and in the ones that followed used the themes of people, politics, and abstraction to express the complexity of Latin American identity. Featuring approximately 50 works from the museum’s collection, the exhibition also highlights several important recent acquisitions by modern and contemporary Latin American artists, including León Ferrari, Gego, Wifredo Lam, and Liliana Porter.

Caroline Fowler, interim director of the Research and Academic Program, discusses her newly published book, The Art of Paper: From the Holy Land to the Americas, and signs copies. In the late medieval and Renaissance period, paper transformed society—not only through its role in the invention of print but also in the way it influenced artistic production. The Art of Paper tells the history of this medium in the context of the artist’s workshop from the thirteenth century, when it was imported to Europe from Africa, to the sixteenth century, when European paper was exported to the colonies of New Spain.

The talk is free. Books are available in the Museum Store and can be purchased at the event.

Founded in 1963 by Jean Adhémar and published by the Comité national de l’estampe, the journal Nouvelles de l'estampe is intended to present current events in the field of printmaking and engraving. It deals with the printed image both as an art form and as a technology capable of multiplying images, with all the cultural and historical consequences that this has had.

All the issues published since 2010 are available full-text with the original illustrations in PDF format.

From now on the journal will be published only in electronic version. Under the aegis of the Comité national de l’estampe, it will publish, after approbation of the editorial board, articles written in French, English and Italian. Proposals should be sent to remi.mathis@bnf.fr

For the editorial rules, see: http://nouvellesdelestampe.fr/nouvelles-de-lestampe/soumettre-un-article/