Belger Arts is pleased to announce The Lawrence Lithography Workshop: 40 Years in Prints. This exhibition will feature highlights of many national and local artists in collaboration with master printmaker, Michael Sims.

Michael Sims established The Lawrence Lithography Workshop in 1979 in Lawrence, Kansas as a contract printing and teaching facility for local and regional artists. At the time, it was one of the very few independent presses in the Midwest providing a place where artists with little or no printmaking experience could collaborate with a master printer to produce hand-pulled lithographs. Over time, the workshop evolved with an increased emphasis on publishing regional and national artists. Today, most projects are done on an invitational basis with TLLW acting as the primary publisher or co-publisher, though contract printing remains a significant part of the business.

Sims received his M.F.A. in printmaking in 1971 from Ohio University and began teaching lithography at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. He has also taught at Western Michigan University, Centro de Eñsenafiza Graficas (Center for the Study of Graphic Arts) in Caracas, Venezuela and Western New Mexico University. In 1978, he left KU to work as an assistant at Landfall Press in Chicago. In 1997 Sims closed the shop in Lawrence and moved the facility to Sunland Park, New Mexico; one more move in 2001 relocated the shop to its current location in Kansas City, MO. This facility boasts a large press room with 2 electric flatbed litho presses and an etching press, as well as an exhibition gallery.

To date, The Lawrence Lithography Workshop has collaborated with over 100 artists from across the United States. Among them are: Ron Adams, Anthony Baab, Nick Bubash, Paul Brach, Susan Davidoff, Archie Scott Gobber, Julie Green, Robert Green, Edward Henderson, Peregrine Honig, Tom Huck, Benito Huerta, Gesine Janzen, Luis Jiménez, Elizabeth “Grandma” Layton, Mike Lyon, Alden Mason, Marcie Miller Gross, John Newman, Ed Paschke, Zigmunds Priede, Warren Rosser, Miriam Schapiro, Roger Shimomura, Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, Robert Stackhouse, Robert Sudlow, Akio Takamori, Theodore Waddell, Patti Warashina, William Wiley, and Andrzej Zielinski.

Hear about the history of Landfall Press and the stories behind some of the workshop’s most significant prints, from Thomas Cvikota, guest curator and author of Landfall Press: Five Decades.

About the Exhibition
Landfall Press: Five Decades of Printmaking celebrates the history and innovation behind one of America’s most renowned printers-publishers on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary year. Founded in 1970 by Jack Lemon, in Chicago, Landfall Press has cultivated a uniquely collaborative environment and produced work for many artists at different points in their career. The press has operated out of Santa Fe, New Mexico, since 2004.

The exhibition features approximately 100 editioned prints and printmaking materials from the Museum’s Landfall Press Archive, established in 1992, and reveals the various and often complex processes that go into printmaking at Landfall.

Upcoming Talks:

Gallery Talks
Tues., 1:30 p.m.
Oct. 8, Nov. 12, Dec. 10, Jan. 21
With Nikki Otten, Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings

Panel Discussion
Thurs., Nov. 21, 6:15 p.m.
Welcome Jack Lemon, founder of Landfall Press, Thomas Cvikota, guest curator and author of Landfall Press: Five Decades, and artists Lesley Dill, James Drake, and Peregrine Honig, as they discuss the collaborative nature of printmaking.

All programs free with Museum admission, free for Members

“New Edition: Print from the past, present, and future at Pratt” is an exhibition featuring works generated by P.I.E. (Pratt Institute Editions, est. 2017) alongside works from the archive of Pratt Graphics Center (1953-1986). PIE is the publisher of Pratt Fine Arts Department’s edition multiples. PIE invites artists to campus to produce an edition with our master printer, Caitlin Riordan, and printmaking students. PIE’s mission is to produce professional fine art multiples that connect our student community to a broader cultural context. PIE is committed to fostering new and innovative collaborative relationships across generations and communities.

Pratt Graphics Center, a world-renowned center for printmaking, was established in 1953 and ran until 1986. Located in Manhattan, the Center held print classes, printed and published Limited Edition prints by leading artists of the time and produced print-based magazines and periodicals. The center was a major draw for artists all over the world including David Hockney, Lee Krasner, Ray Johnson, and Takesada Matsutani. In addition to its publishing and teaching program, Pratt Graphic Center curated print shows that traveled across the US and around the Globe.

Artists included: Trudy Benson, Geoff Chadsey, Angela Dufresne , Ray Johnson, Lee Krasner, Krystin McKinney, Lisa Sanditz

Abstract Expressionism often brings to mind the work of artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko, whose reputations have reached heroic heights. They have been posited as innovators—the creators of one of the most uniquely American art movements in history. The significance of the contributions made to Abstract Expressionism by Pollock and his male contemporaries should not be underestimated, but nor should the contributions of the many female artists who not only helped to found the movement but who continued to define abstraction for many decades.

Great efforts have been made in recent years to reevaluate the development of Abstract Expressionism in relation to women’s contributions and it is from these efforts that this show builds. Drawn entirely from the Museum’s collection of works on paper, the work of pivotal artists including Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, and Deborah Remington as well as the work of contemporary artist Mary Heilmann, a leading figure in abstract American art, are brought together to demonstrate that the masculine lens through which abstraction has been previously understood must be removed.

Tamarind will hold its biennial art lottery on Saturday, September 14. Individuals may participate in person or by proxy. 100 tickets will be sold, and ticket-holders will be assigned a random number that evening, allowing them to select one piece from the 100+ available lots. Prints by Clinton Adams, Garo Antreasian, Will Barnet, Willie Cole, Jim Dine, Alison Saar, James Siena, Kiki Smith, June Wayne and many more included. All artwork has been generously donated by Tamarind artists, printers, and friends, to support Tamarind programs, artist residencies, and student scholarships. All lots available to view online.

Printmaking as a medium has for centuries been associated with the making of flat, editioned images—mostly on paper. Prints are utterly democratic, as they have the potential to create numerous originals that can be widely distributed. However, with the development of the digital cosmos, the potential for editioning and multiplication has become meaningless and nostalgic; nowadays, everything can be transmitted and shared on multiple platforms.

The 19 contemporary printmakers in this exhibition have removed the artificial boundaries around printmaking and have contextualized it as participatory, rather than only a democratic process. Here is a technique that is so porous, it can act like a sculpture and inhabit three dimensions; it can mimic a painted mural as it sprawls across a wall. What’s more, its materiality is astounding.

The prints in this exhibition are on porcelain, recycled wood, and melting ice; they live in the toxic residue left by the contaminated water of Flint, Michigan, and are even inked onto good old fashioned paper—only sideways, on the paper’s less-than-millimeter thick edge. They are built like a puzzle or planted as a garden. Some are architectural; others are biological. Prints were all somehow manipulated—cut, folded, burnt, fired, mounted, recorded, or pasted. All these actions reveal the innate familiarity printmakers have with matters of time, space, gravity, and pressure.

Artist featured include Justin Barfield, Shawn Bitters, Vanessa B. Cruz, Florence Gidez, Rebecca Gilbert, Ruthann Godollei, Sheila Goloborotko, Brandie Grogan, John Hitchcock, Andrew Kozlowski, Lauren Kussro, Nathan Meltz, Guen Montgomery, Jill Parisi, Andrew Raftery, Samantha Parker Salazar, Marliee Salvator, Mizin Shin, Swoon, and Eszter Sziksz. Curated by Sheila Goloborotko.

Paper Media: Boetti, Calzolari, Kounellis is the first exhibition in the United States focusing on works on paper by artists related to the Arte Povera movement. Convening the work of three masters: Alighiero Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, and Jannis Kounellis, selected from the Olnick Spanu Collection, the exhibition will consider the significance of drawing and print within each artist’s practice, as well as in Italian art and culture in the 1960s and 1970s more broadly.

Curated by Magazzino’s inaugural Scholar-in-Residence, Francesco Guzzetti, the exhibition represents the culmination of his research on the drawing practices of Arte Povera artists, as well as the provenance of the works in the Olnick Spanu Collection. An illustrated catalog will accompany the exhibition, focusing on this under-explored area of works on paper from the Arte Povera period and detailing the history of each work on view.

Paper Media: Boetti, Calzolari, Kounellis brings together ten rarely seen works on paper from the Olnick Spanu Collection. As with many of the artists associated with Arte Povera, working with various drawing and printing techniques was fundamental to the practices of Boetti, Calzolari, and Kounellis. In a new development for the period, these artists regarded their works on paper as finished pieces rather than preparatory steps to create an artwork. From Calzolari’s alchemical experimentation with unconventional materials such as rose petals and salt, to Kounellis’ iteration of a new alphabet of signs and images, works on view will speak to the artists’ embrace of formal and material experimentation and intensive questioning of what it meant to be an artist.

Artists Deborah Roberts and Robert A. Pruitt discuss Charles White’s influence and legacy and their own interest in representations of black bodies in a conversation moderated by Dr. Cherise Smith, Chair of the African and African Diaspora Studies Department, the founding director of the Art Galleries at Black Studies, and an associate professor of AADS and Art History at The University of Texas at Austin, held in conjunction with the exhibitions Charles White: Celebrating the Gordon Gift at the Blanton Museum of Art and Charles White and the Legacy of the Figure: Celebrating the Gordon Gift at the Christian-Green Gallery on campus.

This event is free to attend. Seated is limited for this special event; register at the 'External Link' below starting September 16, 2019.

With their avant-garde style and rejection of artistic traditions, a new generation of rebel-artists known as the Expressionists came to prominence during the early 20th century. This was the time of empires and colonies, air raids and allied forces, nationalism and revolution that was particularly tumultuous in Germany and neighboring Austria—countries closely connected during the First World War (1914–1918) and the rise of the Nazi Party (1920–1945).

Labeled as “degenerates,” many of the Expressionists were drafted or otherwise affected by war. To express their personal reactions to the atrocities they experienced, they turned to boldly simplified line work, distorted forms, or clashing colors. Above all, they heralded printmaking—a quick, inexpensive medium rife with creative potential—as the premier form of artistic rebellion.

From lithographic posters to book illustration, this Focus Installation exhibition encapsulates the violence and defiance of European modernism through works from the Dallas Museum of Art’s permanent collection as well as works from Dr. Alessandra Comini’s generous gift to the Museum in 2018 and 2019.

Celebrating the 30th anniversary of Tsuruya Kōkei's first solo show in the United States, the exhibition will display 77 prints by this artist widely celebrated as one of Japan's leading contemporary print artists. The British Museum lauded Kōkei for producing Japan's "most notable Kabuki prints" in the post-war era.

Known for his bold portraits of Japan's leading actors in a dynamic theatrical form, Kōkei responds to the idiosyncratic late-18th century kabuki prints by the great Sharaku. A master in his own right, Kōkei captures the intense color, movement, and emotion of kabuki. Yet Kōkei diverges from tradition by designing, carving, and printing his own work. Because he uses extremely delicate paper, his works juxtapose emotionally dynamic images with fragile materials to create objects of extraordinary power.

The exhibition presents all of Kōkei's actor prints from 1984–1993. Because the artist limited his editions, such a complete collection is unprecedented and will represent a first in Texas. To explore the broader contours of Kabuki actor prints, Kōkei's work will be contextualized by actor prints by Sharaku as well as two dozen works by contemporary Japanese and western artists.

The exhibition utilizes the layered issues of identity in kabuki — where actors take on multiple roles and males take on female roles — to explore broader questions of self-definition and its representation. It includes several of Kōkei's emotionally complex self-portraits produced after he gave up actor prints in 2000. It concludes by examining how kabuki actor imagery has inspired pop images over the last 20 years, demonstrating the productive link between Japan's historic ukiyo (floating world) and our own culture.