The best way to find out what holds the world together at its very core is to cut it open. Cathedrals, skulls, the hulls of ships, the circles of hell, volcanoes, blossoms, caterpillars or even entire mountain chains – nothing and nobody can escape the exploring cut. Be it a cross section or a longitudinal section, the most important thing is that it runs right through the middle. The world opened up in this way is presented as images, models or at the object of curiosity itself.

The exhibition shows how the cross section functions as a visual principle of insight. It is presented as a versatile and effective method of visual communication, be it in medicine, architecture, biology or geology. The works in the exhibition tell an exemplary story of the symbiotic relationship between art and science. While scientific researchers adopt many of the established methods, techniques and compositional strategies of art in order to visualize their findings, artists, in turn, appropriate the specific visual syntax of the sciences in a way that at times seems to verge on expropriation.

The method of obtaining certainty about invisible inner worlds by cutting clearly through it, not only connects art and science, but also very different epochs. The exhibition shows cross-sections from the 15th century to the present. Not all of them come from the Graphische Sammlung: important loans from a total of eight different ETH collections and archives enter into a dialogue with them.

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) was captivated by Europe’s popular fascination with Japanese culture. He collected and copied Japanese woodblock prints, as well as took artistic inspiration from their vibrant colors and innovative compositions. In an 1888 letter from Van Gogh to his brother Theo, the artist wrote, “all my work is based to some extent on Japanese art.” This focused exhibition will explore the influence of Japanese art on Van Gogh’s oeuvre by comparing reproductions of the artist’s paintings to authentic Japanese prints from the internationally renowned Raymond A. Bidwell Collection at the D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts.

This conference takes a fresh look at the printed material too often regarded as trash - either by its contemporaries, who regarded it as disposable, or by the academy which until recently has tended to treat such items as beneath contempt.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER:
Professor Brian Maidment
'To drive away the heavy thought of care' - the early history of the trade in scraps, 1820-1840

SPEAKERS:
-Diana Patterson, Parliamentary rubbish
-Judith Davies, A week is a long time in politics: how a short, sharp poster campaign in 1857 helped to overturn centuries of aristocratic domination in Dudley
-Helen S. Williams, Printing in procession: printers’ participation in nineteenth-century public events
-David Osbaldestin, Yesterday’s tomorrows: a throwaway history of ephemera studies
-Jim Mussell, Ephemera belongs to the dead: affect, print, and memory
-Sue May, Trading on fear of purgatory: a mass printed ticket to Tudor popularity
-Annemarie McAllister, ‘My friend, do me the favour of reading this’: trash or tract?
-Karel van der Waarde, Medicines information leaflets: are we just printing waste or are we really supporting patients?
-David Atkinson, Bellman’s sheets: between street literature and ephemera
-Iain Beavan, Chapbook woodcuts: ‘unfit for purpose’?
-Francesca Tancini, Virtually indestructible: the ephemeral life of Victorian picture-books for children
-Elaine Jackson, ‘I’d rather be good bad than bad good’
-Berta Ruck writing ‘bad’ romance for women’s magazines
-Tony Quinn, Fifty years too early: George Newnes and The Million, a penny colour magazine for the masses
-Karen Attar, From dross to gold: Augustus De Morgan’s sale catalogues
-Annette Hagan, The chapbook collection of Sir Walter Scott
-Marine Furet, The archaeology of her desk: reading the ephemera in Angela Carter’s archives

Tattoos in Japanese Prints recounts how large-scale, densely composed pictorial tattoos — what we now recognize as a distinctly Japanese style — emerged in 19th-century Japan in tandem with woodblock prints depicting tattooed heroes of history and myth.

More than 60 superb prints by artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797–1861) and his contemporaries from the noted collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, explore the interplay between ink on paper and ink on skin. Kuniyoshi’s influential print series "One Hundred and Eight Heroes of the Popular Water Margin" (1827–1830), illustrating hero-bandits from a 14th-century Chinese martial-arts novel, probably both inspired and reflected a real-life tattoo trend — art into life and life into art.

Many of the characters in Kuniyoshi’s "Water Margin" prints sport elaborate tattoos. Other artists, seeing the popularity of these works, made their own prints of tattooed Water Margin heroes and went on to depict historical figures and Kabuki actors with prominent inked embellishment. The iconography of the tattoos in these prints, also found on the bodies of real-life Japanese urban men, included lions, eagles, peonies, dragons, giant snakes and the fierce Buddhist deity Fudo Myoo. These motifs — still popular today — evoked bravery, valor and strength.

The vogue for tattoos in Japan lasted until the early Meiji period (1868–1912), when the Japanese government prohibited them as part of its effort to modernize the country. Woodblock prints are some of the best documentation we have of real-life tattoos of 19th-century Japan, and they continue to provide models for worldwide tattoo artists today.

James Siena: Resonance Under Pressure features ten prints produced in 2018 by the artist, who is well-known for his brightly colored paintings of boldly rendered, labyrinthine forms. In these new works, Siena continues his exploration of the potential of modulation and repetition of biomorphic forms, as well as his engagement with typewritten and letterpress text as image. Siena made the works during artist-residencies at Flying Horse Editions at the University of Central Florida, Orlando; Dolphin Press & Print at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore; and the MFA Book Arts + Printmaking Program at The University of the Arts, Philadelphia.

"[The prints made at Flying Horse Editions] are also somehow about the physical representation of sound, in which circuits resonate from one to the other, and iterative waves cross the image . . . . This project is deeply fruitful for my practice in which printmaking holds an equal place with painting or drawing, and methods generate new approaches to developing a body of work that doesn’t privilege one mode over another." --James Siena

The Printer’s Perspective: Gail Deery and Alex Kirillov on James Siena
Wednesday, April 24, 6pm
Gail Deery, Professor of Printmaking, Papermaking and Book Arts and Co-Director of Dolphin Press & Print at MICA, and Alex Kirillov, Senior Lecturer, MFA Book Arts + Printmaking and Studio Art at The University of the Arts, both worked with Siena when he printed at their respective institutions. Deery and Kirillov will give a tour of the exhibition James Siena: Resonance Under Pressure from the printer’s perspective, walking through the various processes used by Siena and their students during his artist-residencies in 2018.

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

New Typographics: Typewriter Art as Print features work by artists who use the typewriter as a matrix for forming text into image. Typically referred to as typewriter “art” or typewriter “drawings,” this exhibition posits that artworks created with a typewriter should be recognized as prints, in light of the mechanism and process of their production.

Early examples of typewriter prints date to the late 1800s, when the typewriter became commercially produced and publicly accessible. Typewriter prints flourished in avant-garde sound experiments at the turn of the 20th century as well as in global movements in concrete poetry, mail art and conceptual art after World War II. In the United States at mid-century, the typewriter was a staple of daily life, used in offices and homes alike. Artists today are turning to the typewriter as a tool and an inspiration.

"I use the typewriter against itself. It was built to draft first chapters of novels and resignation letters; I use it to draw my son’s eyelashes and knitted socks . . . . I really enjoy that this process allows me to focus on those very simple forms and moments that are, perhaps, usually overlooked." --Lenka Clayton

"I began writing with a typewriter, a tool that could keep up with my thoughts. However, I employed no rules of the written language: no capitalization, no punctuation, no paragraphs. The writing slowly transformed – the words left the page and what remained has become my language." --Allyson Strafella

Curator’s Talk
Thursday, May 2, 6pm
Ksenia Nouril will give a talk on the history of typewriter prints, highlighting key moments and artists that were influential to the thinking around the exhibition New Typographics: Typewriter Art as Print.

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

Join us for this special public program in conjunction with our Paper Vault exhibition "Copies, Fakes, and Reproductions: Printmaking in the Renaissance." Andrew Raftery will discuss the ways in which copying a print reveals an enormous amount of specific information, albeit often hidden to plain sight.

This exhibition brings together lithographic prints and related graphic materials donated by key artists of the European avant-garde in support of the anarchist journal Les Temps Nouveaux (The New Times), edited by the writer and activist Jean Grave. Contributors included such famous artists as the Neo-Impressionists Camille Pissarro, Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross.

Organized around the social themes and aspirations that defined the politics of the anarchist movement, the exhibition addresses such timely issues as poor labor conditions, homelessness, cross-border migration, child abuse among the clergy, opposition to war and visions of a coming anarchist utopia.

The Temps Nouveaux artists also publicized their ideals through postcards, brochures and book illustrations, including those designed for working-class children. Thus these artists utilized the graphic arts as media for their avant-garde experimentation, even as they worked to convey their social message to a broad public.

This interdisciplinary conference re-evaluates the roles of booktrades peronnel, and explores directions for future research. It draws together book history, printing history, reading history, and literary studies.

Whether we view them as tastemakers, ideological brokers, or entrepreneurial opportunists, the personnel of the book trade undeniably shaped the book cultures of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. While capital, technology, and markets are all powerful factors in the trade’s development, its people are its most significant agents. Current research across periods is demonstrating the creative agency of book trade personnel, and the extent of their cultural and political engagement. As recent monographs and essay collections demonstrate, book trade history is now firmly established as a field of study: James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450-1850 (2007) and Publishing Business in Eighteenth-Century England (2017); Lisa Maruca, The Work of Print: Authorship and the English Text Trades, 1660-1760 (2007); Marta Straznicky, ed., Shakespeare’s Stationers: Studies in Cultural Bibliography (2013); Kathleen Tonry, Agency and Intention in English Print, 1476-1526 (2016); Kirk Melnikoff, Elizabethan Publishing and the Makings of Literary Culture (2018). Much remains to be done, however, to understand and theorise the cultural and social activities, subjectivities, and identities of book trade personnel.

Topics for consideration
• gender in the print trades
• representations of the book trade in print
• roles and figures within the Stationers’ Company
• ethnicity and the print trades
• queering the print trades
• the shaping of professional identity
• genres developed by the print trade
• printing families and inheritance
• interactions with other professional groups: guildsmen, theatre people, lawyers
• bookshops and printing houses as sites of sociability and education
• apprentices and youthfulness
• the gendering of print trade labour
• the social status of book trade personnel and the social stratification of the book trades
• regional and national identities in print
• creative influences
• pamphlets, periodicals, and ephemera
• copyright and property
• regulation and control
• libel, and seditious printing
• printers’ catalogues, wills, and effects
• the writer-as/and-printer; the printer-as/and-writer

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

Although her designs adorned the walls of homes and businesses across the United States, the name Frances (“Fanny”) Flora Bond Palmer (1812-1876) remains obscure. Arguably the most prolific and effective artist working behind the scenes for the Currier & Ives lithography firm, Palmer illustrated some of the most celebrated images associated with American life in the 1800s. In addition to designing over 200 popular prints, Fanny Palmer supported her family financially at a time when it was nearly unheard of for women to do so. This exhibition celebrates her achievements and offers a renewed examination of prints produced by Currier & Ives.