In histories of art as in contemporary practice, we rarely consider where ink wiped off a printing plate ends up or how reams of trial proofs get recycled. When we celebrate end products of creation, we silence and conceal the flows of waste to which all making inevitably contributes. NET-ZERO PRESS, a new impact project funded by the University of St Andrews and led by Dr Ruth Ezra, Lecturer in Art History, aims to work with contemporary stakeholders, educators, and practitioners across the printmaking landscape of Scotland to "start from trash" as we trace waste flows in print shops and act on these data to propose strategies for making studio spaces (from classrooms to open-access workshops) less toxic and more sustainable.

To launch the project, a group of art historians, practitioners, and technicians will gather together for a workshop at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) on Tuesday 21 October, 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Our goal? To share stories from the print room floor.

Interested participants should prepare a 10-minute presentation wherein they tell the story of one material that features in their practice, tracking its lifespan from acquisition through consumption, transformation, and disposal. The tone is meant to be light and exploratory and the company, congenial. We will conclude the workshop with a guided tour of the DCA print room, with a focus on waste flows and reuse. Any artists presenting will be paid a stipend of four hours at the Scottish Artists’ Union rate, based on years of experience. An additional hour of comfort break/lunch will be provided as part of the day, as well as an optional closing half-hour of tea and chat. Local economy travel expenses (train/bus) to and from Dundee city will be reimbursed.

Interested? Email netzeropress@st-andrews.ac.uk with a description of your material; an 150-word summary of your object story; and a CV by 15 September 2025. Participants will be notified of acceptance by September 21. If you live outside of the UK but would like to attend in a virtual capacity, please also feel free to get in touch.

Learn more about the project: http://netzeropress.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk
http://linktr.ee/netzeropress

When an object is collected, it begins a new life. It does not freeze in time, as it can still be altered and manipulated. This panel, sponsored by The Society for the History of Collecting, seeks to analyze, on a visual, material, and theoretical level, the various interventions made by artists, collectors, merchants, and restorers on artworks after their completion as these came to be part of a collection. Within this framework, many concepts come into play: reworking, retouching, alteration, manipulation, integration, correction, refreshing, reframing, repurposing. These interventions often respond to a need for conservation or restauration, sometimes they are carried out for esthetic or repurposing needs, other times they are the result of a misunderstanding as to an object’s original intention when this crossed cultural boundaries.
Whatever the reason, such practices have consequences that lead to changes in the artwork’s status of completeness, its function, its display or storage, and the way it is interpreted. Identifying, analyzing, and understanding these practices allows for a layered understanding of an object's life, from its production to its reception, within a complex temporal framework. What type of interventions are executed? How are they carried out, and by whom? Are there written sources that transmit this technical and material knowledge? What are the aesthetic and theoretical consequences of these actions on the objects themselves? Moreover, nowadays, how do scholars critically define these practices, considering their complex entanglements with concepts of authorship, originality and style?
Open to different media, we welcome contributions that explore cases from any geographical region during the early modern period. By privileging both diachronic and synchronic approaches, we aim to measure and analyze the growing interest in the physical condition of artworks, as well as in the conservation, restoration, and repurposing practices applied to objects within collections, broadly understood.

Proposals should be for 20-minute papers and must include a title (15 words maximum), abstract (150 words maximum), keywords and a CV (1 page maximum). Speakers will need to be members of RSA and members of The Society for the History of Collecting at the time of the conference. Please send your submission before 10 August 2025 (PDT) to Federica Gigante (federica.gigante@ames.ox.ac.uk), Alice Ottazzi (alice.ottazzi@khi.fi.it) and Adriana Turpin (adrianaturpin@gmail.com). Applicants will be notified by 11 August.

APS members Ruth Pelzer-Montada and Sandra De Rycker’s call for Participation in the CAA 114th Annual Conference (February 18-21, 2026) is now live:

We welcome contributions from artists, art historians, curators, educators, printers, and printmaking workshops that consider the important creative ecologies and often neglected infrastructures of the print workshop from various perspectives.
_ _ _

What would it mean to approach the model of a print workshop from an ‘intra-active’ perspective (Barad, 2007)? That is, to explore such environments as dynamic, agential and material-discursive phenomena? Considering workshop commonalities (such as printers’ preparation and processing of plates, stones or screens), as well as specificities (individual expertise, technological apparatuses, ecological approaches, spatial dynamics, differing models of collaboration), we wish to ask: How do prints operate in the workshop setting as non-human (objects, things, materials) and humans (artists, printers, institutions) mingle and/or intra-act?
Following Jennifer L. Roberts’ (2024) close investigations of the materiality of print processes, this session proposes further enquiry into the social and material groundings of the print workshop. Despite scholarly examinations of individual 'master printers' (Stanley William Hayter, Robert Blackburn, Kenneth Tyler, Stanley Jones); particular print workshop set-ups (Paul Laidler, 2011; Christina Weyl, 2019) and important collaborating printers’ accounts of working with artists (Craig Zammiello, Kathan Brown, Phil Sanders) this area remains seldom studied and undertheorized.

This session invites artists, art historians, curators, educators, printers and printmaking workshops to consider these often neglected ecologies from various perspectives, drawing on new-materialism and related interdisciplinary methodologies including decolonial, feminist, intersectional and eco-critical approaches. Taking account of print-making’s transitory states as well as its interrelationships with wider material, social, political, economic and institutional networks, we welcome proposals that delve into the dynamics of collaboration, tacit learning and embodied knowledge, and corresponding values in and beyond the print workshop, to elucidate these important and currently threatened infrastructures.

APS Sponsored Call for Papers:
Renaissance Society of America, Feb 19-21, 2026, San Francisco
Witchcraft and Magical Knowledge in Early Modern Print Culture

Positioned at the intersection of visual and textual culture, print played a critical role in shaping both imagined and institutional responses to magic, witchcraft, and the occult. Its advent in fifteenth-century Europe enabled the widespread circulation of texts and images concerning magic and witchcraft, ranging from demonological treatises and legal handbooks to illustrated broadsides, sensational pamphlets, and works of art by renowned early modern artists. Far from signaling a “decline” in magical thinking, this proliferation of printed material suggests a redefinition of the boundaries of magic, both as a practice and as a conceptual category. Print culture served simultaneously to document, disseminate, and delimit magical knowledge. It reflected emerging interests in classifying popular beliefs, integrating occult ideas into new natural philosophies, and asserted control over invisible forces through the apparatus of increasingly centralized religious and political authorities.

Organized in conjunction with the Cunning Folk: Early Modern Witchcraft, Magic, and Occult Knowledge exhibition at the Cantor Arts Center, this panel invites papers that explore how magic, witchcraft, and the occult were represented and contested through print. We welcome contributions that address a wide range of magical topics across early modern Europe and the Atlantic world. This can include papers that address the interplay between image and text in constructing magical authority, articulating fear or fascination, and/or legitimizing its control. Possible themes include, but are not limited to:

● Witchcraft, magic, and the supernatural in broadsides, ballads, and newsprints
● The aesthetics and materiality of grimoires and printed books of magic
● Relationships between the print culture of magic and painting, decorative arts, architecture, or other visual forms
● The printed/published visual rhetoric of witchcraft and demonology and its relationship to state or ecclesiastical power, including trials and punishment
● The representation of cunning folk and popular healing in print
● Artists and publishers as mediators of magical or occult imagery
● Magic, race, and colonial knowledge systems in transatlantic print culture
● Archival gaps and historiographical challenges in the study of printed magic
● New interpretations of specific witchcraft prints or illustrated books
● Presentations on exhibitions, curatorial activities, archival/library initiatives, conservation projects, or other museum practice with objects related to this theme

Papers should be in English and a maximum of 20 minutes in length. Presenters at any stage of their career are welcome to apply.

Please send the following materials to Sara Frier at sfrier23@stanford.edu, by August 1, 2025:

• Paper title and abstract (400 word max) with a summary of key conclusions
• Full name, current affiliation, and email address
• Curriculum vitae (no more than 2 pages)

Notifications of acceptance will be sent by August 4, 2025. For any questions, feel free to contact Sara Frier.

Women Printmakers in the Early Modern World
An APS-sponsored session for RSA 2026
Abstracts due: July 25

The history of early modern printmaking has long centered on male engravers and publishers, leaving the contributions of women largely overlooked and insufficiently theorized. Yet ongoing archival research and recent scholarship continue to recover names, works, and forms of labor that unsettle the conventional picture of how prints were made, circulated, and valued. Across Europe and beyond, women participated in the world of intaglio and woodcut not only as inheritors of family trades but also as brilliant amateurs or as anonymous contributors to the devotional image economy. Their presence complicates neat distinctions between art and craft, genius and labor, public and private spheres.

This session invites papers that center the work of early modern women printmakers (c. 1450–1700) in any geographic context. We welcome close readings of individual artists and works, as well as methodological or historiographic interventions that reflect on how and why women’s labor as printmakers has remained so difficult to see. Possible questions include—but are not limited to:

• How did women access the training, tools, or networks necessary to enter the world of printmaking?
• What kinds of images were women printmakers asked to produce—or found themselves producing—and how were these works received?
• In what roles did women participate in workshop economies, and what forms of collective or domestic labor supported their production?
• What critical frameworks might allow us to better apprehend this history and the absences that define it?
The papers, in English, should be 20 minutes in length. Scholars at any stage of their career are encouraged to apply. Travel support may be available thanks to Stanford University.

Please send the following materials to Emanuele Lugli, elugli@stanford.edu, and Rhoda Eitel-Porter, editor@printquarterly.co.uk by July 25, 2025:

• Paper title and Abstract (400 word max). The abstract should briefly cover the main points of the paper, including its research topic, the main findings and their significance.
• Full name, current affiliation, and email address
• Curriculum vitae (no more than 2 pages)
Notifications of acceptance will be sent by August 4, 2025.

For any questions, feel free to contact Emanuele Lugli or Rhoda Eitel-Porter

Call for Papers: Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas, Volume XVII. Send completed materials to hmsphr@unm.edu. Deadline: Monday, June 30, 2025
We invite graduate students (MA & PhD) to submit work on topics such as agency and political interventions, geopolitical landscapes, cartographies and borders, migration and transnationalism, memory-making and alternative archival practices, belonging and identity, food relations and visual culture, gender and sexuality, indigeneity, and methodologies (decolonial, feminist, anti-imperial, critical race theory, etc.)

Submission Types:
-Research Articles (20-30 pages)
-Exhibition/Performance Reviews (5-10 pages)
-Interviews (5-10 pages)
-Book Reviews (5-10 pages) on recent works related to Central American art and visual culture, including:
-Carnalities by Marianna Ortega (2025)
-Visual Disobedience by Kency Cornejo (2024)
-Central American Counterpoetics by Karina Alma (2024)

Submission Guidelines:
-Only completed works from graduate students will be considered.
-Submissions in English, Spanish, or Portuguese.

Read more about the publication at https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/hemisphere/

Email submissions to hmsphr@unm.edu by Monday, June 30, 2025.

The Association of Print Scholars invites submissions for its sponsored sessions at the Renaissance Society of America conference, to be held in San Francisco from 19-21 February 2026.

APS-sponsored session proposals may be related to any theme of Renaissance and Early Modern printmaking, or any aspect of print scholarship for the era 1300–1700. RSA is a multidisciplinary society, and we especially welcome session proposals that transcend geographic and disciplinary boundaries, as well as those that engage current theoretical interests in historiography, materialism, archival theory, bibliographic studies, or social history.

Series of sessions in honor or in memory of an individual scholar are limited to two sessions per honoree. Co-organized sessions are welcome; junior and senior scholars are encouraged to collaborate. Organizers may act as chair(s), or they may elect another scholar to serve this position, as per RSA guidelines.

You do not need to be a member of RSA to submit a session proposal to APS, but all accepted participants must become RSA members for 2025-2026 and register for the conference. Please note that proposing a session or a paper indicates your commitment to attend.

Organizers, chairs, and/or co-organizers or co-chairs must be members of APS, however, please note that those currently serving as APS officers, whether elected or appointed, may not submit conference proposals for panels sponsored by the organization during their tenure, although are welcome to participate in the selected panel.

How to submit a session proposal for APS sponsorship:
To propose an APS-sponsored session, please submit your session title (15-word maximum) along with a maximum 300-word abstract describing the topics and issues of printmaking that your session will address. Applicants do not need to propose a full panel of presenters in order to submit a session proposal. Submissions should include a two-page CV for each organizer. In the subject line, please indicate “APS-Sponsored session proposal RSA 2026” and send to Dr Talitha M. G. Schepers at rsacoordinator@printscholars.org

DEADLINE:
Submission deadline for all session proposals is:
25 June 2025


Acceptance decisions will be communicated to submitters by 30 June 2025.

“Antillean art,” remarked St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992, “is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent.” Walcott’s Nobel lecture, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory”, offers a compelling meditation on the interplay between art, history, and the archipelago as a space of fragmentation, multiplicity, and interconnectedness. In dialogue with Walcott’s reflections, Italian philosopher and politician Massimo Cacciari has framed the rise of early Cycladic culture in the Aegean Sea as the archetype of sociocultural relationality in Europe, inviting a reconsideration of the Archipelago as a model of geographical, as well as political negotiations.

As the eighteenth century witnessed the expansion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the anchoring of European empires across Atlantic, African, Indian, and Mediterranean archipelagic complexes, the insights of Walcott and Cacciari challenge us to rethink how eighteenth-century art and architectural practices in archipelagic spaces were shaped by tensions between isolation, connection, empire, displacement, autonomy, and exchange. While offering an opportunity to reconsider the intertwined histories of colonialism, slavery, and territorialism, focusing on archipelagic structures can help “decenter” Western narratives. An archipelagic perspective is also critical to understanding how island societies navigated and negotiated their cultural identities and agency outside, or in spite of, colonial structures.

This issue of Journal18 explores how archipelagic thinking informs the study of eighteenth-century art, architecture, and material culture. How might concepts of creolization, diaspora, and tidalectics, in the words of Kamau Brathwaite, reshape our understanding of artistic production and circulation? In the fragmentation of archival repositories, what can eighteenth-century objects and built environments made within archipelagic spaces reveal about the experiences of the people who lived there? How did eighteenth-century objects negotiate relationships between islands, oceans, and continents? How did artistic and architectural practices in the archipelago both reflect/reinforce and resist colonial power?

We encourage contributions that explore the metaphorical and material implications of the archipelago in artistic practices, cartography, and networks of exchange and use. We welcome interdisciplinary and innovative approaches to object study in the form of full-length articles or shorter pieces focused on single objects, interviews, or other formats.

Issue Editors
Demetra Vogiatzaki, gta/ETH Zurich
Catherine Doucette, University of Virginia

Proposals for issue #22 Archipelago are now being accepted. Deadline for proposals: September 1, 2025.

To submit a proposal, send an abstract (250 words) and a brief biography to the following email addresses: editor@journal18.org, cd2bv@virginia.edu, and vogiatzaki@arch.ethz.ch. Articles should not exceed 6000 words (including footnotes) and will be due for submission by February 1, 2026. For further details on submission and Journal18 house style, see Information for Authors.

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is pleased to announce the forthcoming symposium Stradanus at Cooper Hewitt taking place on November 6-7, 2025.

Cooper Hewitt is home to 143 sheets of drawings and inscriptions by the Netherlandish artist Johannes Stradanus (Jan van der Straet, 1523–1605). With support from the Getty’s Paper Project Initiative and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Collections Program, Cooper Hewitt embarked on The Stradanus Project, an effort to conserve, research, and digitize Stradanus’s drawings, which served as preparatory designs for his engravings. At some point in their history, the drawings were bound together to form several sketchbooks that were later disassembled. The leaves were separated and cut apart, and the sheets were laid down on secondary and tertiary supports—perhaps as part of an album that was then again cut apart.

From 2021 to 2022, Cooper Hewitt conducted a conservation survey of all of its Stradanus sketches. Based on this information, the team selected 38 sheets for lining removal and treatment, which was completed in 2024. As a result of conservation work and research, drawings and inscriptions that have been obscured for more than a century have been newly revealed.

To share the discoveries, Cooper Hewitt has launched a website with high-resolution images of the treated drawings and reconstructed sketchbook sheets, an updated catalogue raisonné of the museum’s Stradanus holdings, transcriptions and translations of the newly revealed inscriptions, and detailed information about the conservation process:

The Stradanus Project
https://www.cooperhewitt.org/the-stradanus-project

We invite symposium submissions on Stradanus that draw from this new information and Cooper Hewitt’s holdings. Potential topics could include, but are not limited to:

Stradanus’s international artistic, publishing, and trade networks
Stradanus’s working methods and processes
The role of materiality and Stradanus’s use of paper
The afterlife of Stradanus’s drawings

High-resolution images of the treated sheets can be consulted on The Stradanus Project website. Images of all sheets in Cooper Hewitt’s collection can be found through the Cooper Hewitt’s Collections Highlights (https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/highlights/2318812519/).

Submission guidelines:
Please submit a 150–200-word abstract, along with CV and affiliation to stradanus_symposium@si.edu by June 15, 2025.

Participants will be notified by July 18, 2025. Honoraria will be provided for speakers.

The symposium will be free and open to the public. General registration will open in early September through Cooper Hewitt’s The Stradanus Project website.

The Stradanus Project is made possible with support from the Getty Foundation through The Paper Project initiative; and received Federal support from the Smithsonian Collections Care Initiative, administered by the National Collections Program.

The California Printmaker | 2026 | Journal Call for Proposals

Accepting proposals now until August 30, 2025, from artists anywhere in the world regardless of CSP affiliation. No application or participation fees.

The California Society of Printmakers is soliciting proposals for the 2026 issue of The California Printmaker, “Raising Your Voice–Telling Your Story.”

Do you have a unique body of work that sends a message? Does your visual narrative focus on current or past events, your identity or your personal experience?

We would like proposals by you or your recommendation of other print artists (including their website) who could contribute to this topic.

Your work will be judged on its quality and how well it relates to this year’s theme.
If you are considered, your finished article (up to 1200 words with accompanying pictures) would be due November 1, 2025.

Proposals due:
August 30, 2025

Proposals should include:
• how your article will address the theme.
• outline or short narrative (about 200 words) in a word doc.
• 5 or more jpegs relating to your proposal content–do not embed images in a pdf
• website address.
• artist bio with contact information.
• please send a word doc and attach image files: no pdfs, no embedded images.


Submit proposals to:
Bob Rocco, Editorial Board, California Society of Printmakers
bobroccoart@gmail.com
www.caprintmakers.org

To view past issues of The California Printmaker visit:
www.caprintmakers.org/the-california-printmaker

https://www.caprintmakers.org/


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The California Printmaker, annual journal of the California Society of Printmakers, features articles and artwork from print artists worldwide. Each issue provides insight into the diverse perspectives shaping the global conversation on printmaking. Free access to our published journal is provided to the public digitally.