This essay examines William Webb’s mid-nineteenth-century toy theater adaptation of Obi; or, Three-Finger’d Jack, a pantomime based on the story of an enslaved Jamaican rebel who escaped enslavement in the late 1770s and evaded capture until his murder in 1781. Although scholars have attended to the varying representations of Three-Fingered Jack across print, stage, and fiction, his appearance in toy theater has not previously been considered. A careful examination of this material trace of a figure of rebellion and revolt complements and pushes against previous understandings of Jack’s resistance in the British mind in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Webb’s toy theater faithfully follows John Fawcett’s 1800 pantomime, a play that staged Black resistance only to contain it through Jack’s defeat and death and the restoration of colonial order. Yet the material form of the toy theater expanded possibilities for revolutionary agency in reimagining the story. Its interchangeable scenery, movable figures, broad stage directions, and roots in the transgressive conventions of pantomime gave domestic performers considerable latitude in restaging the play. The physical manipulation of miniature enslaved figures could reproduce colonial authority by rendering plantation labor and violence as spectacle, but the same material practices also made it possible to enact moments of escape, resistance, and disruption.

By situating Webb’s toy theater within the histories of colonial Jamaica, British pantomime, and the wider revolutionary Atlantic, this essay considers the toy theater as a site where the fraught relationship between imperial representation and the unstable meanings of Jack’s resistance could be materially enacted. Produced around mid-century, after the Haitian Revolution and the emancipation of Jamaica, Webb’s toy theater stages Jack as a belated but persistent figure of insurrection: rebellion is displaced into the colonial past even as its gestures remain available for domestic rehearsal. The toy theater thus did more than reproduce an earlier representation of colonial authority. Through the imaginative and material acts of cutting, arranging, moving, and restaging its figures and scenery, it offered young domestic performers the possibility of subtly unsettling the racist and hierarchical assumptions embedded in the play. Three-Fingered Jack in toy theater form reveals how narratives of rebellion and empire were continually rearticulated across print, stage, and parlor performance, and how material and performative practices helped shape revolutionary imaginaries in the Atlantic world.

Prints have long been associated with language and communication, yet the subtle processes of production that scaffold their graphic traces often remain a mystery, unseen and entangled with the transitory and social stages of their making. This article follows the collective and multimodal semiosis of a printmaking workshop during a residency with Barbadian artist Annalee Davis, and the co-development of a print edition titled An Impossible Map. This residency was in partnership with the National Trust for Scotland’s project Facing our Past and Dundee Contemporary Arts Print Studio. Analysis focuses on the significance of texture and touch and the journey towards Davis’s selection of an inkless process resulting in a ‘blind emboss’, offering insights into the critical potential of print to evoke what Davis called the ‘inadequacies of the archive’ regarding historic forced banishments of indentured labourers from Scotland to the Caribbean to support the prosperity of the sugar trade.

Editions are drawing younger collectors, new gallery and fair investment and fresh attention from artists—now galleries, publishers and workshops are testing how far the model can stretch.

This is a book about why the woodcut matters and why its power to shock, thrill and inspire has never diminished. From third-century China through to the present day, celebrated printmaker Paul Coldwell explores how we have used the medium to visualise ideas, capture key moments in history and help shape the society around us, telling the story of the art form itself in all its historical and intellectual significance.

Beautifully illustrated throughout, Ink Paper Chisel Grain is an ode to craft and care, conveying the marvel and excitement of seeing a woodcut for the first time – and what makes these encounters so unforgettable.

Sébastien Le Clerc (1637–1714) led a remarkably diverse career, engraver, cartographer, theorist of fortification, and writer on optics, architecture, and cosmology, while championing engraving as an art equal to painting and turning his workshop into a hub of learned sociability. By examining the interplay of these varied practices, Antoine Gallay explores the complex relations between arts and knowledge at the dawn of the Enlightenment, illuminating the origins of our modern dichotomy between art and science.

'Art and Science in the Spanish Baroque' explores the intersections between two defining chapters in early modern history: the development of modern science and the unfolding of Baroque culture.

This book examines three domains of seventeenth-century Spanish science and art: collecting, natural history and the visual arts, painting in particular. Its topics include the role of images in the creation and circulation of knowledge; the significance of cabinets of curiosities and art collections; still-life and vanitas paintings and their relationship with the world of learning; and the symbolic and religious interpretation of Asian and American nature.

The author focuses on case studies such as the visual representation of the bird of paradise and the passion flower, the expedition of Francisco Hernández to New Spain, the collection of wonders of the enigmatic Juan de Espina, the naturalist work of Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, and the Baroque meditation on the vanity of the world and its expression in paintings by artists such as Antonio de Pereda and Juan de Valdés Leal.

Bringing together the history of science and the history of art, this revised and updated edition of 'Art and Science in Spanish Baroque' offers new perspectives on one of the most remarkable and fascinating periods in history.

The series of ten paintings known as 'The Labours of Hercules' (1634, Museo Nacional del Prado), commissioned and executed for the decoration of the Hall of Realms in the Buen Retiro Palace, is one of Francisco de Zurbarán’s most famous artistic projects. This article offers new hypotheses regarding a key aspect of the cycle’s production: the corpus of visual sources that Zurbarán used both to represent the actions and physical appearance of Hercules and other characters. Among its contributions, this article discusses a series of prints by Hendrick Goltzius, whose direct relation to the Prado cycle had not been previously considered.

Regarded as one of the founders of both minimalism and conceptual art, Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) is best known for his large-scale wall drawings and modular structures. Alongside these works, LeWitt generated more than 350 print projects during his 40-year artistic career, including thousands of lithographs, silkscreens, etchings, aquatints, woodcuts, and linocuts. Printmaking proved to be the perfect medium for LeWitt’s brand of conceptual art, in which the “idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”
Beautiful Ideas: The Prints of Sol LeWitt explores the artist’s extensive body of prints, beginning with his earliest works and extending through his mature expressions in abstraction. Organized in four thematic sections— “Lines, Arcs, Circles, and Grids,” “Bands and Colors,” “From Geometric Figures to Complex Forms,” and “Wavy, Curvy, Loopy Doopy, and in All Directions”—the exhibition reflects the bold geometric shapes and precise lines that defined LeWitt’s artistic style. Beautiful Ideas: The Prints of Sol LeWitt is organized by the New Britain Museum of American Art and curated by David S. Areford, professor of art history at the University of Massachusetts Boston. The exhibition includes 41 objects, consisting of single prints and print series, for a total of over 100 prints.

Parasol Press: Breaking New Ground is the first exhibition to survey Parasol Press’s remarkable publications from 1970–2014, showcasing radical innovations that pushed the boundaries of printmaking and secured Parasol’s place as one of the most important print publishers of the twentieth century. Founded by Robert Feldman (PA 1954) in 1970, the publisher came to prominence for introducing a generation of Minimalist and Conceptual artists to printmaking, including Mel Bochner, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Edda Renouf, Dorothea Rockburne, and Robert Ryman. Parasol’s published editions were among the decade’s most ambitious prints, demonstrating the complex and varied ways artists explored the materiality of printed surfaces while challenging the medium’s limits. Over time, the publisher expanded its roster to encompass a diverse range of artists, including Photorealists, Neo-Expressionists, and even a group of award-winning mathematicians and scientists. Collaborating with print workshops such as Crown Point Press and Edition Domberger, Parasol Press took risks on technically daring feats, including Chuck Close’s creation of the largest mezzotint ever produced, Richard Estes’s intricate Photorealist screenprints consisting of hundreds of layers of color, and a multi-artist portfolio made entirely from rubber stamps. Parasol Press: Breaking New Ground reveals how the publisher helped forge transformative connections between dozens of artists and printers, highlighting the significance of risk-taking, collaboration, and experimentation in pushing the boundaries of artistic expression.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication, published by the Addison Gallery of American Art and distributed by Yale University Press, that includes a full list of all editions published by Parasol Press.