Raphael worked well with others, more so than many Renaissance artists. In this long-awaited book, Lisa Pon reassesses Raphael's collaborations in painting and many other media, thereby re-evaluating period and current attitudes towards originality, authorship, artistic practice and value. In the process, readers will see not the familiar painter in "pursuit of perfection," but an unruly Raphael who exceeds our expectations, a Renaissance artist who experiments with artistic techniques, considers polyphonic music and humanist debates, and plans a virtual Rome to explore through new means of visualization.

This book is about the ampersand: &. Just as an anti-novel may look like a novel in form, this book may resemble a conventional artist's monograph in its attention to Raphael and some of his major paintings. But I subvert the classic monograph's basic premise by emphasizing not an isolated, singular artist but rather the many social and working relationships with which Raphael was emmeshed and the many media into which he delved. This book is fundamentally about how we write about art and artists, what we want to know and can know historically, and what sustains our visual interest and intellectual curiosity, especially after five hundred years.

While image printing techniques were invented in the West around 1400, it took several decades for a public particularly fond of prints to emerge in Europe. Dismissed by contemporaries because of its mechanical nature, this new medium nevertheless ended up taking deep root in scholarly and artistic circles across Europe by the late 15th century.

This book focuses on one of the manifestations of this wide circulation of printed images: the birth of the first print collections. Initiated seemingly by religious communities, the practice of gathering engravings for preservation spread to civil society, particularly among humanists, who gradually devised strategies to collect, select, preserve, organize, and display their prints. These Renaissance collections were driven by two dynamics, which might overlap depending on the collector's personality: on the one hand, a quest for knowledge, as prints could convey scientific lore concerning the humanities or natural sciences, and thus find a place in libraries; and on the other hand, an aesthetic aspiration, viewing engravings as works of delight that could sit alongside drawings, paintings, or objects of curiosity in a cabinet or a Kunstkammer. These practices developed during the long sixteenth century form the foundation of the methods employed by print collectors throughout the early modern period and beyond.

Down in the Dirt chronicles more than fifty years of multidisciplinary artist Terry Allen's printmaking and visual storytelling. Rooted in West Texas yet reaching far beyond, Allen's work fuses image, text, music, and performance into layered narratives shaped by memory, geography, and personal mythologies. The book explores how Allen's art inhabits the shifting space between fact and fiction, autobiography and invention.

Peter S. Briggs traces Allen's evolution from early experiments at Cirrus Editions in Los Angeles to later collaborations at Landfall Press and Tamarind Institute, highlighting landmark works such as Juarez: A Simple Story-a multimedia suite combining lithographs, music, and text. Recurring themes include love, violence, humor, the American Southwest, and the tension between home and exile. Allen's imagery-beds, highways, deserts, saints, and outlaws-functions like fragments of stories that resist closure, encouraging viewers to assemble meaning from ambiguity.

The book also situates Allen within the post-World War II printmaking revival, noting his embrace of technical experimentation, serial imagery, and collaborative processes with master printers. Essays examine how Allen's prints, like his songs and performances, blur boundaries between media while reflecting on place, memory, and identity.

Ultimately, Down in the Dirt presents Allen as a restless storyteller whose work defies linear narratives, inviting audiences into a world where personal history, regional culture, and artistic invention collide across decades of creative output.

This catalogue was published in conjunction with the exhibition Ruth Fine: In Search of the Place, on view in Bryn Mawr College's 1912 Gallery from August 27–December 18, 2026. The exhibition explores Philadelphia-based artist Ruth Fine's longstanding engagement with the natural world in terms of her "search for the place," an approach to artmaking that invites close looking and collaboration. The catalogue was edited by Carrie Robbins and Maggie North, and designed by Nathanael Roesch. In addition to text by Robbins and North, it includes contributions from Wendy Edwards, Ruth Fine, Marianne Hansen, Janelle Rebel, and Chloe Sun.

The history of the printing museum at The New York Times annex established by Arthur Hays Sulzberger and Elmer Adler in 1938 to trace 6,000 years of written and printed communication.

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.