A picture book biography about the barber shop of woodcarver Elijah Pierce, recipient of the highest folk art honor in the United States.

“Creeeeak!” goes the screen door to self-taught artist Elijah Pierce’s barbershop art studio. A young boy walks in for an ordinary haircut and walks out having discovered a lifetime of art.

Mr. Pierce’s wood carvings are in every corner of the small studio. There are animals, scenes from his life, and those detailing the socio-political world around him. It’s this collection of work that will eventually win Elijah the National Heritage Fellowship in 1982 just two years before his death. But the young boy visiting the shop in the 1970s doesn’t know that yet. All he knows is: “You gotta meet Mr. Pierce!”

Based on the true story of Elijah Pierce and his community barber shop in Columbus, Ohio, this picture book includes cleverly collaged museum-sourced photos of his art and informative backmatter about his life. With engaging text by Pierce to the Soul! playwright Chiquita Mullins-Lee and Christopher Award-winning author Carmella Van Vleet, it’s illustrated with striking Japanese woodblock by Jennifer Mack-Watkins. A new addition to vital Black art history!

Printmakers have conspired, historically, to illustrate the maps created by European colonizers that were used to chart and claim their expanding territories. Over the last three decades, Latinx artists and print studios have reclaimed this printed art form for their own spatial discourse. This book examines the limited editions produced at four art studios around the US that span everything from sly critiques of Manifest Destiny to printed portraits of Dreamers in Texas.

Reclaiming the Americas is the visual history of Latinx printmaking in the US. Tatiana Reinoza employs a pan-ethnic comparative model for this interdisciplinary study of graphic art, drawing on art history, Latinx studies, and geography in her discussions. The book contests printmaking’s historical complicity in the logics of colonization and restores the art form and the lands it once illustrated to the Indigenous, migrant, mestiza/o, and Afro-descendant people of the Americas.

As a social phenomenon and a commonplace of internet culture, virality provides a critical vocabulary for addressing questions raised by the global mobility and reproduction of early modern artworks. This book uses the concept of virality to study artworks’ role in the uneven processes of early modern globalization.
Drawing from archival research in Asia, Europe, and the Americas, Stephanie Porras traces the trajectories of two interrelated objects made in Antwerp in the late sixteenth century: Gerónimo Nadal’s Evangelicae historiae imagines, an illustrated devotional text published and promoted by the Society of Jesus, and a singular composition by Maerten de Vos, St. Michael the Archangel. Both were reproduced and adapted across the early modern world in the seventeenth century. Porras examines how and why these objects traveled and were adopted as models by Spanish and Latin American painters, Chinese printmakers, Mughal miniaturists, and Filipino ivory carvers. Reassessing the creative labor underpinning the production of a diverse array of copies, citations, and reproductions, Porras uses virality to elucidate the interstices of the agency of individual artists or patrons, powerful gatekeepers and social networks, and economic, political, and religious infrastructures. In doing so, she tests and contests several analytical models that have dominated art-historical scholarship of the global early modern period, putting pressure on notions of copying, agency, context, and viewership.

Vital and engaging, The First Viral Images sheds new light on how artworks, as agents of globalization, navigated and contributed to the emerging and intertwined global infrastructures of Catholicism, commerce, and colonialism.

News traveled quickly in the early modern era, and printed accounts of the most
recent international disasters fueled this fascination. Book and print collectors
could experience these incidents safely at home with novel, interactive broadsheets
with liftable flaps. The most famous grouping showed the 1618 rockslide that
completely destroyed the Graubünden mining district of Plurs, near Switzerland.
Inspired by Zurich printer Johann Hardmeyer’s 1618 publication, in 1619, Strasbourg
and Nuremberg publishers Jacob van der Heyden and Johann Philipp Walch
produced their own. Such tactile additions helped viewers literally grasp the extent
of the wreckage while they perused the letterpress describing the newsworthy
event. This article examines these unruly printed landscapes, their published
afterlives, and their relationship to existing landscape modes.

Cockaigne, the legendary land of plenty, formed a sub-theme of popular depictions
of gluttony in sixteenth-century prints. These images combined carnivalesque
exuberance and moralising caution, illustrating both excessive consumption
and its ill efffects, from inappropriately lascivious or slothful behaviour to the
physical need to expel from top and bottom. Scatological motifs emphasised the
grotesque nature of Cockaigne, providing laughter while also warning viewers
of the consequences of gluttonous behaviour in the here and now: that spending
on fleeting pleasure will reduce fortunes to shit. These themes are explored here
chiefly through an exceptionally large mid-sixteenth-century German woodcut
now in the New York Public Library, as well as two related woodcuts by Peter
Flötner.

In the latter part of 2021, the Beyeler Foundation in Basel mounted the most important retrospective exhibition on Goya in recent decades. Curated by Martin Schwander—who is also the editor of the catalog—and developed by Isabela Mora and Sam Keller in collaboration with the Prado Museum, it gathered 181 Goya works, including seventy-seven paintings, fifty-three prints, and fifty-one drawings. It was a unique opportunity for those able to attend the fully booked exhibition, since many of the works have rarely been shown outside of Spain, and many come from private collections.

Prints, artists’ books, posters, multiples, printed ephemera have been displayed, sold and collected in international, large-scale exhibitions. Alongside paintings and sculptures, they were—and still are—regularly exhibited at the Venice Biennale, São Paulo Biennale, documenta and in several other perennial exhibitions. Regardless of their continuous presence and vitality, there have been few studies about the role of prints and artists’ editions in the context of these exhibitions. OBOE’s third issue, Exhibiting Prints: The Role of Printmaking in Large Scale Exhibitions guest edited by Jennifer Noonan, intends to redress this lacuna while shedding new light on the manner in which printed matter has been vital for the life and fortune of large-scale international exhibitions.

Works on paper have often played a pivotal role in disseminating artists’ works to an international audience. As multiples, they are more accessible, and have a lower production and distribution cost. They are easier to transport than painting or sculpture, but also to collect, which led several art museums of distinguishable importance to acquire prints from international large-scale exhibitions. Notably, when Alfred H. Barr launched MoMA Activities, he almost immediately established a Print Cabinet and enriched it over the years with purchases from large-scale exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale. It is no coincidence that even today major art fairs like TEFAF in Maastricht devote an entire section of the commercial show to works on paper and prints. Furthermore, at the beginning of the 20th century, printed editions were one of the preferred strategies to advertise these exhibitions. They served to bolster cultural tourism and to emphasise the value of exhibitions.

From the first perennial of the Venice Biennale in 1895 with the Sale del Bianco e del Nero, into the 20th century when prints, ephemera, manifestos, and leaflets of performances is quite renown (Contrabienal and the 1970 Venice Biennale), and most recently to documenta 15 (2022), in which even the making of prints through the Lumburg Press was part of the exhibition, printed material has always held a specific, if not shifting, place. The exhibition of prints and artists’ editions within these venues has provided opportunities for national representation and the dissemination of ideas, even in times of changing regimes and difficult economic circumstances. For this reason, to understand the constitutive role of prints it is necessary to incorporate various perspectives on cultural tourism, dissemination of the avant-garde, bourgeois collections, taste-making, democratisation of art, institutional critique, as well as politics. This issue, therefore, is necessarily cross-disciplinary, gathering together a group of scholars and researchers with varied methodologies and approaches. Examining the production, presence and circulation of printed matter in biennial-type exhibitions from its origins to the present moment will expand histories of printmaking and will enrich the body of literature on large-scale, international exhibitions. For this special issue, we have been assisted by a specialist on this topic, Jennifer Noonan, who has edited this issue selecting the papers of Alessia Del Bianco, Maeve Coudrelle and Camilla Pietrabissa.

In addition, in the section Miscellanea, the issue hosts Jacob Lund’s essay “Exhibition as Reflective Transformation”. Taking Forensic Architecture's project Triple-Chaser as its point of departure, Lund theoretically explores the role of exhibitions in contemporary aesthetic and artistic practices. Finally, Adelaide Duarte and Lígia Afonso provide us with a meticulous review of three books, published between 2020 and 2021, reflecting on the mutual histories and shared aspects of contemporary art fairs and biennials.

Colorful Neotropical parrots were amongst the first and most frequent exotic animals to be imported by Europeans from the “New World” of the Americas, becoming key figures in what would become known as the Columbian exchange. There has been an ongoing effort to locate and identify images of Neotropical parrots in the visual record of early modern Europe, with the classification of many remaining unsettled in the scholarship. Proper identification of these images can be valuable data for reconstructing historical biogeography and transatlantic trade; especially compelling is the potential of certain “mystery parrots” in the visual record to support the existence of taxa which may have gone extinct due to colonization and trade. However, it is important to recognize the potential pitfalls of trying to assert positive identifications through these centuries-old images. As parrots are amongst the most colorfully diverse taxa of birds on the planet, often, plumage color is a key diagnostic factor in making an identification; and yet, there are a variety of reasons why the colors of any one individual’s image may not be enough to confirm its scientific classification. Reading colors as recorded in the visual record must therefore be approached with caution and with an interdisciplinary knowledge of both the science and art of color. This paper offers a list of scientific and artistic variables which should be considered when reading color clues to identify Neotropical parrots in early modern European art, including explanations and illustrated examples of these factors, which scholars from across fields interested in engaging in such "historical birding" can consult.

Opossums (Order Didelphimorphia) are marsupial mammals endemic to the Americas. They are also the first marsupials Europeans ever encountered, over a century before any Australasian species. Because of their unique marsupial characteristics, opossums have historically been viewed as an “anomalous” animal form across both Indigenous American and European cultures, and thus developed a rich and complex transatlantic cultural history. By tracing the development of opossum imagery through the millennia, one can uncover clear patterns of how their distinct features became embedded in iconographies relative to biogeocultural sphere, and how certain iconographic conventions were transmitted through various media both within and between cultures. The single most important flashpoint in this historical visual timeline was the transatlantic convergence of cultures post-1492, as this was the catalyst which not only jumpstarted this visual record on the European side, but also curtailed it for centuries on the Indigenous American side. While European opossum images proliferated, a once diverse and widespread Indigenous American iconography was all but erased within a generation of conquest. However, it appears at least a few opossums managed to survive this apparent iconographic extinction, embedded within the imagery of early Spanish colonial projects illustrated by Indigenous artists, while Indigenous ethnozoological knowledge also influenced the production of European images. This thesis will examine how, through cross-cultural currents and syncretic processes, opossum iconography developed on both sides of the Atlantic during the Early Modern Period (fifteenth through eighteenth centuries), with an emphasis on where and how Indigenous knowledge survived in this visual record.