Beginning in the early 1960s, with only the meager budget of a part-time art history professor, Leo Steinberg (1920–2011) amassed a collection of more than 3,500 prints that spans the medium’s five-hundred-year history in the West. Akin to books on a shelf, Steinberg’s prints formed a visual library that shaped his scholarship in fundamental ways. His collection, incorporating the work of artists both famous and obscure, illuminates his claim that in the era before photography, prints functioned as the “circulating lifeblood of ideas,” disseminating figures, compositions, and styles across boundaries of geography, time, and medium. Through close observation of his own prints, Steinberg developed some of his most innovative arguments about the instructive richness of the copy and the expressive potential of body language, while also challenging reigning orthodoxies about modernism. This lavishly illustrated volume with essays by Holly Borham and Peter Parshall examines the development of Steinberg’s remarkable collection and its role in his scholarship. It also serves as a detailed guide to the collection, now housed at the Blanton Museum of Art, and as an introduction to the history of Western printmaking that it broadly encompasses.

In Ruth Asawa's final year at Black Mountain College, c. 1948–49, she used a rubber stamp borrowed from the laundry room and featuring the college's initials (BMC) to make a body of work. Three years later, a pattern derived from this work was mass-produced and marketed across the US under the name Alphabet – without attribution to Asawa, nor to the school for which the pattern's acronym stood. This essay examines the doubled abstraction of Asawa's stamp (in the sense of both material tool and figurative signature), as the letters that she first abstracted into images were subsequently disassociated from both her name and that of the school itself. By tracing Asawa's eventual reclamation of her authorship from this contextual abstraction, this essay makes a broader case for recognizing artistic practices of self-definition.

Prints of a New Kind details the political strategies and scandals that inspired the first generation of American caricaturists to share news and opinions with their audiences in shockingly radical ways. Complementing studies on British and European printmaking, this book is a survey and catalogue of all known American political caricatures created in the country’s transformative early years, as the nation sought to define itself in relation to European models of governance and artistry.
Allison Stagg examines printed caricatures that mocked events reported in newspapers and politicians in the United States’ fledgling government, reactions captured in the personal papers of the politicians being satirized, and the lives of the artists who satirized them. Stagg’s work fills a large gap in early American scholarship, one that has escaped thorough art-historical attention because of the rarity of extant images and the lack of understanding of how these images fit into their political context.

Featuring 125 images, many published here for the first time since their original appearance, and a comprehensive appendix that includes a checklist of caricature prints with dates, titles, artists, references, and other essential information, Prints of a New Kind will be welcomed by scholars and students of early American history and art history as well as visual, material, and print culture.

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.

Readers will probably understand from written instructions that the task of preparing lithography stones can be slow and physically demanding. A detail in the updated Tamarind Techniques for Fine Art Lithography also worth noting is that ‘careful attention is needed for this and all other aspects of lithography’ (Devon, Hamon, and Lagattuta 2008, p.126). Reflecting on the significance of this sometimes lengthy process, my tentative proposal is that, if understood as a form of contemplative labour, limestone graining may offer a way to think about the quality of the ‘careful attention’ needed for lithography. However, far from a silent meditative activity, graining stones is also noisy. Likewise, in this account attention and noise are equally present as the indivisible aspects of a mode of perceptual awareness that I propose is familiar to lithographers. This paradoxical coupling, I suggest, might also reveal the nature of the language engendered by the synchronic vibrations between inscribing flesh and limestone matrices

This project re-envisions the Stanza as the library of Julius II. In so doing, it reanimates these conversations by allowing visitors today to explore the visual and literary parallels that once wedded Raphael's magnificent paintings to the books that were shelved below them. Designed for students, scholars, and curious explorers alike, the platform is an immersive educational environment, allowing users to step into the shoes of the Renaissance scholars, diplomats, and prelates that once visited the space. We invite you to join this digital Stanza as reader, viewer, and interlocutor, to peruse its histories, and to reconsider its contents. What does the Bibliotheca Iulia reveal about word and image in sixteenth-century Rome? And what might these conversations tell us about learning, then and now?

Enter the database at https://scalar.usc.edu/works/digital-stanza-della-segnatura/index