Home

A look at some New Members

Message from the President

History

Mission

Newsletter

Patrons

Members

Membership

Links

Board of Directors

Print Biennial

Arches Student Show

Annual Members Show

Annual Meeting

Publications

Press

Volunteer Opportunities

Travel

Patrons

Accepted Artist

2009 Awards

Jurors Statement

Gallery of some of the Biennial prints

s

Download the 2009
Full Biennial Catalog

At her lecture before the opening reception, juror Roberta
Waddell discussed and illustrated each piece she had chosen for the
2009 Biennial. To read her remarks, click here.

top

top

top

Juror’s Statement

It can be a challenge to find an exhibition that features contemporary prints. In New York, a city that prides itself on being the center of the art world, there are major print collections in museums and other cultural institutions (along with a number of printmaking workshops and schools that foster printmaking), but new prints barely register on the local exhibition seismograph. Although there are
several hundred commercial galleries within the five boroughs, prints do not command the prices necessary for dealers to pay the rent, so only a handful offer prints and generally only those editions they have published. Furthermore, the contemporary print, an original (usually multiple) work of art, is often confused with a reproduction (even the word “print” in English compounds the confusion). In a quiet, ongoing response to this situation, The Boston Printmakers for more than sixty years have championed printmakers and have educated the public about prints, particularly through the North American Print Biennial, a competition and exhibition that provides a significant overview of contemporary work. As the juror of this year’s Biennial I was introduced to a remarkable selection of new prints. Admittedly it was a challenge to choose from 1,791 images no more than 125 works of art, a charge made more daunting given the high quality of the submissions. I juried the show from digital files, which reduce marks, textures, ink and paper to pixels that can be frustrating to interpret. I was grateful that the Executive Board of The Boston Printmakers allowed me two weeks to study carefully the digital surrogates.

I wanted to include as many artists as possible, while documenting the variety of printmaking media available today. As I reviewed the images, several themes gradually emerged: figures and faces; the landscape and still life; architecture, the city and suburbs; abstraction; political and social commentary; and finally, words used as images. These leitmotifs served as useful, but loose guidelines during the selection process and helped shape the show. Once I made my choices and learned the names of the contributing artists, I continued my research and uncovered themes and concerns more subtle and complex than those initial categories could begin to suggest. No matter what their issues and agendas, however, I found that the artists included in the Biennial successfully communicated their artistic intentions through carefully chosen printmaking techniques (sometimes combining processes, sometimes in concert with drawing and painting). Many of the prints were created by artists who have specialized in printmaking and mastered all the skills required to create a print. Others were made by artists in collaboration with professional printers. Such technical assistance has encouraged painters, sculptors and artists of varied persuasions to discover through printmaking new ways to “say things,” oftentimes giving them fresh insights into their work in other media.

Whether solo or with collaborators, the artists in the Biennial have chosen and exploited printmaking techniques to serve their expressive and conceptual needs: content and form are symbiotic. Among the relief prints that I feel demonstrated that thematic and technical synergy is Neil Shigley’s larger than life Eddie 51. Shigley aggressively gouged a sheet of Plexiglas with marks that give a powerful presence to his subject, a homeless San Diego man, while Nicholas Naughton equates the mass and solidity of the wood block matrix with the stolid strength of his immigrant worker. Chris Papa’s dynamic abstractions reflect the energy that he expends to cut the block, in contrast to Ann Conner’s spare, conceptual woodcuts that play with varied simple geometric forms, colors, and wood grain textures.

Intaglio processes proved equally versatile and eloquent. They give a crystalline clarity to Linda Adato’s and Wilfred Loring Jr.’s skillfully rendered suburban views, and conviction to K.K. Kozik’s haunting, surreal bedroom scene in Force Majeure. Whitney Calvert conjures up urban grittiness in her evocatively etched 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, while Jessica Dunne uses the painterly effects of spit bite to suggest the moody mystery of a dark highway. Mezzotint shines a spotlight on the exquisite beauty of everyday objects, including Judith Rothchild’s cabbage and Julie Niskanen’s wasp’s nest, and injects drama into night scenes, like Frederick Mershimer’s F train to Manhattan. James Groleau relies on mezzotint’s unrivaled blacks in his series of covered and shadowy faces to suggest that veils isolate individuals and cultures.

For Butt Johnson, known for his intricate ballpoint pen drawings, lithography (the word literally means “stone drawing”) was an ideal medium to render his whimsical Piranesian architectural ruin, and James Dormer similarly chose lithographic crayon to freely weave an abstract network of intersecting lines that he perceives as automatic drawings informed by memory. Ellen Price uses the same tool to delicately model her African-American sitters, and in the process, help convey their vulnerability.

Other artists demonstrated the expressive range of the screenprint. With flat, dense areas of color Mark Hosford gives substance and reality to his surreal scenario in The Waiting Game. However, in Brian Johnson’s hands the screenprint becomes as transparent as his critique on Washington and the Iraq War. In “. . . an illusory panorama. . .” he overlays pale, translucent areas of color with images and text that orders “shoot again,” while reassuring, “mission accomplished.” Digital processes have allowed artists to create “seamless” images that redefine the “handmade.” By appropriating and weaving together 1950s advertisements Mike Elko offers highly visible symbols of patriotism; his subjects wear elaborate headgear that accommodate American flags “For Those Times When a Lapel Pin Just Isn’t Enough.” Ross Racine, with Adobe Photoshop and an inkjet printer (the same tools used in urban planning), digitally draws his own convincing and claustrophobic suburb, Brookdale Gardens.

Some artists capitalized on the immediacy of the monotype. By painting and judiciously wiping away ink, Michael David finds in monotype a printmaking equivalent to light shimmering on and through glass in his China Cabinet. Paula Stokes, a trained glass blower, realizes a fluid, vitreous transparency in her monoprint composed of layers of floating “organisms.”

While medium in the Biennial seemed consistently and convincingly intertwined with the artist’s intentions, sometimes that message involved actual words. In Roberta Delaney’s Parallel Voices, one of the books selected for the show, images not so much illustrate as illuminate a series of poems, while for Barbara Millman words and images join forces to address specific ecological issues. Most books included in the Biennial stretch the definition of the traditionally bound book as a reminder that form and format can also reinforce an artist’s message. Christie Ginanni appropriates missing children advisories on milk cartons to communicate her concern about vanishing species. Ginanni’s cartons and Leah DePrizio’s Gaze Vase insist that prints need not be flat, nor must they be framed, but like Nicholas Naughton’s woodcut, they can float, or, like Neil Shigley’s portrait, be mounted on canvas, unglazed and unframed, to heighten the work’s impact and presence.

My comments about this year’s Biennial can only suggest how exciting and rewarding it was to review the submissions, more prints and books than I could otherwise have seen in years of portfolio reviews and visits to galleries and museums. From among those entries, but for space constraints, I could have selected not just one, but two strong shows. I am grateful to the Executive Board of the Boston Printmakers for their continuing commitment to the North American Print Biennial, which can answer any and all questions about the state of printmaking today. The answer: printmaking is alive, well, and thriving, and the proof is amply evident and on view in Gallery 808.

Roberta Waddell
Curator Emerita, The New York Public Library