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2021

Looking Back on the New York Graphic Workshop, 1964-1970

October 13, 2021 · 12:00 PM ET · Online

Presented by the Association of Print Scholars

Title frame from the recording of “Looking Back on the New York Graphic Workshop, 1964-1970”

Watch the recording

Speakers

  • Nora Rosengarten — Ph.D. candidate, Harvard University
  • Luis Camnitzer — Artist-printmaker
  • Ursula Davila-Villa — Independent curator and art historian
  • Liliana Porter — Artist-printmaker

Organized in association with IFPDA, this symposia presented by the Association of Print Scholars explores the past, present, and future of printmaking studio practices, specifically examining how the medium has evolved conceptually, culturally, and as a dialogic artistic practice.

This panel considers the work and legacy of the New York Graphic Workshop, a printmaking collective operative from 1964 to 1970. Together, printmakers Luis Camnitzer (b. 1937), José Guillermo Castillo (1938-1999), and Liliana Porter (b. 1941) devoted themselves to producing conceptual pieces indebted to printmaking and its labor-intensive processes. Even as they were committed to traditional methods, the NYGW often bent lithography, etching, and engraving away from their conventions, toward new questions, problems, and ideas. As Camnitzer stated in 1966: “We are printmakers conditioned but not destroyed by our techniques.”

  2. Title frame from the recording of “Themes and Variations: Topics from Print Council of America — Art and the Pull of Print; A Conversation”

    2021OnlineRecording

    Themes and Variations: Topics from Print Council of America — Art and the Pull of Print; A Conversation

    October 28, 2021 · 12:00 PM ET

    Jennifer L. Roberts, Glenn Adamson, Andrew Raftery and Shelley R. Langdale

    How might we more fully consider the physical operations of printmaking as contributing to the conceptual, metaphorical, and visceral implications of prints as works of art? Jennifer Roberts provides an overview of her recent A.W. Mellon lectures *Contact: Art and the Pull of Print*, and then discusses, with Raftery and Adamson, the ideas set forth in the lectures. What would it mean to consider contact rather than reproduction as the essence of print? To argue that printmaking drives, rather than derives from, innovation in other media? To imagine that the processes of printmaking, its nuanced way of facing up to the factual, encourage a way of seeing the world that is urgently needed today? **Jennifer L. Roberts** is the Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. She is a scholar of American and British art from the 18th century to the present day. Her work approaches the history of art through its intersections with print history, material studies, the theory and practice of making, and the history and philosophy of science. **Glenn Adamson** is a curator and writer who works at the intersection of craft, design history and contemporary art. He has previously been Director of the Museum of Arts and Design; Head of Research at the V & A; and Curator at the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee. His most recent book is *Craft: An American History*, published by Bloomsbury in 2021. **Andrew Raftery** is an artist specializing in both fictional and autobiographical narrative scenes of contemporary American life. Known for his paintings, burin engravings and drawings, Raftery has developed a particular interest in prints for their ubiquitous role in our world: on wallpaper, clothing, and functional objects. His artistic practice is heavily research-based as a curator and collector, and it is both personal and objective, a constant self-reflection informed by historical research on the democratization of mediums.

  3. Title frame from the recording of “Sybil and Cyril: Cutting Through Time with Jenny Uglow”

    2021OnlineRecording

    Sybil and Cyril: Cutting Through Time with Jenny Uglow

    October 27, 2021 · 12:00 PM ET

    Jenny Uglow, Jennifer Farrell and Gordon Samuel

    Join us for a conversation with author Jenny Uglow as she sheds new light on the dynamic artistic partnership of Cyril Power and Sybil Andrews. In 1922, Cyril Power, a 54 year old architect, left his family to work with the 24 year old Sybil Andrews. They would be together for 20 years. Both became famous for their dynamic, modernist linocuts, streamlined, full of movement and colour, summing up the hectic interwar years. Yet at the same time they looked back, to medieval myths and early music, to country ways disappearing from sight. *Sybil & Cyril* traces their struggles and triumphs, following them from Suffolk to London, from the New Forest to Vancouver Island. This is a world of Futurists, Surrealists and pioneering abstraction, but also of the buzz of the new, of machines and speed, shops and sport and dance, shining against the threat of depression and looming shadows of war. **Jenny Uglow** is a critic and award-winning biographer. She is particularly interested in the relation of word and image, and her books include studies of writers, artists and engravers, including William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick and Walter Crane. Her most recent book, *Edward Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense*, won the Hawthornden Prize for 2018.