Passages
September 18 – December 19, 2014
FIRST RETROSPECTIVE OF ARTIST AND MASTER
PRINTMAKER
Opening reception with special guests Faith
Ringgold and Mel Edwards: Thursday, September 18, 2014, 5-7pm
1207 Cole
Student Activities Building
University
of Maryland,
College
Park, MD
Driskell
Center press release:
The David
C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland is pleased to organize the
first comprehensive retrospective exhibition of influential artist and master
printmaker Robert Hamilton Blackburn (1920-2003): Robert Blackburn: Passages. The exhibition is curated by Dr.
Deborah Cullen, Director & Chief Curator, The Miriam & Ira D. Wallach
Art Gallery, Columbia University in the City of New York; with contributions by
Prof. Curlee R. Holton, Executive Director, David C. Driskell Center.
Robert Blackburn: Passages features about 90 works
by Blackburn and 10 by his contemporaries such as Charles Alston, Will Barnet,
Grace Hartigan, Robin Holder, and Norman Lewis. Passages will include works on loan from the Library of Congress,
the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts’ Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop,
The Cochran Collection, The Nelson/Dunks Collection, and Metropolitan Transit
Authority Arts for Transit and Urban Design, and others, and will be on display
at the Driskell Center from September 18th through December 19th 2014. The
exhibition will start its national tour on January 2015 and will travel
thereafter.
A
retrospective of Blackburn is long overdue. A “printmaker’s printmaker,”
Blackburn affected the course of twentieth-century graphic through his own work,
as well as through the institution which he founded in New York City in 1948,
The Printmaking Workshop—the oldest and largest print workshop in the United
States until 2001. Blackburn’s “passages” through the modern and contemporary
print world are complex and unique, and he is a bridge between the Works
Project Administration (WPA) and the “print explosion” of the 1960s.
In
conjunction with the exhibition, the Driskell Center will also publish an
exhibition catalogue which will be the first significant monograph of Robert
Blackburn’s work. The catalogue will include color reproductions of each work
in the exhibition, as well as essays by Prof. Curlee R. Holton and curator Dr.
Deborah Cullen, whose monographic text is an excerpt from her dissertation, “Robert
Blackburn: American Printmaker,” 2002 (The Graduate Center of the City
University of New York). The catalogue will be available for purchase at the
Driskell Center and on the Center’s website for $35.
In
addition, the Driskell C. Center and the Arts Program at the University of
Maryland University College will host a symposium, “Robert Blackburn and the
Modernist Movement in Prints,” on Friday and Saturday, October 24th and 25th.
The symposium will be held at the University of Maryland University College,
College Park Marriott Hotel & Conference Center, Adelphi, MD. Both the
symposium and exhibition Robert
Blackburn: Passages look at Blackburn’s work within the context of American
modernism. The symposium will open with a reception at the David C. Driskell
Center on Friday, October 24th, from 5:30p.m. - 7p.m. The Symposium’s sessions
on Saturday, October 25th, include: “Is it a Good Print, or Not?”; “Blackburn
as an Artist/Printmaker and his Contemporaries”; and “Blackburn and Modernism.”
Presenters at the symposium include Judith Brodie, curator and head, department
of modern prints and drawings, National Gallery of Art; Prof. Curlee R. Holton,
Executive Director, David C. Driskell Center; Dr. Deborah Cullen, Director and
Chief Curator, Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University;
Katherine Blood, Curator of Fine Prints & Poster, Prints & Photographs
Division, Library of Congress; Phil Sanders, Director, Robert Blackburn
Printmaking Workshop; Prof. Joshua Shannon, Associate Professor, Contemporary
Art History & Theory at the Department of Art History and Archaeology at
the University of Maryland; and Prof. David C. Driskell, artist and
Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Art at University of Maryland,
College Park. The symposium will conclude with a reception for the exhibition Maryland Printmakers: Printmaking in a
Modern Society at the University of Maryland University College’s Arts
Program (at the same location as the symposium). Additional information about
the symposium and registration will be made available at
driskellcenter.umd.edu.
ABOUT ROBERT BLACKBURN
Trained
through the nexus of arts organizations in Harlem during the 1930s, Blackburn
learned lithography at the WPA’s Harlem Community Art Center. He attended The
Art Students’ League in the early 1940s, where he met Will Barnet, who would
become his teacher and longtime friend. He moved downtown, and by 1948, bought
his own press to initiate a collaborative atelier in his loft. Blackburn
traveled to Paris and throughout Europe in 1953-1954 on a John Hay Whitney
Traveling Fellowship, while his workshop was run by friends. Upon his return,
Blackburn was hired as the first master printer of Universal Limited Art
Editions (ULAE) in West Islip, Long Island, where he printed its first
seventy-nine editions for Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Jasper Johns,
Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, and others. His fluency
and technical mastery of complex, abstract, color lithography contributed to
forging the well-known ULAE expression that instigated the “graphics boom” of
the 1960s. Blackburn returned full-time to his own shop, and in 1971
incorporated it as a not-for-profit organization. He continued to work on a
series of experimental woodcuts as well as investigative intaglio and monotype,
traveled, and did residencies and commissions including designing mosaics for a
New York subway station in the year before his death. Blackburn received a John
D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1992 and a Lee Krasner
Award from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 2000.
Blackburn
produced an experimental and intimate body of work, primarily in lithography
and woodcut that reveled in rich color, explored ideas of edition and variation,
and experimented with abstraction at a time when black artists were expected to
use figuration. The artist’s graphics have been exhibited internationally and
are represented in numerous public and private collections.
