Chinese Woodblock Print Exhibition at UMMA

 

Multiple Impressions: Contemporary Chinese Woodblock Prints

July 16–October 23, 2011

 

 

Multiple Impressions is organized by the University of Michigan Museum of Art with the cooperation and support of the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China. The 114 works on view by 41 of China's leading contemporary printmakers showcase the extraordinary innovations, both in technique and conception while providing an important framework for understanding both contemporary art from China and contemporary Chinese society.

For more info go to: http://www.umma.umich.edu/view/exhibitions/2011-mimpressions.php

A few years back I wrote on Baren about one of China's premier printmakers...Liao Shiou-ping.

Earlier this year, Taiwan’s Council for Cultural Affairs awarded graphic artist Liao Shiou-ping one of three National Cultural Awards. The 74-year-old artist, renowned for blending Western printmaking techniques with traditional Taiwanese and Chinese influences, was recognised for his outstanding contribution to Taiwan culture.

Click here to read an article celebrating the artis's accomplishments.  

To visit a retrospective website with many images and writings click on the image below. 

Mabel Hewit (1903 - 1984)

Cleveland artist Mabel Hewit, whose work is the subject of a delightful summer/fall exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Born in Conneaut in 1903 and raised in Youngstown, Hewit, who died in 1984, spent the last 50 years of her life in Cleveland and Parma, where she produced dozens of colorful prints redolent of small-town and city life during the Great Depression and the decades that followed.

Hewit learned from West Virginia native Blanche Lazzell, a leading practitioner of white-line woodcut technique, who gave instruction in her studio in Provincetown, Mass., during the 1930s. The exhibition's catalog, which presents original research by Jane Glaubinger, the show's organizer and curator of prints, states that Hewit must have studied with Lazzell in 1929, when she visited Cape Cod to attend a class in outdoor painting sponsored by Teachers College, or in the summer of 1933. Judging from a 1934 color woodcut, in which Hewit closely emulated a similar work by Lazzell, the latter's influence was profound and lasting.

For the complete article see: http://www.cleveland.com/arts/index.ssf/2010/07/hewit.html

More images below......

"Mowing", color woodcut, (11" X 9.5") 

"Along the River" , color woodcut, 1959 (8" X 8.5")

"Welcome Home", color woodcut, 1959 (77.8" X 5.6")

Letterpress Printing - FILMS

Let's go back in time and see what commercial printing was like 60 years ago ! These are vocational films going back to 1947 !!!