The Department of Drawings and Prints boasts more than one million drawings, prints, and illustrated books made in Europe and the Americas from around 1400 to the present day. Because of their number and sensitivity to light, the works can only be exhibited for a limited period and are usually housed in on-site storage facilities. To highlight the vast range of works on paper, the department organizes four rotations a year in the Robert Wood Johnson, Jr. Gallery. Each installation is the product of a collaboration among curators and consists of up to 100 objects grouped by artist, technique, style, period, or subject.

Featuring a dazzling selection of prints and drawings ranging in date from the early seventeenth century to the present and including several new acquisitions, the current installation explores themes of artistic lineage and homage with a primary focus on portraiture. At its heart are works by members of Black Women of Print, a collective founded by Tanekeya Word to promote the visibility of Black women printmakers and create an equitable future within the discipline of printmaking. These dynamic images pay tribute to earlier Black women artists, among them Elizabeth Catlett and Emma Amos, whose works are also on view. Their prints, along with those by Lorna Simpson, Charles White, Fred Wilson, and John Wilson, reveal the expressive potential of portraiture.

The Wisconsin Triennial, a cornerstone of the Museum’s curatorial programming, is known as a celebration of the breadth and range of artistic practices in the state. For the first time in the Triennial’s history, the exhibition is being organized by a Guest Curator, Fatima Laster. Laster is owner, operator, and curator of 5 Points Art Gallery + Studios in Milwaukee. Ain’t I a Woman? highlights Black women artists in Wisconsin who expand upon the nature and scope of art production. The exhibition will highlight an intergenerational group of women working across different disciplines, including murals, printmaking, sculpture, painting, performance, textiles, and more.

The theme of the 2022 Wisconsin Triennial is influenced by abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Sojourner Truth’s quote and author bell hooks’ book on Black feminism, entitled Ain’t I a Woman?. Laster’s exhibition draws much needed attention to the fact that most racial and gender-based equity and inclusion opportunities in the arts have been dominated by Black men and white women to the exclusion of Black women. Ain’t I a Woman? expands the discourse and highlights trailblazing women and their work.

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*I requested the removal of my artwork from this exhibition on 6/29/22 at 1:13pm due to anti-Blackness. For more info visit FWD:truth

listen,
you a wonder.
you a city
of a woman.
you got a geography
of your own.
listen,
somebody need a map
to understand you.
somebody need directions
to move around you.
listen,
woman,
you not a noplace
anonymous
girl;

-lucille clifton

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What the Mirror Said is an exhibition that borrows its namesake title from a poem published in 1980 by the legendary African American poet, Lucille Clifton. Clifton’s words are written as an affirmation to Black women and serve as a mapping to guide Black girls and women to see themselves as a reflection of grandeur, of boundlessness, where society has localized their being.

This exhibition is an invitation into the collective imaginings of several Black women printmakers who have turned the gaze inward—as a mode of self-reflexivity and autonomy. In our largest group exhibition to date, Black Women of Print utilizes printmaking as a device to recollect and visually narrate how the artists see themselves and the world around them and to imagine otherwise.* -Tanekeya Word, exhibition curator

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Exhibitors:

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Chloe Alexander     Dr. Deborah Grayson          
LaToya M. Hobbs     Ann Johnson     Delita Martin
Althea Murphy-Price     Karen J. Revis
Stephanie Santana     Tanekeya Word

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* Sharpe, Christina. “Lose Your Kin.” The New Inquiry, 16 November 2016, and In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

Image Details: Chloe Alexander, I didn't recognize you, you changed your hair, silkscreen, 2021, 11 x 20 in.

“Like our foremothers, Black women printmakers have used the tools in our hands to create visual languages that tell the stories of our past, present, future and the in-between spaces within fractal time. A Contemporary Black Matriarchal Lineage in Printmaking explores the narratives of 9 contemporary Black women printmakers, living in the United States of America, who have shaped a place for themselves. Utilizing the elements of art, in an improvisational style, each printmaker shares matriarchal perspectives on Black interiority."

- Tanekeya Word

Featuring Works By:
Tanekeya Word, Delita Martin, LaToya Hobbs, Lisa Hunt, Ann Johnson, Karen J Revis, Chloe Alexander, Sam Vernon, and Stephanie Santana

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Highpoint is delighted to partner with Delita Martin and Tanekeya Word to deliver the exhibition A Contemporary Black Matriarchal Lineage in Printmaking. Curated by Tanekeya and Delita, this show centers the narratives of Black women printmakers, by Black women printmakers.

The exhibition will feature the work of 12 contemporary Black women printmakers from across the United States.

The Department of Drawings and Prints boasts more than one million drawings, prints, and illustrated books made in Europe and the Americas from around 1400 to the present day. Because of their number and sensitivity to light, the works can only be exhibited for a limited period and are usually housed in on-site storage facilities. To highlight the vast range of works on paper, the department organizes four rotations a year in the Robert Wood Johnson, Jr. Gallery. Each installation is the product of a collaboration among curators and consists of up to one hundred objects grouped by artist, technique, style, period, or subject.

For centuries, art has played a role in revolutions, protests, and social activist movements. This installation explores how artists from the eighteenth century to the present have mobilized works on paper to promote causes or ideals, record or respond to events, and sway public opinion. The drawings, prints, and posters on view relate to the American, French, Haitian, Mexican, and Russian revolutions, the abolition of slavery, and campaigns for and against the dominant political systems of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As this grouping demonstrates, artists have turned to printmaking, in particular, to call attention to racial, gender, and economic injustices.

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Center of Knowhere
73 Circuit Avenue
Oak Bluffs, MA 02557

Curated by young scholars as part of the MFA’s new partnership with local youth empowerment organizations, “Black Histories, Black Futures” focuses on works by 20th-century artists of color. It represents a major rethinking and reinstallation of a central area in the Museum that stretches between the Huntington Avenue and Fenway entrances. Forming a literal centerpiece of the MFA’s 150th anniversary celebration in 2020, the exhibition carves out a space for stirring exploration and celebration of Black histories, experiences, and self-representations.

The exhibition includes works by well-known artists such as Archibald Motley, Norman Lewis, James Van Der Zee, Gordon Parks, and Dawoud Bey and brings fresh attention to artists with connections to Boston, such as SMFA graduate Loïs Mailou Jones and longtime South End resident Allan Rohan Crite. The teens organized the exhibition into four thematic sections: “Ubuntu: I am Because You Are” presents images of community life and leisure activities; “Welcome to the City” focuses on paintings of urban scenes in both figurative and abstract styles; and, with photographs and works on paper depicting intimate moments from everyday life, “Normality Facing Adversity” and “Smile in the Dark” both consider the radicality of simply being oneself.

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Koplin Del Rio is pleased to announce the opening of Drawing the Ghost, a group exhibition curated by long-time gallery artist, Robert Pruitt. Drawing the Ghost presents nearly 50 works from 18 artists employing varying modes of drawing to explore ideas of Race, Class, Gender, Futurism, Celestial phenomena, History and other concepts. This is Pruitt's first curated exhibition with the gallery. Says the artist, "This exhibition merges with my own art practice through the selection of artists who work with the human figure as a foundation. Similarly, the selected artists carefully use humor and juxtaposition in their work. These are artists I have known and have admired for some time. They create alluring images, apply complicated conceptual strategies, and illustrate narratives from the margins of our social and cultural landscapes."

"Drawing has been the dominant and central medium forming and guiding my relationship to art making and understanding creative processes. I am attracted to its nature as a democratic, primal and primary art form. For me, the human figure is a social, physical and spiritual subject, unparalleled in its ability to intuitively convey ideas about our shared conditions. This exhibition delves into the nexus of figure drawing.


All of these artists' processes inform deeper conceptual readings of the works in this show, but they also affirm the innate accessibility of drawing. It is a medium that naturally allows the viewer to see every step of an image's creation. The conjury of drawing happens not in the mystery of materials, but in the visibility of the acts that created it. A drawn line, finger smudges, even erasures act as a history that the viewer can see. The finished artwork becomes a recording of the time and movements of the artist who created it. The artist's presence or "spirit" is captured in the completed work. Drawing the Ghost then becomes not just an exhibition but a documentation of rituals."

Robert Pruitt - TwankieTwankie

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