Robert Blackburn Revolutionary Printmaker At Amon Carter

FORT WORTH, TEXAS

:The Amon Carter Museum will present an exhibition of more than 50 dazzling prints that illustrate the enduring vision of master printmaker Robert Blackburn (1920-2003), who changed the course of American art through his groundbreaking graphic work and the printmaking workshop that he founded in 1948 in New York City. "Creative Space: 50 Years of Robert Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop" features a selection of Blackburn's own work along with prints by collaborators, students, friends and colleagues, and presents a remarkable record of artistic achievement over the past 50 years. The exhibition will be on view in the Carter's Works on Paper Galleries from January 7 through March 19.

Blackburn is widely regarded as a pioneering contributor to the technical and aesthetic development of abstract color lithography. He is recognized as well for his generosity in encouraging and training thousands of diverse artists to experiment in graphic color. Some of these artists are represented in the exhibition, including Will Barnet, Romare Bearden, Willie Birch, Jacob Lawrence, Faith Ringgold and Juan Sanchez.

"Robert Blackburn's efforts on behalf of American printmaking were closely intertwined with that of many important printmakers of our time," said Jane Myers, senior curator of prints and drawings at the Carter. "His heartfelt, inclusive sprit is evident in the wide diversity of artists he attracted to his studio, as well as through his discovery of new printmaking processes that allowed for considerable freedom and complexity."

Growing up in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, Blackburn was influenced by the intellectual and artistic legacies of Harlem Renaissance artists such as Charles Alston and Augusta Savage, as well as by abstract artists like Hans Hofmann. He also absorbed the artistic ideologies and political tendencies of American social realism practiced by the artists of the WPA and the Mexican modernism of artists like Diego Rivera.

He learned lithography as a teenager at a community center on 125th Street that was sponsored by the Depression-era Works Progress Administration. He studied at the Art Students League for three years during his 20s and later did freelance artistic work for institutions such as the Harmon Foundation. During this time he began to forge his signature abstract style amid the varied modernist currents he encountered. In 1948, he opened his own studio in Chelsea, the Printmaking Workshop, which would become the longest-lasting and largest nonprofit print workshop in the Untied States.

In 1957, following a period of travel and study in Europe, Blackburn became the first master printer for the prestigious Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) lithographic press in Long Island, N.Y. He printed the first 79 editions for the workshop, setting the standard by which it exerted powerful influence on modernist printmaking in America. His own complicated, varicolored abstractions shaped the printmaking forms of more familiar ULAE works by artists such as Jasper Johns and Helen Frankenthaler. In particular, his experiments in color lithography during the 1950s helped fuel the explosion of graphic art that occurred in the following decade by Andy Warhol and his contemporaries.

Co-curated by guest scholar Deborah Cullen of the Museo del Barrio in New York and Katherine Blood, curator of fine prints at the Library of Congress, "Creative Space" examines the life and work of Blackburn in five sections: Milieu: The Harlem Community Arts Center and the WPA; Founding the Printmaking Workshop; A Graphic Explosion; Incorporation, Experimentation and Outreach; and Seeds and Collaborations.

"Creative Space: 50 Years of Robert Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop" is a Library of Congress exhibition. The Amon Carter Museum is at 3501 Camp Bowie Boulevard. For information, 817-738-1933, or cartermuseum.org.