Annmarie Sculpture Garden & Arts Center

On Paper: Printmaking, Book Arts & Beyond

February 19 - September 26, 2021

The Kay Daugherty Gallery at Annmarie Sculpture Garden & Arts Center will feature On Paper: Printmaking, Book Arts & Beyond. Selected work will highlight the expanse of printmaking and book arts as an artistic discipline. Techniques such as relief printing, etching, lithography, paper making, book binding, letterpress, collage and papercut will be explored. All works should showcase the unique process and craftsmanship that goes into each handmande paper, print, or collage.

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Juror’s Statement 

Paper has been made and used to produce creative works since the eighth century BCE. With early roots in Eastern cultures and associations with handwriting, image-making, and printing it has an impressive and important past and a strong call from its public for a thriving future.

Along with paper made for every day uses, paper made for fine art writing, drawing, and  printing has seen a revival in recent decades and continues to offer a wide variety of creative surfaces and building blocks for art works.

Artists introduced to different paper textures will have different creative reactions, some practical, some inspirational. Works on paper by artists represented in this display offer a myriad of creative thought and manipulation, from a drawing on a sheet of paper to a compendium of colored papers in books.

Artists create wonder and introspective magic during typical times, but during the last months, ripe with social unrest and a pandemic, our comfort levels have been exhausted. In order to make sense of the world many artists feel the need to escape outside, mainstream tensions by creating. The artistic works give us contemplative views of comfort, pain, joy, strength, pride, resilience, and hope.

My experience with works on paper has been as a “keeper” of some forty thousand drawings, progressive proofs, and prints in the Graphic Arts Collection of the National Museum of American History. The mission of the unit has been to collect, retain, and explain printing and printmaking processes. This mission has enabled me to work with, and better understand, the countless creative approaches to works on paper, through time and internationally. Interestingly the collection, established in 1886, was created initially and primarily as a teaching collection with much of the then much smaller group of holdings remaining on display in a “permanent” exhibit. As part of our mission, we assisted and continue to assist our public with information about the technologies of printing and printmaking.

TAKE A CLOSER LOOK 
at the artists' processes and inspiration below!