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Prints and the Prince of Prints
Artist-printer collaborations at Portland Museum of Art
by Edgar Allen Beem
Contemporary Collaborations: Artist and Master Printer at the Portland Museum of Art features fine art prints by 30 artists who worked with master printers to create lithographs, serigraphs, etchings, aquatints, silkscreens, monotypes and mixed media multiples of all kinds. Most if not all of the artists have Maine connections, but this is by no means a provincial little Maine print show. Featured artists include Will Barnet, Jonathan Borofsky, Lesley Dill, David Driskell, Richard Estes, Charlie Hewitt, Alison Hildreth, Robert Indiana, Yvonne Jacquette, Alex Katz, Tim Rollins, Johnnie Winona Ross, David Row, and John Walker, all artists with established reputations and extensive national and international exhibition histories.
What Contemporary Collaborations does is call attention to the role of master printers, the equivalent in the fine art world of the cinematographer in film, in helping artists who are primarily painters to translate their visual vocabulary from paint to print. The exhibition was the brainchild of curator and collector Bruce Brown, Maine's one-man band of printmaking. Brown's own print collection was exhibited at Portland Museum of Art in 2000 as Lasting Impressions. When he retired as curator of the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in 2006, Brown, a selfless and well-loved champion of contemporary art, inspired virtually every art institution in the state to undertake a Maine Print Project in which 25 museums and galleries mounted coordinated print exhibitions. The Maine Print Project resulted in David P. Becker's definitive study, The Imprint of Place: Maine Printmaking, 1800-2005 (Down East Books, $35).
The exhibition begins in the museum's elevator lobby where Maine native Tim Rollins, who achieved fame in New York for his collaborations with at-risk teenagers he called Kids of Survival (KOS), shows a photolithograph called "Midsummer's Night Dream" that he made in collaboration with A Company of Girls, a local theater project, and master print Alex Kahn of the Maine College of Art. Johnnie Winona Ross, who taught for many years at MECA before relocating to New Mexico, contributes a very subtle abstract grid chine collé lithograph he made in collaboration with master printers at Santa Fe's Tamarind Institute.
The exhibition continues on the museum's fourth floor mezzanine gallery. One of my favorite prints there is Charlie Hewitt's large-scale drypoint etching "Portland Tumble," which employs his working class vocabulary of hands, chains, ropes, saws and dice in a gritty evocation of Maine's largest city. Hewitt collaborated on the print with James Cambronne at MECA. I was also drawn to Maine native David Row's untitled abstract monotype created at Two Palms Press in New York. The print uses the S-curve so prevalent in Row's geometric abstractions, a great example of which currently hangs in the museum's Great Hall.
For those with a taste for realism, there is photorealist Richard Estes' "Kentucky Fried Chicken," a 110-color silkscreen of an urban landscape executed with the assistance of master printer Luther Davis at Axelle Editions in Brooklyn, and Yvonne Jacquette's "Aerial View of 33rd St.," a large black and white lithograph made in collaboration with John Chris Erickson at Sienna Studio.
What you will not see, blessedly, in Contemporary Collaborations are any of those ersatz "prints" made these days by painters who simply get their paintings scanned and laser printed and then sign them as limited edition prints. A fine art print is not a photocopy or a reproduction, not a picture of a painting but a work of art unto itself. Personally, I like to see the hand of the artist at work on the surface, not just in the signature.
Contemporary Collaborations: Artist and Master Printer, through August 10, Portland Museum of Art, Seven Congress Square, Portland ME, 207-775-6148, www.portlandmuseum.org.
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