Printmaking

Two wood and glass cases with screenprints inside in the middle of a gallery space with white walls and colorful prints hung on the walls.

Two TV monitors and various types of seating rest on a wooden floor printed with dark images. Adjacent to the TV monitors, a wall is covered with yellow pamphlets printed with different urban scenes printed in black ink.

A group of people sit around a table covered with screenprints in front of a black and white polka-dot wall with colorful prints hung on it.

People stand and talk in a room with partial wood paneling and partial wallpaper covering the walls. Lots of framed and unframed artworks hang on the wall.

Two light-skinned, young people work on a screenprint in a gallery space.

Three people look down at a table covered in colorful screenprints. One of them, a tanned, middle-aged, Native man points to the prints.

Two white women work on a screenprint while a group of children watch.

A Black man in an apron crouches in a space filled with prints on paper and t-shirts laid out to dry.

A man sits on a large bean bag chair holding a poster and facing a wall of posters.

A little white girl exclaims in joy and surprise next to a smiling, older white woman looking down at a piece of paper with stamp prints on it.

Printmaking is an all-encompassing term for multiple techniques of transferring an image from one material, called the matrix, on to another material, commonly paper or fabric. The process allows for multiple impressions of the same image to be generated relatively easily and inexpensively and for text and images to be disseminated broadly. Prints can be a powerful tool for grassroots activism and social and political protest.

Common methods of printmaking include woodcut, etching, engraving, lithography, linocut, and serigraphy/screen printing. The two oldest types of printmaking are intaglio (such as etching or engraving) and relief (such as woodcut or linocut). For intaglio printmaking, lines are incised into the matrix, filled with ink, then transferred to the paper or fabric by rolling them together through a press. For relief printmaking, material is removed from the matrix and what remains is inked and transferred to the paper or fabric. In both cases, the image is reversed in the final product, so images and text must be created backward on the matrix in order to read correctly in the final print.

Explore printmaking by clicking on the images above and browsing the content below.

Explore collection stories—texts, videos, and creative responses from faculty, students, artists, scholars, and curators to works in the Tang collection.

Messy black ink letters and numbers printed on a white paper.

Assistant Professor of Psychology Erica Wojcik on

Glenn Ligon

A symmetrical print of a face with houses and people in the background. Half of the print is green and half is red.

Atlan Arceo-Witzl ’18 on

Self Help Graphics & Art

Two women in a gallery looking at a row of artworks depicting black and white silhouettes and various scenes.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Bernardo Ramirez Rios on

Sister Corita Kent & Chicano/a Art in Los Angeles

A yellow screenprint with a black capital G and text "your name is a golden bell hung in my heart. I would break my body to pieces to call you by your name."

Curatorial Assistant Molly Channon on

Corita Kent’s G O greatest show of worth, 1968

A middle-aged, tanned, Native man sits behind a table covered in colorful screen-prints.

Jeffrey Gibson on

Inspiration from Corita Kent

A middle-aged Latinx man stands talking to two light-skinned, younger people facing him.

Miguel A. Aragón on

Printmaking & Depicting Death in a Border City

A checklist with text on the left and thumbnail images of black and white prints on the right.

View or download the checklist here!

Teaching Ideas

Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History Allison Kim’s “AH251C: Italian Renaissance Art” class examined woodcut and intaglio prints from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs and Malloy Curator Rachel Seligman led a class discussion about printmaking tools and techniques, and the students participated in close-looking exercises to understand the refined features of each composition, such as how subtle line quality can define shadow and light. The class also discussed printmaking as a mode of representation during the Renaissance, reviewing advantages and disadvantages to printing methods, image reproduction, and audience reception.

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Anchor name: Dalí

A checklist with text on the left and thumbnail images of colorful prints on the right.

View or download the checklist here!

Teaching Ideas

Assistant Professor of Spanish Mary Kate Donovan led a discussion with her “WLS211: Survey of Spanish Literature” class about Les Caprices de Goya by Salvador Dalí.

Dalí’s series, from 1977, re-imagines Francisco de Goya’s eighteenth-century etching series, Los Caprichos. Donovan shared examples from Goya’s Los Caprichos and students compared and contrasted the two versions using the Spanish language.

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Close-Looking Exercise

For a visual literacy assignment related to William Acedo’s Dia de los Muertos no es Jalogüin, download the PDF below. Interested in other artwork from the collection? Contact Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs Rachel Seligman.

View or download the close-looking exercise here!