Art on Paper Nov/Dec 2005

Wilson Shieh,
Baby,
color direct gravure with aquatint, spitbite, aquatint, and Ganmpi paper chine collé

I'm about to run out of the door and pick up this month's "Art on Paper". It's their second annual print edition.

The Year in Prints, Second Annual
prints by:
Mary Lee Bendolph / Enrique Chagoya / Shoshana Dentz / Tony Fitzpatrick / Ellen Gallagher / Trenton Doyle Hancock / Carrie Moyer / Shaun O’Dell / David Row / Ed Ruscha / James Siena / Wilson Shieh / Dana Schutz / Carolyn Swiszcz / Richard Tuttle / Kara Walker / Andrea Zittel

Thirty-five years ago, it would have been unlikely to walk into a collector’s home and find limited edition prints hanging in the company of paintings. Prints were considered the affordable offspring of contemporary art; people acquired them because they did not have the money to buy unique artworks by their favorite artists. Today things are changing and collectors acquire contemporary art with less regard to a particular medium. Still, we think it is instructive to single out prints as a sub-genre of contemporary art because the world to which they belong is full of fascinating contradictions. Technically, prints can be both inventive and arcane, incorporating the latest digital discoveries while making great use of such primitive processes as woodblock carving. Socially, they are simultaneously elitist and populist. Originally developed to ensure the widespread proliferation of images and ideas, fine art prints are now generally published in small editions of between ten to thirty impressions. For our Second Annual New Prints Review, we looked at more than 175 submissions from 81 publishers and workshops. The prints we considered were all published in the United States between September 2004 and September 2005 and adhere to the traditional definition of printmaking: they were printed through the transfer of an image from a matrix or plate to paper (i.e., lithographs, silkscreen prints, etchings, etc.). We selected seventeen for inclusion here, which is less than ten percent of what we reviewed. With regard to publishers and workshops, there are many whose prints were included last year that do not have prints included this year; several whose work is appearing for the first time; and a few that are represented by two prints, in part, because we are particularly excited about the artists they are working with right now. Although there is a lot of deserving work that is not here, we believe that the pages that follow provide a representative overview of some of the highlights of the year. —The Editors