Marking Resilience: Indigenous North American Prints at MFA Boston

Check out this exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston! Marking Resilience: Indigenous North American Prints is on view from November 4, 2023 through March 17, 2024 and features Highpoint Editions work by Dyani White Hawk, Julie Buffalohead, and Andrea Carlson!

Resilience often manifests in work by Indigenous North American artists, for example in its content or simply by increasing visibility to combat erasure in representation. Some Native artists have used the collaborative medium of printmaking as a way of reclaiming their histories and addressing the challenges their communities face today.

Check out MFA Boston’s website for more information and additional programming.

Highpoint Editions at INK Miami 2023

Highpoint Editions visits INK Miami for the 2nd year!

Now celebrating its 16th year, the INK Miami Art Fair is unique among the satellite fairs during Miami Art Week as the premier fair for works on paper. Visiting INK is also free! From December 6th through December 10th, Highpoint Editions exhibited 13 artists at INK including Julie Mehretu, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Wille Cole, Andrea Carlson, Delita Martin, Jim Hodges, Carlos Amorales, Todd Norsten, Carter, Lisa Nankivil, Brad Kahlhamer, Michael Kareken, and Carolyn Swiszcz.

Just two blocks from Art Basel Miami, INK showcases work from 15 galleries and publishers in the historic Dorchester Hotel. Instead of traditional fair booths, exhibitors occupy the hotel’s suites - giving visitors a rare opportunity to imagine the work in their homes.

The fair was bustling with attendees this year and the resounding response was incredibly positive. Many visitors expressed their gratitude for this breath of fresh air and insisted it was their favorite fair during Miami Art Week!

On Njideka Akunyili Crosby's "The Beautyful Ones" May Have Arrived, by Jason Rosenfeld

Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s new print, “The Beautyful Ones” May Have Arrived, represents her first foray into an area of artistic production that she has been considering for some time. It is both a statement of continuity with the subject matter and style that has dominated her painted work for over a decade, and a novel departure in terms of process and materials.

“The Beautyful Ones” May Have Arrived by Njideka Akunyili Crosby 2023 | Edition of 60 | 45-run screenprint on Rives BFK | Paper Size: 36 1/2” x 46” | Image Size: 29 7/8” x 39 7/8”

The design is related to an acrylics-and-transfer-on-paper painting from 2013 titled “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born” Might Not Hold True For Much Longer, now in the collection of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. At five and a half by seven feet, it was the precursor to a celebrated series of works, “The Beautyful Ones,” derived from the debut novel by Ayi Kwei Armah from 1968. Armah was born in Ghana in 1939, and his book centers on the challenges in the life of a working-class man in the weeks leading up to the coup against Kwame Nkrumah’s government in 1966. Akunyili Crosby’s continuing series, now encompassing eleven paintings, thus takes post-colonial Africa as its starting point, and presents frontal portraits of youthful relatives, friends, and herself in intricate interiors and complex clothing. This initial image from 2013 is different from the others in the body of work as the protagonist, the artist herself, is seen in profil perdu, and the viewer is left to imagine her state of mind. In both the present print and its painted inspiration, a woman sits on a rug next to a low table on which rests a variety of objects, including a kerosene lantern, bowls, and plates. There is a radiator to the left of her head, and a wall with a baseboard. She wears an Ankara dress and sports a distinctively threaded hairstyle.

Detail, “The Beautyful Ones” May Have Arrived

The painting was produced in Akunyili Crosby’s signature method, through precise drawing, the use of acrylic paints, and a photo transfer technique. The latter entails transferring images sourced from the internet or photographs she has collected over many years that serve as a kind of personal lexicon in her pictures. Pictures from this image bank are laser printed onto sheets of paper, and these color photocopies are placed face down onto the final surface and rubbed with acetone, transferring the image onto the paper below. The result is then often given a whitewash to further cloud the transferred image and push it back into the illusionistic space of the picture. This is a kind of monoprinting, and its ghostly reversed effects are visible in the radiator, baseboard, rug, side of the dress, edge of the table and its legs. In a gesture with metaphysical resonance, Akunyili Crosby painted a still life on the tabletop based on objects she photographed in 2012 at her grandmother’s house in a countryside village outside the town of Enugu where the artist grew up. Photographs of these same objects are then transfer printed onto the side and legs of the table.

In adapting such a complex work for an autonomous print, Akunyili Crosby and master printer Cole Rogers of Highpoint Center for Printmaking in Minneapolis needed to be both flexible in the process and rigorous in the determination of colors and textures. As a result, their collaboration has taken four years. Akunyili Crosby had been inspired by printmaking classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and then at Yale University, where she studied under Rochelle Feinstein. She was also greatly influenced by prints made by artists such as Kerry James Marshall and Julie Mehretu. Rogers had first seen Akunyili Crosby’s work in person in a show of five pictures titled I Still Face You at Franklin Art Works in Minneapolis in 2013. The eventual collaboration has taken four years. Initially, Akunyili Crosby drew the intricate design onto a large lithographic limestone, sourced by Rogers from the stock of a deceased printmaker in New Mexico, who had probably procured it from the famed Solnhofen quarries in Germany. The plan was to employ a combination of oil-based lithography and water-based-ink screen printing, but in the end it was decided to scan the image printed from the stone, making forty-five screens from the scan, and employing an astounding forty-three specially mixed colors in the printing process. The result is printed on Rives BFK paper, the same support that Akunyili Crosby uses for her paintings. In the sections that approximate her trademark image-transfer work, a transparent grayish whitewash is applied to push the image into the perceived background. The radiator, for example, is printed using four different transparent colors to locate it in deeper space. Such intricacies of the process mitigate against the tendency for screen-printing to result in opaque and flat surfaces, and successfully convey the distinctive way Akunyili Crosby crafts her paintings, preserving their essence in this independent work.

Detail, “The Beautyful Ones” May Have Arrived

In “The Beautyful Ones” May Have Arrived, Akunyili Crosby amplifies elements of the source image while adding new details, such as the gold hoop earring and the four inverted glasses on the table. She made both feet visible including a big toe and heel, added a bit of the left arm, and turned the subject’s face to the right to make the slit of her eye and her high cheekbone visible. She also transformed the table from rectangular to circular to better harmonize with the round pooling of the dress on the rug, the table’s shadow, that earring, and the various round bowls and plates and lantern and glasses on the table. Most critically, she deleted the narrow threshold at the upper right and the continuation of the wall and baseboard, in favor of a suggestive void that begins mere inches from the sitter’s face.

The most complex element of the print is the sitter’s fabulous dress. This is in an Ankara style, employing traditional African patterns in a wax-based process on cotton that is itself, of course, a kind of printing. Based on a design from Boxing Kitten in Brooklyn, it is built of sections like puzzle pieces, a combination of many colors and various levels of transparency. The wavy patterns are echoed in the complex hairstyle derived from images of threaded hair by Nigerian photographer J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere (1930—2014), who began shooting these traditional looks in the 1960s. As with so much of Akunyili Crosby’s work, there is an architectonic quality to the dress and hair, signaling an awareness of the modernist design that marked the landscape of post-colonial Africa, especially the metropolitan Lagos of her youth. The artist’s works are often built on such design scaffolds; they combine with her beautiful drawing of faces and bodies and her challenging use of perspective to enliven the compositions and establish physical settings for the sitters’ mental musings.

Detail, “The Beautyful Ones” May Have Arrived

In works such as “The Beautyful Ones” May Have Arrived, Akunyili Crosby instills a sense of inner life into her figures who are presented in domestic environs that meld the Nigeria of her youth and the America of her maturity, and that literally bear their histories and culture—printed onto the metal of the radiator, the wood of the baseboard and table, the broad seams of a dress. These somewhat washed out visual sparklings press back into the depicted image but simultaneously and animatedly burst forward into the mind, in the forms of the hopes and dreams of the young sitter, who stares out into a light manilla-hued void, enveloped by the past but expectant and embracing of the future.

Jason Rosenfeld

Thank you to Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Cole Rogers, and Andre Keichian for their help in the writing of this essay.

Jason Rosenfeld, Ph.D., is Professor of Art History at Marymount Manhattan College, New York, and a Senior Writer and Editor-at-Large at The Brooklyn Rail. He is the co-author of a monograph on Cecily Brown (Phaidon, 2020). He was co-curator of the exhibition River Crossings at Cedar Grove, the Thomas Cole National Historical Site, in Catskill, New York, and Olana, in Hudson, New York (2015); co-curator of Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde at Tate Britain, London, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, the Mori Arts Center Gallery, Tokyo, and the Palazzo Chiablese, Turin (2012-2014); and co-curator of John Everett Millais at Tate Britain, the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, the Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Fukuoka, and the Bunkamura Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2007-2008). He is the author of the monograph on John Everett Millais (Phaidon, 2012).

View availability of the work here and for all inquiries, please email the Gallery Director, Alex Blaisdell, alex@highpointprintmaking.org

"The Beautyful Ones" May Have Arrived, new print by Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Highpoint Editions is proud to release a new screenprint by artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby, “The Beautyful Ones” May Have Arrived. This ambitious 45-run screenprint represents the artist’s first print publication and the culmination of a four-year-long collaboration with Highpoint Editions.

“The Beautyful Ones” May Have Arrived
Nideka Akunyili Crosby, 2023
45-run Screenprint on Rives BFK
Paper Size: 36 1/2” x 46 inches”
Image Size: 29 7/8” x 39 7/8”
Edition of 60

About Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Drawing on art historical, political, and personal references, Njideka Akunyili Crosby creates densely layered figurative compositions that, precise in style, nonetheless conjure the complexity of contemporary experience. Akunyili Crosby was born in Nigeria, where she lived until the age of sixteen. In 1999 she moved to the United States, where she has remained since that time. Her cultural identity combines strong attachments to the country of her birth and to her adopted home, a hybrid identity that is reflected in her work.

On initial impression her work appears to focus on interiors or apparently everyday scenes and social gatherings. Many of Akunyili Crosby’s images feature figures — images of family and friends — in scenarios derived from familiar domestic experiences: eating, drinking, watching TV. Rarely do they meet the viewer’s gaze but seem bound up in moments of intimacy or reflection that are left open to interpretation. Ambiguities of narrative and gesture are underscored by a second wave of imagery, only truly discernible close-up.

Vibrantly patterned photo-collage areas are created from images derived from Nigerian pop culture and politics, including pictures of pop stars, models, and celebrities, as well as lawyers in white wigs and military dictators. Some of these images are from the artist’s archive of personal snapshots, magazines, and advertisements, while others are sourced from the internet. These elements present a compelling visual metaphor for the layers of personal memory and cultural history that inform and heighten the experience of the present.

While the artist’s formative years in Nigeria are a constant source of inspiration, Akunyili Crosby’s grounding in Western art history adds further layers of reference. Religious art, the intimism of Edouard Vuillard’s intoxicatingly patterned interiors, the academic tradition of portraiture and, in particular, still life painting become vehicles for delivering, Trojan horse-like, new possible meanings.

These are images necessarily complicated in order to counter generalizations about African or diasporic experience. Talking about her work, Akunyili Crosby notes, ‘In much the same way that inhabitants of formerly colonized countries select and invent from cultural features transmitted to them by the dominant or metropolitan colonizers, I extrapolate from my training in Western painting to invent a new visual language that represents my experience — which at times feels paradoxically fractured and whole — as a cosmopolitan Nigerian.’

Njideka Akunyili Crosby was born in Enugu, Nigeria in 1983 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She was awarded a 2021 United States Artists Fellowship and 2017 MacArthur Fellowship. Akunyili Crosby is the recipient of the 2020 Carnegie Corporation “Great Immigrant, Great American” Award; the 2019 African Art Award; the 2017 Future Generation Art Prize Shortlist; the 2016 Prix Canson Prize; the 2015 Foreign Policy’s Leading 100 Global Thinkers of 2015 Prize; the 2015 Next Generation Prize, New Museum of Contemporary Art; the 2015 Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize, and the 2014 Smithsonian American Art Museum’s James Dicke Contemporary Art Prize. She was named one of the Financial Times’ Women of the Year in 2016.

Akunyili Crosby’s work is in the collections of major museums including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, The Norton Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Tate, Whitney Museum of American Art, Yale University Art Gallery, and Zeitz MOCAA.

Pricing and availability can be found here, or you may contact Gallery Director, Alex Blaisdell alex@highpointprintmaking.org

FOR FURTHER READING, CLICK HERE FOR JASON ROSENFELD’S ESSAY ON “THE BEAUTYFUL ONES” MAY HAVE ARRIVED.

Association of Print Scholars at Highpoint

Highpoint hosted a cohort of print historians, curators, and educators from the Association of Print Scholars for a workshop Funded by the Getty Research Institute in the Highpoint studio at the end of July. Participants came to Minneapolis from all over the United States, along with two others who traveled internationally for the workshop, one from Montreal and another from Basel, Switzerland. Cole Rogers and Josh Bindewald provided a thorough, technically-focused, and participatory walkthrough of intaglio printmaking. Participants were able to create two images on copper plates using the techniques of drypoint, engraving, line etch, aquatint, and spit-bite. They were also guided through the process of making prints from their plates. Cole and Josh also demonstrated additional advanced intaglio techniques, including sugar lift, soft ground, chine-collé, and multiple plate printing. 

Amidst and between their studio sessions, the scholars viewed and discussed intaglio publications that Highpoint Editions has completed. They were also able to examine seminal historical prints during several visits to Mia. On their last day in the printshop, the scholars had the opportunity to apply their knowledge by identifying the techniques used in each other's prints and discussing what they had learned. The single greatest takeaway was their surprise at the level of skill needed to correctly wipe a plate, the scholars were emphatic about it!

The workshop was a long time in the works and took a great deal of planning. Originally it was to take place in the summer of 2020, but due to obvious circumstances, it was delayed. This was a case of good things worth waiting for, Josh said this about the workshop: “Teaching this group was so rewarding, their enthusiasm was palpable and contagious! All week long, they peppered us with intelligent questions and insights. It was just such a great experience all around.”

Thanks to the Association of Print Scholars for entrusting us to teach them intaglio and to engraving expert Todd Bridigum for helping introduce the ancient art of engraving to the group!

New Lithograph by Brad Kahlhamer

Highpoint Editions is proud to release the newest print by artist Brad Kahlhamer, ++HAWK+LITTLE HAWK++.

++HAWK+LITTLE HAWK++ by Brad Kahlhamer 2023 | Edition of 15 | Lithograph | Paper Size: 30 ½” x 25”; Image Size: 25” x 20”

Last summer, Highpoint Editions welcomed Brad Kahlhamer back to the professional shop to work on a series of watercolor monotypes and this lithograph edition of 15. Signed in May 2023, ++HAWK+LITTLE HAWK++ is now available for purchase.

This lithograph features a recurring character in Kahlhamer’s nearly 30-year career, the Hawk. The additional icons and themes in his work are born of a deliberate longtime practice – an almost life philosophy – of “yondering,” a term Kahlhamer coined to refer to his practice of nomadic wandering and pondering through his writing and drawing.

Brad Kahlhamer draws on his tripartite identity in his art, navigating his Native American heritage, adoptive German-American family, and adult life in New York City’s Lower East Side, where he has lived since 1990. In reference to his Native American history, Kahlhamer works with Hopi katsina dolls, but he deviates from their prescribed histories and uses, reimagining the dolls through a neo-expressionist lens and embellishing them with detritus collected from his neighborhood. Kahlhamer similarly combines established artistic traditions with his own history in his painting practice. The artist references hallmarks of 20th-century abstract painting, notably German expressionism and American neo-expressionism, while incorporating a highly personal iconography and absorbing the artistic milieu of downtown Manhattan.

Pricing and availability can be found here, or you may inquire with Highpoint’s Gallery Director Alex Blaisdell at alex@highpointprintmaking.org.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby Featured in New York Times

Highpoint Editions artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby was recently featured in a New York Times article titled “Njideka Akunyili Crosby Wants to Take it Slow, Despite Her Rapid Rise” following the opening of her solo exhibition at David Zwirner’s new Los Angeles location. Read the online article here.

Photograph of Njideka Akunyili Crosby by Erik Carter for The New York Times

Brad Kahlhamer at Nemeth Art Center

Highpoint Editions artist Brad Kahlhamer will be participating in the Nemeth Art Center’s first artist’s residency program and will be exhibiting work created during the program in a show on view at NAC in Park Rapids, MN from July 1 through October 1, 2023.

Opening & Artist Reception: July 1, 2023, 4:00 - 6:00PM

For more information and updates click here.

Morgan Solo Exhibition "Thought Notes" with Bockley Gallery

Highpoint Editions artist Morgan recently opened a solo exhibition with Bockley Gallery in Minneapolis.

“Welcoming his first engagement with Bockley Gallery, Morgan’s solo exhibition, Thought Notes, brings together a more recent selection of works (2006–2015) from his fifty-year career. As the title speaks to Morgan’s relation to and reverence for thought’s fragmentary, temporary, and hovering nature, it materializes his consistent studiousness with thought as a mark-making practice that embodies scripted and sonic notes on life.” - Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis

“Thought Notes” is on view from May 6 through June 17, 2023.

Learn more about the exhibition here.

Image ©Bockley Gallery.

Highpoint Editions at Expo Chicago 2023

Highpoint Editions visits EXPO Chicago for the Second Year

From April 13th through April 16th, Highpoint Editions exhibited at EXPO Chicago, a fine art fair taking place at Navy Pier’s Festival Hall in Chicago. This year’s 10th anniversary exposition featured over 170 exhibitors representing 36 countries and 90 cities from around the world. We exhibited recent works by Julie Mehretu, Delita Martin, Brad Kahlhamer, and Jim Hodges.

Over 32,000 visitors attended the fair this year and every interaction we encountered oozed with enthusiasm. People were back at the fair in full force and excited to view a wide range of work and engage in thoughtful discussions. While the huge selection of work may have felt overwhelming at first, every interaction was heart felt in intention and highlighted the tight-knit community of art lovers and enthusiasts that make this event a must attend.

Sarah Rose Sharp said it best in her article for Hyperallergic on this year’s fair: “One might go to an art fair anticipating spectacle, shenanigans, and eye-watering sales numbers, but the thing I found was much more heartening, and also deeply Midwestern: an environment of care, enabled by a deep work ethic and sincere enthusiasm for bringing art together with its audience.”

Co-Founder and Master Printer Cole Rogers celebrates 22+ years at Highpoint Center for Printmaking

Cole Rogers in the Highpoint Editions Print Shop by the ink wall

After an impressive twenty-two-year career at Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Co-founder, Artistic Director, and Master Printer Cole Rogers has announced he is stepping down from his position at Highpoint. We offer Cole our support for his next steps, celebrate his influential career at Highpoint, and recognize his legacy in the greater printmaking field.

When we asked Cole if he is retiring, he said, “What’s that? I plan to collaborate with artists making prints and being an active community member.” As creatives, there is not quite a word to describe what it means to “retire,” but it’ll be a continuation of the craft. One thing's for certain, Cole Rogers's legacy in the printmaking community and the number of artists that have been impacted by his presence and expertise is incalculable.

See the Star Tribune Article here.  

As Cole departs, we celebrate his career and legacy. Since its opening in 2001, Cole has worked with over 50  international artists creating hundreds of prints and multiples from internationally known artists like MacArthur Fellows Julie Mehretu and Njideka Akunyili Crosby, to Do Ho Suh, Jim Hodges, to self-taught artist Donovan Durham. Highpoint Editions’ Print publications have been acquired for the permanent collections of over 70 major museums, corporations, and numerous private collections throughout the United States and abroad. Cole has been honored with ‘Printmaker of the Year awards from the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Mid-America Print Council and is a lifetime member of Southern Graphics Council International and Mid-America Print Council.

Highpoint was founded on the idea of bringing artists together to make prints, learn, explore, and find community through the medium of printmaking. In founding Highpoint, Cole and Carla have built a lasting hub for printmaking that includes members, artists, enthusiasts, collectors, students, neighbors, and families.

We are excited for Cole and Carla as they embark on their next chapter together and we know that they will continue to be honored members of Highpoint’s community for years to come. 

Cole Rogers printing ɹǝɯɯnS  ɟo  by Jim Hodges 2016

I am so grateful to have shared this adventure with many wonderful HP Board members, staff, interns, and co-op members, and tens of thousands of community members and stakeholders.  It has been an honor and privilege of a lifetime.
– Cole Rogers

Cole Rogers working with artist Dyani White Hawk on test proofs for her 2019 Takes Care of Them suite.

Having the opportunity to work with Cole was a gift. He is an incredible printmaker and human being. Having the opportunity to collaborate with someone with that level of expertise opens doors of possibility. My practice has benefited tremendously through the opportunity of creating prints through Highpoint Editions. I am but one of many people whose practices and lives have been enriched through participation in Cole and Carla’s vision of creating increased accessibility to printmaking. I am so proud of and grateful for, the work we created together as well as the lasting friendships that came through the experience of the beauty of collaboration.
– Artist Dyani White Hawk

Cole Rogers with artist Julie Mehretu who is signing her 2003 print Entropia (review).

Cole is one of the most talented and generous printmakers I’ve had the pleasure of working with. He embodies the full spirit of democratization of printmaking in the creation of Highpoint with the artists and students he has worked with over the years. He’s given an enormous gift to the community of Minneapolis.
– Artist Julie Mehretu

Cole Rogers artist Willie Cole while signing his 2012 Sole Sisters print.

Cole Rogers is a wonderful blend of patience, professionalism, and optimism. He cares and believes in the creative potential of both artists and ideas and that belief leads to amazing collaborations. Artists fall in love with potential. Cole Rogers, as the founder and Director of Highpoint, nurtures this potential through optimism, patience, and professionalism to help artists create amazing prints.
– Artist Willie Cole

Highpoint staff, Highpoint Editions artists and exhibition curator Dennis John at the opening night of The Contemporary print, 20 Years at Highpoint Editions.

We plan to honor Cole with a special event this summer and look forward to sharing details with you in the near future. 

---

FULL PRESS RELEASE:

By: Carol Schuler

Highpoint Center for Printmaking’s Co-Founder Cole Rogers retires and celebrates
22+ years as Master Printer and Artistic Director

Highpoint Center for Printmaking Continues Successful Legacy

MINNEAPOLIS, MN (Apr. 18, 2023) – Co-founder, Artistic Director, and Master Printer Cole Rogers has announced his retirement from Highpoint Center for Printmaking. Established in 2001, Highpoint nurtures the art of printmaking by providing educational programs, community access, and collaborative publishing opportunities. 

Founded by Cole Rogers and Carla McGrath, Highpoint Center for Printmaking is recognized as the only community-based printmaking center of its caliber in the Upper Midwest. Executive Director Jehra Patrick will continue that vision for Highpoint to further the art of printmaking in exceptional ways.

“I am proud of the work Highpoint has done over the past two decades, born out of a first discussion and dream in August of 1997,” said Rogers. “I am so grateful to have shared this adventure with hundreds of accomplished artists, many wonderful Highpoint Board members, staff, interns, and co-op members, and tens of thousands of community members and stakeholders. It has been an honor and privilege of a lifetime. My time at Highpoint is ending, but I will continue printmaking and teaching as the future unfolds.” 

During his 20+ year tenure as Artistic Director and Master Printer of Highpoint, Rogers collaborated with scores of artists to cultivate their vision through printmaking. He guided Highpoint’s curatorial committee, led and facilitated artistic programming, managed printshop staff, and scouted and nurtured new talent for the Highpoint Editions visiting artist program. Rogers has collaborated with over 50 professional artists to create hundreds of prints and multiples: from internationally known artists like MacArthur Fellows Julie Mehretu and Njideka Akunyili Crosby, to Do Ho Suh, Jim Hodges, to self-taught artist Donovan Durham. 

 “Cole is a dedicated organizational leader, mentor, educator, and friend to many," said Highpoint Executive Director Jehra Patrick. “His deep love and commitment to printmaking has impacted our local community and is evident nationally. Together, Cole and Carla cultivated a thriving community of artists, learners, collectors, and enthusiasts brought together by printmaking — we are honored to steward this legacy of artistic and educational excellence into the future.”

“Artists fall in love with potential,” said artist Willie Cole. “Cole Rogers, as the founder and Director of Highpoint, nurtures this potential through optimism, patience, and professionalism to help artists create amazing prints.”

“I am so proud of and grateful for the work we created together as well as the lasting friendships that came through the experience of the beauty of collaboration,” said artist Dyani White Hawk. “I am but one of many people whose practices and lives have been enriched through participation in Cole and Carla’s vision of creating increased accessibility to printmaking.”

“Cole is one of the most talented and generous printmakers I’ve had the pleasure of working with,” said artist Julie Mehretu. “He embodies the full spirit of democratization of printmaking in the creation of Highpoint with the artists and students he has worked with over the years. He’s given an enormous gift to the community of Minneapolis.”

“In founding Highpoint, Cole Rogers and Carla McGrath created what is now one of the Twin Cities’ most vibrant and vital nonprofit art spaces,” said Siri Engberg, Senior Curator and Director of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center, and a founding board member. “The professional print workshop is a haven for artists working in the medium – a place of perfect synergy where one’s vision can be realized through Cole’s technical collaboration and innovation at the highest level. I have yet to meet an artist he has worked with who has not been positively changed by the experience of working there.”

Highpoint is forming an executive search committee to identify the best possible successor. 

About Highpoint Center for Printmaking: 

Highpoint is a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the art of printmaking. Its goals are to provide educational programs, community access, and collaborative publishing opportunities to engage the community and increase the appreciation and understanding of the printmaking arts. Highpoint Center for Printmaking offers a variety of programming including educational classes for kids, adults, and community members, a print shop co-op space that provides access to local artists to create work in a supportive workshop environment, a visiting artist program with national and international artists who can produce work with a master printer, creative residency, fellowship, and scholarship programs to support early career and professional artists, and a gallery space that is fully accessible to the public. Highpointprintmaking.org 

On Julie Mehretu's Corner of Lake and Minnehaha, by Susan Tallman

The tricky bit of sublimity, Edmund Burke acknowledged in 1757, is the balance between profusion and disorder: we feel awe at the night sky because “the stars lie in such apparent confusion as makes it impossible on ordinary occasions to reckon them. This gives them the advantage of a sort of infinity.” But to artists who would seek to imitate this effect, Burke issued a caution: “unless you can produce an appearance of infinity by your disorder, you will have disorder only.” The works of art that succeed at this game “owe their sublimity to a richness and profusion of images, in which the mind is so dazzled as to make it impossible to attend to the exact coherence and agreement of the allusions.”

The sublime, in Burke’s sense of aesthetic experience entangled with peril, has often been invoked in relation to the careening, elegant mayhem of Julie Mehretu’s art. The superfluity of images that tumble across her prints and paintings succeed in defying “exact coherence,” even while suggesting elusive relationships of vast design. But where earlier painters found the requisite menace and majesty in storms at sea and vertiginous mountainscapes (J.M.W. Turner is the poster boy here), Mehretu’s topography is geopolitical. She has described herself as a “child of a failed revolution” (her Ethiopian-American family relocated to Michigan as the post-Selassie nation devolved into a bloody quagmire), and the opposing forces that drive her abstractions—energy and entropy, construction and destruction—have been soldiers in every campaign ever waged for utopia. 

Detail, Corner of Lake and Minnehaha

Mehretu’s infinity unfolds in layers, each rooted in a different way of thinking about the world and a different way of drawing it. Her marks may be fuzzy or lapidary, may swoop like a raptor or stammer like scuffs on a drum head, their relationships chafe as well as bind. As a graduate student she thought of her gathered lines as “social agents.” Even in painting her working habits—drawing, separation, layering, relocation—are endemic to printmaking, and it is not surprising that she has proved to be a prolific and virtuosic printmaker, collaborating with eminent print workshops on both sides of the Atlantic, almost always in etching. ¹ Her projects with Highpoint are the exception. ²

In her new prints and two earlier ones from 2003-4, Mehretu stepped away from etching’s airs and graces in favor of screenprint and lithography, once-commercial methods whose virtues include deadpan flatness and an aura of real-world plausibility. Her very first print with Highpoint, Entropia (review), features twenty-eight colors of screenprinted ink splashing east and west like the parting of a psychedelic Red Sea. Line drawings in long arcs, staccato bursts and curling filaments float in and around the spray, along with modernist architectural renderings agleam with the blithe promise of a better future. The print, like all her work, is the product of staged accretion. It began with a sixteen-layer drawing in Photoshop from which sixteen printing screens were made. She then made four further drawings on translucent mylar for lithographic plates to capture greater tonal nuance and detail. To reach the final composition, further colors were added during proofing, including translucent white layers to provide an atmospheric perspective akin to the clear acrylic layers in her related paintings).

Detail, Corner of Lake and Minnehaha

In the meantime, however, Highpoint master printer Cole Rogers had been smitten with the appearance of Mehretu’s translucent black-and-white drawings stacked on their own. He suggested printing each of the litho plates on a separate sheet of Gampi (a thin Japanese paper), and mounting them one over the other. Pleased with the result, Mehretu tweaked the composition by adding a fourth lithographic plate. In both prints, the viewer is suspended in ambiguous space, but in Entropia (Construction), this disorientation is augmented by an eerie sense of sagittal depth, of things at a distance seen through not-quite-transparent air.

Julie Mehretu, 2022, Corner of Lake and Minnehaha, Corner of Lake and Minnehaha (smoke), Corner of Lake and Minnehaha (blue)

Seventeen years later, the arrival of Mehretu’s mid-career retrospective at the Walker Art Center provided an opportunity to revisit screenprint and lithography with Highpoint. She had since moved away from the kind of architectonic line drawing that underpinned the Entropia prints; photographs shot at points of jeopardy: border crossings, political protests, wildfires. Reduced to pulsing clouds of color, the action is impossible to identify in terms of location or protagonists, but even (or perhaps especially) in this state, Mehretu saw curious echoes of European grand manner history painting—a kind of formal structure and moral swagger that can be traced from Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19) to Joe Rosenthal’s Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima (1945) and beyond. Her hand-drawn overlays had also changed, growing looser and more expressive, and now swept like dark squalls across the new bokeh backdrops.  

The new project began with a photograph of a striding protester carrying an inverted American flag and backlit by a liquor store in flames, a scene captured by AP photographer Julio Cortez four days after the murder of George Floyd and two miles due east of Highpoint, on the corner of Lake Street and Minnehaha in Minneapolis. The event was real, but were it a painting, it would have owed much to Eugène Delacroix’s exemplar of heroic hokum, Liberty Leading the People (1830), with its barefoot and bare-breasted (why?), heroine marching over a pile of corpses, the tricolor held aloft in her right hand, a bayonet in her left, while saber-rattling Frenchmen take up the rear amid martial smoke.³ The Minneapolis protester carries a bottle rather than a bayonet, but the flag, the fire, and the phoenix-like equation of destruction with rebirth attest to a continuum of political hope and rage.

Mehretu cropped the photograph, then flipped it upside down and blurred it. Though in etching she had used photo-blurs of almost diaphanous refinement, in screenprint she aimed for a coarser print terrain. In most industrial printing, all the colors of the rainbow are approximated through dots in four colors: cyan, magenta, yellow and black (or “key,” giving the process its acronym “CMYK”). The dots wax and wane in size in accordance with the colors they aim to replicate, but are regularly spaced in four interlocking grids. If the grids are fine enough, the trick works seamlessly: a speck of blue sits next to a speck of magenta, and the viewer thinks “violet.” When the resolution is less refined, weirder things happen.

Detail, Corner of Lake and Minnehaha

Oversized “Ben Day” dots were a trope of Pop art, a tool that turned the workings of mass media into subject matter, but while Mehretu’s enlarged dot screen can be seen as a nod to photojournalism, she was less interested in the dots per se than in the visual pitter-patter of those grids as a battleground for drawing. The soft blurs now calcified into jittery rosettes of spots. Omitting the “key” black component produced a porous structure with a kind of visual tooth, while the edgy snap of screenprint means that each component reads as a discreet entity (every dot is an island, entire of itself). Over this she drew three layers of addenda, each for a different screen, each screen printed in a different black (yellow-black, purple-black, and flat black). Finally, small bursts of color were peppered on top, like flickering halations. 

The dot-screen colors of Corner of Lake and Minnehaha (co-published with the Walker Art Center) reflects the incendiary palette of the original photograph (and of Minneapolis in June 2020). Her drawing layers, smoky and diffuse, operate less as strata than as currents, flowing through one another and backwards and forward in space. Each was executed with different drawing technique: one with wispy airbrush strokes; another with swift feathered marks in the manner of sumi-e brushwork; the last as a computer “dither” drawing, with spray-paint-like splotches and the kind of clean-edged wormholes familiar to anyone who has ever played with the eraser tool in Photoshop.

Detail, Corner of Lake and Minnehaha (blue)

In the digital world, “dither” denotes the application of stochastic interference to disrupt unwanted patterns that arise when continuous information is quantized. The crude color chunks that show up in low-contrast digital images, for example, can be broken up with a spray of random dots; in sound recording, inaudible amounts of white noise can obliterate the phantom tones produced when slightly different data points are rounded to the same value. Dither, somewhat poetically, is noise as a means to quiet. Mehretu’s dither drawing is not there to fix an error but—like the jangly checkerboard of CMY dots and the quixotic fall of ink from bristles—to defy and subvert the temptations of a single coherent storyline.

In the wider world, “dither” means something else—an indulgent indecision or cozy species of panic. In both senses, it is a cousin to Burke’s dazzle: an agent of confusion endowed with strange aesthetic powers and possible wisdom. The perception of phantom patterns within complex events, after all, is the defining feature of conspiracy theories. And a mind “so dazzled as to make it impossible to attend to the exact coherence and agreement of the allusions” is a mind able to accept complexity without resorting to fables.

Detail, Corner of Lake and Minnehaha (smoke)

Burke wrote his treatise on the sublime as a young man, but for most of his life he was a politician, and his long career in Parliament encompassed both the American Revolution (he was sympathetic to the colonists) and the French (he admired the spirit and was appalled by the execution). Mehretu, the child of a more recent, failed revolution, has made herself a poet of the social sublime—the dithering, dazzling spectacle of humanity’s infinitely hopeful, endlessly myopic designs for the world. “The compositional and structural issues in my work are directly tied to the desire to take up arms and lead revolution,” she told Phong Bui around the time she began working on these prints. “But my effort is to question these gestures, to take these myths apart.”⁴

— Susan Tallman

1. These workshops include: Greg Burnet Editions (New York, 2000--); Crown Point Press (2005-2007); Gemini G.E.L. (Los Angeles, 2008--); Niels Borch Jensen (Copenhagen, 2014--).

2. While uses screenprint in her paintings, her only screenprint editions have been with Highpoint, and her only other lithographic projects have been two benefit prints with the lithographer Maurice Sanchez.

3. The standard explanation for Liberty’s costume is that it separates her from the “real” people in everyday dress, and thus identifies her as the symbolic Marianne, the personification of French liberty, though most Mariannes managed to keep their tops on.

4. Brooklyn Rail interview 21 April 21

Susan Tallman is a writer, critic and art historian living in Massachusetts and Berlin. She has written extensively on contemporary art, the history of prints, and other aspects of art and culture. A regular contributor to New York Review of Books among other publications, she has authored and co-authored many books, most recently No Plan At All: How the Danish Printshop of Niels Borch Jensen Redefined Artists Prints for the Contemporary World. In 2011 she co-founded the journal Art in Print, and served as its Editor-in-Chief until its closure in 2019. 

Educated at Wesleyan and Columbia Universities, she is Adjunct Associate Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and sits on the Editorial Board of Print Quarterly. (And, yes, she was a founding member of the New York guitar band Band of Susans.)

For inquiries about Julie Mehretu’s prints, please contact the Gallery Director: sara@highpointprintmaking.org.

Corner of Lake and Minnehaha, new print by Julie Mehretu

Highpoint Editions is proud to release the newest print by artist Julie Mehretu, Corner of Lake and Minnehaha, a co-publication which has been made through support of the artistic programs of Walker Art Center and Highpoint Editions.

This year marks the 18th anniversary of the release of one of Mehretu’s earliest prints [Entropia (review)], co-published by Highpoint Editions and the Walker in 2004.

View fullsize

Corner of Lake and Minnehaha, 2022
Julie Mehretu
17-run Screenprint on white Coventry Rag paper
47" x 37" image size
54 ¾" x 43 ½" paper size
Edition of 45

Current events and unfolding histories have long informed Mehretu’s practice. Her most recent works are propelled by her reaction to urgent crises in our present moment, and how the media’s framing of these conditions impacts society. From the incessant stream of daily imagery we consume of violence, injustice, warfare, and environmental disasters, Mehretu seeks out resonant photographs—of fires raging simultaneously in California and Myanmar in 2017, for example; or in the case of this print, an image from the civil unrest in Minneapolis on May 28, 2020 following the murder of George Floyd. These photographic sources, which Mehretu alters by digitally blurring, rotating, and cropping them, become the ground of her recent works. The artist then builds upon these in layers by marking over them with her own gestures to create visually and conceptually complex abstractions.

Working with Master Printer Cole Rogers and the team of printers at Highpoint Editions, Mehretu developed this work into a 17-run screenprint. This ambitious print combines a halftone dot pattern in Cyan, Magenta and Yellow along with drawings by the artist that are layered one by one in various tones of black and colored inks.

— Siri Engberg, Senior Curator and Director of Visual Arts

Pricing and availability can be found here, or you may contact jehra@highpointprintmaking.org or info@highpointprintmaking.org

For further reading, click here for writer, art critic and historian Susan Tallman’s essay on Corner of Lake and Minnehaha.

In the Fold: A Critical Dialogue on Blackness + Printmaking, a conversation with Delita Martin, Chloe Alexander and Tanekeya Word

She Sent Him Back to His Mother, Stephanie Santana, 2020

“As artists, collectively and individually, we are continuously asking ourselves questions and creating artwork that are iterations of those inquiries. What unfolds is an expansion of the intersections of our lives on varied planes. Each artist will take you into the fold and invite a critical dialogue on their art praxis and discuss a homeplace they all share, Black Women of Print.”

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Join us for what will be a thoughtful and powerful conversation with three printmakers, Delita Martin, Tanekeya Word and Chloe Alexander. Tanekeya Word is the founder of Black Women of Print, an organization which aims to promote the visibility of mid-career and established Black women printmakers, through accessible educational outreach, to create an equitable future within the discipline of printmaking.

Thursday, June 23, 6:30pm
$10; free for Highpoint Contributing Members
Register for the event here.
Please note that this event has limited capacity. Highpoint is not requiring masks in the gallery space as of this writing, but that is subject to change. Masks are encouraged for all attendees.

“I wanted to create a place where intergenerational Black women printmakers could form bonds like Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs and Elizabeth Catlett. From Mid-Career to Established printmakers, it is my hope that we all can learn something from one another, support one another and also have a home so that the world can get to know the intersectional narratives of Black womanhood and our creative processes.”

— Tanekeya Word

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Delita Martin is an artist currently based in Huffman, Texas. She received a BFA in drawing from Texas Southern University and a MFA in printmaking from Purdue University. Formally a member of the fine arts faculty at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Martin is currently working as a full-time artist in her studio, Black Box Press.

Primarily working from oral traditions, along with vintage and family photographs as a source of inspiration; Martin’s work explores the power of the narrative impulse.

www.blackboxstudio.com

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Chloe Alexander is a printmaker and educator who works in various techniques to create one-of-a-kind prints, drawings, and varied editions. Chloe obtained both her BFA and M. Ed. from Georgia State University in Atlanta and has since exhibited work
widely, including at Kai Lin Art Gallery in Atlanta, the International Print Center New York, and the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair in London

thehaplessprintmaker.com

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Tanekeya Word was born in the Mississippi Delta and those memories are rooted within her praxis.

In her work, she explores subaltern spaces: Black interiority in the United States of America and the cultural connection to identity, history, memory and re-memory.

Tanekeya earned a BA in English and Afro-American Studies, from Howard University and has a MA in Arts Management. She completed her doctoral
program in May 2019 and is currently an Urban Education PhD dissertator with a specialization in Critical Race Theory in Art Education.

Tanekeya Word is based in Milwaukee, WI and is the owner and sole operator of Womanist Press Studio

www.tanekeyaword.com

Highpoint Editions at EXPO Chicago

Highpoint Editions visits the EXPO Chicago

Early April, Highpoint Editions exhibited at EXPO Chicago, a fine art fair that featured over 140 exhibitors from around the country, with some international representation, as well. We exhibited new works by Julie Mehretu, Delita Martin, Rico Gatson, Julie Buffalohead and Jim Hodges, along with favorite prints by Willie Cole, Jim Hodges, Andrea Carlson, Do Ho Suh, and Lisa Nankivil.

Over 30,000 visitors attended the fair this year, and it was so clear that people were hungry for events like this one -- energy was high, and the overwhelming feeling throughout the fair were of excitement and reinvigoration from being able to view art in person. We hope to participate in this fair again!

Keepsakes, a new suite by Delita Martin

Joyce, 2021, Edition of 20

Lithography with collagraph and hand stitching

29" x 41 ½"

Named after a sister.

We are honored to be able to announce the completion of a suite of seven prints by artist Delita Martin. Martin's use of color, pattern and portraiture is powerful, and these incredibly (perhaps deceptively) tender pieces capture the same persistent and confrontational energy characteristic of her larger body of work.

Over the pandemic, Highpoint Editions worked with Martin to ship pieces back and forth, making progress remotely. Because of the size of this suite and the edition — making 140 prints in total — each one stitched by hand with embroidery thread, Martin recruited women from her area in Huffman, TX to assist with the stitching. She describes what became a kind of quilting bee, wherein she felt honored to be surrounded by these women’s conversation, let in on a time honored tradition and bestowed with community wisdom. Contributing sewists include: Sandra Sayles, Wilma J. Evans, Georgia Harper and Sandy Patterson.

The suite is available for purchase now. Please click HERE for pricing. Email alex@highpointprintmaking.org with questions!

Ann, 2021, Edition of 20

Lithography with collagraph and hand stitching

29" x 41 ½"

Named after a longtime friend of the artist.

From the artist:

Keepsakes is a series of prints that look beyond the surface of objects at the memories they hold. Their purpose is to preserve the childhood of young Black girls and act as mementos of innocence. In this way, Keepsakes is a direct act against “adultification”, a perspective where adults view Black girls as less than innocent and more adult-like, ripping away their innocence and replacing it with labels such as “disruptive”, “loud” or “manipulative”. These labels often result in their mistreatment. 

This varied series shows portraits of little Black girls peering from the folds of vintage christening gowns. Such gowns, typically a shade of white symbolize innocence and purity in the Christian doctrine that teaches all men were created blameless and free of sin. However the dresses in these works are slightly yellowed signifying the passage of time and suggesting that perhaps such notions are not equally applied. 

Personal objects have long been a reflection of memory, personal and cultural identity. The dresses in this series act as repositories for both memory and identity. 

Trina, 2021, Edition of 20

Lithography with collagraph and hand stitching

29" x 41 ½"

Named after a sister.

Karen, 2021, Edition of 20

Lithography with collagraph and hand stitching

29" x 41 ½"

Named after a sister.

Delita Martin is an artist currently based in Huffman, Texas. She received a BFA in drawing from Texas Southern University and a MFA in printmaking from Purdue University. Formerly a member of the fine arts faculty at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Martin is currently working as a full-time artist in her studio, Black Box Press. 

Primarily working from oral traditions, along with vintage and family photographs as a source of inspiration, Martin’s work explores the power of the narrative impulse.

Her finished works combine collaging, drawing, painting, printmaking and sewing techniques, placing her figures amid patterns to visually represent what it looks like when we become the spiritual other: when we pray or meditate … we enter the “veilscape.” Martin's layering of technique and material, as well as her use of pattern and color, signifies a liminal space – the space between the waking life and the spirit life. By fusing this visual language with oral storytelling in this different space she offers other identities and other narratives for women of color.