Free Ink Day at Highpoint!

Free Ink Day

October 28, 12 - 4 pm at Highpoint

A free event for the whole family – costumes are welcome!

Join us for our Fall Free Ink Day! For this event, we are using a technique called Pochoir, which is printmaking with stencils. All materials for the planned activity are non-toxic and supplied by Highpoint. No registration is necessary – just drop in, bring your creativity, and be ready to get inky! Staff and volunteers will be able to answer any questions along the way.

It’s a spooky time of year and Halloween weekend, so costumes are welcome, candy is provided, and ghost, pumpkin, and monster stencils will be ready for printing!

Interested in volunteering? We would love your help!

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.

Meet the Jerome Residents

Left to Right: Mei Lam So, Izzy Shinn, and Gidinatiy Hartman

ANNOUNCING HIGHPOINT’S 2023-24
JEROME EARLY CAREER PRINTMAKERS

Highpoint is pleased to announce the 2023-24 Jerome Early Career Printmaking Residents Mei Lam So, Gidinatiy Hartman, and Izzy Shinn. The nine-month residency begins in September and will culminate in May with a June 2024 exhibition in Highpoint’s galleries. Between now and then, though, much experimentation, progress, and growth will occur. The program will include four special guest critiques that occur at intervals during the residency. For more about each of the residents, read on:

Mei Lam So (she/her) is a Minneapolis-based visual artist whose medium includes printmaking, textile printing, and ceramics. She received her BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her MFA in Printmaking and Ceramics from the University of Iowa. Originally from Hong Kong, Mei’s work explores topics surrounding the acculturation process of bicultural Asian immigrants. Mei has exhibited her work nationally.

Mei offered this about the upcoming residency, “I look forward to enacting some developing ideas and creating a new body of work with the community support of Highpoint's technical and conceptual expertise.“

Izzy Shinn (they/he/she) is a butch Twin Cities-based printmaker and comic artist specializing in intaglio etching and ink illustration, having earned their BFA from the University of Minnesota. With a focus butchness, lesbian life, and history, their work is tied intimately with themself and their own experiences, showcased through characters and archetypes, exploring the sexual and social stigmatization of women, the body, and the queer subject.

Most recently, they have worked as a summer workshop studio assistant at Penland School of Craft. They have exhibited and sold work in various local venues, such as the Katherine E. Nash Gallery, Open Eye Gallery, and the North Suburban Center for the Arts. They have also self-published multiple mini-comics and zines and participated as an exhibitor in the 2022 Minneapolis-based Autoptic Festival.

When asked what they’re most looking forward to in the residency, Izzy said,  “What I'm most excited for is the time and resources to experiment more with intaglio printing methods, specifically multi-plate printing, chine collé, and plate shape variation. I'm also very much looking forward to delving into this newer, more personal facet of my work and exploring how drawing from intimate and archival sources will influence my style and practice.” 

Gidinatiy Hartman (they/them) has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in printmaking from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Their artwork is about creating visual representations of the Deg Xinag and other Native languages and is centered around a desire to reclaim their family’s Athabascan language, which was taken from them due to colonization. United by a sense of whimsy and wordplay, their art seeks to make it easier for people to learn Deg Xinag and other Native languages. They aspire to have multiple modes of representation, including visual art, that makes language revitalization more accessible to people.

Gidinatiy said this about the upcoming residency, “I am looking forward to being in a printmaking studio because it gives me the opportunity to use a variety of printmaking methods again. I am excited to continue the same work I did for my BFA, creating artwork related to my Native language: Deg Xinag. Also, I look forward to being more involved in the printmaking community and being able to get feedback and input on my artwork.”

Highpoint would like to thank this year’s panelists Tamara Aupumaut and Heidi Goldberg. Tamara Aupaumut is a multidisciplinary artist and independent curator living on Mni Sota Makoce, also known as Minneapolis. She works in a variety of media, including printmaking. Heidi Goldberg earned her BA from Hamline University and MFA in printmaking and works on paper at The University of Michigan. She taught studio art at Concordia from 1995-2022. Her works have been exhibited in local, regional, national, and international juried exhibitions. She lives and works in the sand hills near the National Sheyenne Grasslands in North Dakota. 

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The Jerome Early Career Residency is in its 21st year of programming and is funded with a generous grant from the Jerome Foundation. The program is open to early-career Minnesota printmakers — defined here as artists who show significant potential yet have not received a commensurate amount of professional accomplishment or recognition, regardless of age or recognition in other fields. You can find details about the program, application process, and creative benefits on our website

About the Jerome Foundation –  Created by artist and philanthropist Jerome Hill (1905-1972), The Jerome Foundation seeks to contribute to a dynamic and evolving culture by supporting the creation, development, and production of new works by emerging artists. Based in St. Paul, MN, the Foundation makes grants to not-for-profit arts organizations and artists in Minnesota and New York City.

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. 

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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 

A Note from Cole Rogers

Stepping away from Highpoint is not an easy decision, but it is the correct one at this time.  Pretty much anyone who knows me is aware of my deep love and commitment to printmaking, Highpoint Center for Printmaking, and Highpoint’s mission.  I am proud of Highpoint's work over the past two decades, born out of a first discussion and dream in August of 1997.  That discussion developed into a business plan which was researched and crafted over three years, eventually resulting in Highpoint opening its doors to the public in early 2001.  From the very inception of Highpoint, it was intended for the organization to be passed on to new stewards to carry Highpoint's mission into the future.  I am incredibly proud of what Highpoint has become over the 25+ years since that early crazy idea Carla McGrath and I shared while cleaning up after a printmaking class in the Walker Art Center's Art Lab.   

Highpoint was a pretty risky idea at first, and luckily, we were able to build a small group of believers who became Highpoint’s first Board of Directors.  Early on, we did a lot of informational lunches and coffees with community members and visited other studios around the country as we built the business plan.  We both had a lot of experience and knowledge under our belts and we believed there was a strong need for a place like Highpoint, but it was unclear whether the community would embrace what we envisioned.  It was a huge leap of faith leaving jobs we both loved for this new and unformed undertaking.  We leased HP’s first space and got to work. We were visited by Mary Abbe, then the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Arts reporter. After telling Mary our plans, she gave us a side eye and a droll ‘uh huh’ which sounded a lot like ‘we’ll see’ but she generously wrote a nice article about our new venture.  Fast forward to 20+ years later and both Carla McGrath and I feel incredibly fortunate to have seen this idea bloom into what Highpoint has become and to have had the support of so, so many amazing people along the way.

I have loved the opportunities to work closely with hundreds of accomplished artists: from internationally known artists like MacArthur Fellow Julie Mehretu and Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Do Ho Suh, and Jim Hodges, to the self-taught artist Donovan Durham.  And I am so grateful to have shared this adventure with many wonderful HP Board members, staff, interns, co-op members, and tens of thousands of community members and stakeholders.  It has been an honor and privilege of a lifetime.

Hundreds of studio interns have passed through Highpoint over the years, many going on to graduate printmaking programs, several to Tamarind Institute’s Professional Printer Program, and a few have started their own studios.  Others are working professionally as printers at some of the most well-respected print publishers across the US including the Lower East Side Print Shop, Gemini GEL, Pace Editions, and Universal Limited Art Editions.  Several Highpoint co-op members and interns have even relocated across the country to work at Highpoint, which is obviously a huge compliment.  I’m still surprised and always deeply touched when I meet someone from another part of the country who knows about Highpoint.

The exhibition The Contemporary Print: 20 Years at Highpoint Editions curated by Dennis Michael Jon at the Minneapolis Institute of Art was a highlight of my career.  Seeing eight of Mia’s Target Galleries filled with so many wonderful works by Highpoint Edition’s artists felt like a big family reunion.  Being able to share all that work was amazing, over 8,000 people viewed the exhibition including 700 on the final day, and this was during the COVID pandemic.  Highpoint Edition’s Archive was created to share and preserve this body of work with the public, and Mia’s acquisition of the archive was a big and important milestone.

— Cole Rogers, Co-Founder, Master Printer, Artistic Director

HIGHPOINT CENTER FOR PRINTMAKING ANNOUNCES THE 2023 MCKNIGHT PRINTMAKING FELLOWS:

NATASHA PESTICH AND CAROLYN SWISZCZ

Natasha (left) Carolyn (right)

Highpoint is delighted to announce the 2023 McKnight Printmaking Fellows Natasha Pestich and Carolyn Swiszcz. During the second week of January, the four finalists for the 2023 McKnight printmaking Fellowship hosted esteemed panelists Alexis Lowry (curator at Dia Art Foundation, New York) and Andrea Carlson (visual artist) for studio visits. Alexis and Andrea’s review of the applications began back in November and concluded with the selection of the 2023 Fellows, Carolyn Swiszcz and Natasha Pestich.

About the 2023 McKnight Printmaking Fellows:
Natasha Pestich is a Minneapolis-based artist and educator. Working primarily in site-specific installation and works on paper, her work seeks to draw out the complex ways values and systems are questioned, internalized and expressed both in our daily lives and at pivotal moments of conflict, loss and renewal. Pestich has showcased her prints in alternative spaces and museums in the United States, Canada, Rome, and Scotland and is the recipient of numerous grants. 

Carolyn Swiszcz is a painter-printmaker known for her images of lonely suburban buildings. Born and raised in New Bedford, Massachusetts, she moved to Minnesota to attend the Minneapolis College of Art and Design where she earned a BFA in 1994. Her work has been exhibited at Highpoint, The Drawing Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery in New York. She lives in West St. Paul with her husband, photographer Wilson Webb, and their daughter. 

The fellowship officially began February 1st and will run through January 2024. Each McKnight fellow is awarded $25,000 in unrestricted funds, access to the cooperative printshop and classes at Highpoint, professional development opportunities provided by Springboard for the Arts, studio visits with invited arts luminaries as well as many other benefits. Carolyn and Natasha’s fellowship year will conclude with an exhibition in Highpoint’s galleries in January 2024.

Highpoint would like to thank Andrea Carlson and Alexis Lowry for providing their expert insight in reviewing the applications for the 2023 fellowship. We would also like to thank the McKnight Foundation for their continued support of this program and Minnesota artists.

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About the panelists:
Andrea Carlson is a visual artist who maintains a studio practice in northern Minnesota and Chicago, Illinois. In 2003 Carlson received a BA in Art and American Indian Studies, and an MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2005. Her work has been displayed in public spaces, while her paintings and drawings often create alternative landscapes and narratives within colonial institutions. Carlson was a recipient of the 2008 McKnight Fellow, a 2017 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors grant recipient, a 2021 Chicago Artadia Award, and a 2022 United States Artists Fellowship.

Alexis Lowry is curator at Dia Art Foundation, New York, where she is responsible for the permanent collection, as well as exhibitions, commissions, and public programs across Dia’s sites and locations. At Dia Chelsea, she has overseen new projects by Lucy Raven, Rita McBride and Kishio Suga. At Dia Beacon, she organized the first North American retrospective of Charlotte Posenenske’s work, as well as installations by Larry Bell, Mel Bochner, John Chamberlain, Mary Corse, Melvin Edwards, Charles Gaines, Barry Le Va, Lee Ufan, Robert Morris, Michelle Stuart, and Anne Truitt. Prior to joining Dia, she was curator of the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, Providence, and a freelance project manager for Creative Time, New York. She has recently contributed to publications for Art in America, Art Monthly, the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College, Orlando; Drawing Center, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; in addition to books produced by Dia. In 2021, Lowry was the first invited curator-in-residence at the Bauhaus Foundation in Dessau, Germany. She is on the board of directors of the Triple Aught Foundation and serves on the advisory council of The Great Northern. She obtained her PhD from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts in 2019.

Leslie Barlow is one of Artful Living's 10 Artists to Watch in 2023

Leslie Barlow was recently featured in Artful Living’s 10 Artists to Watch in 2023. “A force in the Minneapolis art scene and director of Public Functionary, Leslie Barlow investigates the elaborate web at the intersection of racial identity, community and belonging. Her colorful life-sized portraits capture subjects with a tender and nuanced reverence. Using oil paint to reveal their vibrant dimensions, Barlow weaves a sense of humanity and nostalgia into her work that invites you into the intimate warmth of the moment captured.”

Read more about Artful Living’s list here!

Interview with Savannah Bustillo, Jerome Resident and Co-op Artist

My name is Savannah Bustillo and I am a queer Latinx printmaker, book artist, and papermaker originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico. I received a BFA in studio art with a concentration in printmaking from Washington University in St. Louis, and have spent time working with different art non-profit spaces like Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in D.C, the Morgan Conservatory in Cleveland, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and Women’s Studio Workshop. Currently, in addition to being a part of the Highpoint community, I also work with the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, Fireweed Community Woodshop, and the Walker Art Center.

I moved to the Twin Cities in 2019 because of the amazing printmaking and book arts scene that’s here. Highpoint is such a pillar of the printmaking scene, both in the Twin Cities and beyond, so finding a way to be a part of the community was something I wanted from the beginning.

Highpoint, like so many print shops I have been fortunate to be a part of, does such incredible things but is a relatively small operation. It’s approachable as a community space in that regard - I love walking into the studio and knowing the staff and other community members. While I was featured in a show at Highpoint in 2020, I really got to know the community through a 2021 Jerome Early Career Printmakers Residency, and have continued on as a co-op member since then.

I feel very strongly about the fellowships, scholarships, and residencies that Highpoint uses to support emerging artists and people that have been historically underrepresented in the print shop. So often printmakers will talk about the democratic origins and abilities printmaking has to reach large groups of people. However, printmaking cannot endure as a discipline and claim to still be connected to those values if we don’t remember in equal measure that it takes effort to support new generations of emerging printmakers and those that are too often excluded from the printshop. As a community member I am proud to see Highpoint support emerging artists with the Jerome Residency, and the new Full-Color print fellowship and scholarships. These are key first steps in working towards creating an even stronger and more vibrant community.

It is difficult to convey how formative the Jerome Residency was for me. As an emerging artist, studio space, especially as a printmaker, is hard to come by and a difficult stretch financially. Not only was having that space for 9 months so key to continue making, but gaining a whole community of support - my fellow residents, Highpoint staff, meeting other artists in the studio regularly, having designated critiques — all of these aspects were fundamental to pushing my studio practice forward.

I began my residency focusing heavily on research and writing, and I was a little slow to get into the studio for the actual printing if I’m honest. Josh was particularly encouraging in that respect — and reminded me that output is not the point. The critiques were also key; our conversations, like all good conversations, stayed with me and helped me focus the body of work I wanted to create for our show. That mindset - of using this residency as an opportunity to create a completely new body of work, with each piece being slowly developed in tandem with the other works - was a new way of working for me. I had never had the time or resources to make work at that pace and so holistically before. I wanted the work I created for the show to all focus on the different visceral aspects of language - how language is spoken, pronounced, attached to smells, flavors, reading, scribbling. My work has been exploring histories of language for a while, but using more emotive and visceral responses in the work was a key change to make it more approachable for viewers. I feel that everything I produced was really an extension of the efforts, conversations, and support of the community around me, and that is special. I’ll never forget that.

You can find more of Savannah’s work here.

And become a member or donate to support Highpoint here.

Interview with Board Chair, Jerry Vallery

I’m originally from the Washington D.C. Growing up, my family spent a lot of time experiencing the great museums, theaters, and galleries that DC has to offer. My parents also believed in giving time and talent to those causes and organizations that were important to you. Through that, not only did I develop a love and appreciation for the arts in many forms, but I also saw firsthand what it meant to give back to your community. 

I earned my undergraduate and graduate degrees from Florida A&M University and moved to the Twin Cities in 1996. Much of my professional life has been spent in corporate sales, and consumer insights and analytics roles. I like to say that my job is about blending science and art, by leveraging data to craft compelling stories.  

I live in Minneapolis with my wife, Teresa, and our son Landon. We enjoy the local arts community, spending time outdoors, and traveling.

WHAT DREW YOU TO HP?

I was really drawn to Highpoint’s mission. It often goes unmentioned how ambitious the commitment is to provide a state-of-the-art workshop for practicing artists; to establish an Editions program that creates work through collaboration with nationally and internationally recognized artists; to maintain a beautiful gallery space and execute several exhibitions each year; and, then to enhance local arts education by providing education programming for hundreds of school-aged kids each year. 

How could you not want to be part of an organization like that??  

Jerry viewing artwork at the QUE CONSTE /FOR THE RECORD opening reception

WHAT HAS BEEN YOUR INVOLVEMENT?

Since joining the board, I have served as Secretary, Board Co-Chair, and now as Board Chair. My experience has been truly wonderful. I’ve had the opportunity to learn from so many experienced board members, artists, and especially from our founders Carla and Cole. The knowledge, expertise, and passion at all levels is a constant inspiration to me.

WHAT PROGRAMS DO YOU FEEL MOST PASSIONATE ABOUT?

If I’m forced to choose one(!), then it would have to be education programming. Central to HP’s mission is promoting the art of printmaking. And, I believe an important step in achieving this is to provide an introductory experience that is both welcoming and that gives that student a sense of possibility…that feeling that “I can do this”. I think Highpoint does an awesome job at providing that experience.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE PART OF THE HP COMMUNITY?

I think being an active part of the HP community means you believe in the connection and relationship between art and community more broadly. You believe that arts organizations shouldn’t exist in a vacuum, where they create and exhibit work that fails to acknowledge the world beyond its walls. It is not a static state that we reach and stop, of course, but an ongoing shift in how we engage. So, for me, being part of the HP community means that you care about that engagement.  

I am really excited about the future of HP. We will continue to keep the endeavor of promoting printmaking as our north star. But there should be excitement and curiosity around exploring new ways to continue this journey. Whether it is leveraging technology to expand access to our collections or creating work and curating exhibits that expand our audience. While we build upon a strong foundation, we should challenge ourselves to reach out into new directions.

Interview with artist and instructor, Lila Shull

My name is Lila Shull, and I am a new(ish) Minnesotan. I moved here late last summer from Tennessee primarily because I knew of Highpoint’s reputation as a community space and Minnesota’s support for artists in general. I have a BFA in painting from Winthrop University, a small liberal arts school in Rock Hill, SC. I received my MFA in Printmaking from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville in 2019. My experience in the arts is wide-ranging; in the time between schooling, I was a lead press operator for a fine art screenprinting studio, and I also managed a design letterpress studio for a time. Currently, I’m teaching at the University of Minnesota and am lucky to also be the Community Programs Coordinator at Minnesota Center for Books Arts.

This is the first time I have seen a community print shop that has the capacity to offer all the primary printmaking techniques (lithography, etching, relief, and screenprint). From the minute I reached out about joining, I have felt like a member of the community. Initially, I was drawn to the equipment access because it is so rare to be able to work on these niche processes outside of academia. After joining, I’ve been blown away by HP’s rare opportunities, like taking classes, proposing classes, biannual member exhibitions, artist consignments, working memberships on a sliding scale, and sharing space with other practicing artists in a non-competitive environment. 

Right after I joined, there was a call for workshop proposals, and I used it as an opportunity to shake off some studio practice cobwebs. I taught a six-week sharpie lithography class in the spring, which was terrific. I also taught a sampler session this past summer and have a couple more scheduled for this winter. I’m as involved as they will allow me to be. I can't overstate how amazing my experience has been so far. HP has served as a social lifeline since moving to a new city. I’ve been able to form rich friendships with the people I have met through the co-op, and it’s a privilege to make work alongside some of the most talented artists I have ever seen.

For me, I think the education programming and co-op membership are both really special. Having had the privilege of proposing workshops and leading some, this has been an amazing way to feel re-energized in the studio. I am excited to take a class at HP in the future and always have my eye on the schedule. Additionally, the co-op membership is great because there is a tiered payment system that includes pricing differences depending on your involvement. This has been helpful for me to continue to access the space, and it tears down some of the financial barriers that monthly memberships accrue. I hope HP continues to expand on these options in the future because it brings in so many different people who make the space more welcoming and diverse.

You can find Lila’s artwork here.

Lila’s coming classes at Highpoint.

Become a member

Njideka Akunyili Crosby featured in Zeitz MOCAA Exhibitio

Njideka Akunyili Crosby will be featured in an exhibition titled When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting at the Zeitz MOCAA from November 22, 2022 through September 3, 2023. When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting comprises an exhibition, publication and discursive programming that explores Black self-representation and celebrates global Black subjectivities and Black consciousness from pan-African and pan-diasporic perspectives. It boldly brings together artworks from the last 100 years, by Black artists working globally, into dialogue with leading Black thinkers, writers and poets who are active today. 

With a focus on painting, the exhibition celebrates how artists from Africa and its diaspora have imagined, positioned, memorialised and asserted African and African-descent experiences. It contributes to critical discourse on African and Black liberation, intellectual and philosophical movements. The title of the exhibition is inspired by Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us, the 2019 miniseries. Flipping ‘they’ to ‘we’ allows for a dialectical shift that centres the conversation in a differential perspective of self-writing as theorised by Cameroonian political scientist Professor Achille Mbembe. 

The exhibition features more than 200 works of art from 74 institutional and private lenders located in 26 countries. The exhibition is organised around six themes: The Everyday, Joy and Revelry, Repose, Sensuality, Spirituality, and Triumph and Emancipation.

The exhibition includes works by artists such as Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Zandile Tshabalala, Jacob Lawrence, Chéri Samba, Danielle McKinney, Archibald Motley, Ben Enwonwu, Kingsley Sambo, Sungi Mlengeya, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Cyprien Tokoudagba, Amy Sherald, Mmapula Mmakgabo Helen Sebidi and Joy Labinjo, to name a few, and in many instances bring these artists and their practice in dialogue for the first time.

Learn more about the exhibition here!

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.