A leading art historian presents a new grammar for understanding the meaning and significance of print In process and technique, printmaking is an art of physical contact. From woodcut and engraving to lithography and screenprinting, every print is the record of a contact event: the transfer of an image between surfaces, under pressure, followed by release. Contact reveals how the physical properties of print have their own poetics and politics and provides a new framework for understanding the intelligence and continuing relevance of printmaking today. The seemingly simple physics of printmaking brings with it an array of metamorphoses that give expression to many of the social and conceptual concerns at the heart of modern and contemporary art. Exploring transformations such as reversal, separation, and interference, Jennifer Roberts explores these dynamics in the work of Christiane Baumgartner, David Hammons, Edgar Heap of Birds, Jasper Johns, Corita Kent, Glenn Ligon, Julie Mehretu, Robert Rauschenberg, and many other leading artists who work at the edge of the medium and beyond. Focusing on the material and spatial transformations of the printmaking process rather than its reproducibility, this beautifully illustrated book explores the connections between print, painting, and sculpture, but also between the fine arts, industrial arts, decorative arts, and domestic arts. Throughout, Roberts asks what artists are learning from print, and what we, in turn, can learn from them. Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington

The first comprehensive overview of Jasper Johns's work in an innovative medium that the artist has singlehandedly redefined over the course of four decades Jasper Johns (b. 1930) is arguably the most important living American artist, and his work is central to any history of postwar art. With extensive new scholarship based on original research and interviews with the artist, Jasper Johns: Catalogue Raisonne of Monotypes provides the definitive account of his groundbreaking work in an intrinsically subversive medium situated between painting, drawing, and printmaking. Susan Dackerman and Jennifer L. Roberts examine Johns's innovative use of the printing press to create alterity, overturning monotype's long-standing reputation for subjectivity. Featured in this volume are all 143 monotypes Johns made between 1954 and June 2015, most of them published here for the first time. Each work is generously illustrated in color and accompanied by complete cataloguing information, including technical specifications, provenance, exhibition history, and bibliographic references.

Transporting Visions follows pictures as they traveled through and over the swamps, forests, towns, oceans, and rivers of British America and the United States between 1760 and 1860. Taking seriously the complications involved in moving pictures through the physical world--the sheer bulk and weight of canvases, the delays inherent in long-distance reception, the perpetual threat to the stability and mnemonic capacity of images, the uneasy mingling of artworks with other kinds of things in transit--Jennifer L. Roberts forges a model for a material history of visual communication in early America. Focusing on paintings and prints by John Singleton Copley, John James Audubon, and Asher B. Durand--which were designed with mobility in mind--Roberts shows how an analysis of such imagery opens new perspectives on the most fundamental problems of early American commodity circulation, geographic expansion, and social cohesion.

Scale is perhaps the most spectacularly overlooked aspect of artistic production. As photographic and digital reproductions have essentially dematerialized art, critical and historical research dealing with scale--both within the American critical tradition and abroad--has become scattered and insufficiently theorized. However, by posing a specific challenge, such research forces a heightened recognition of both the properties of materials and the deep technical knowledge of makers. A reconsideration of scalar relationships in American art and visual culture therefore reveals original insights. Scale is the second volume in the Terra Foundation Essays series. With eighty color illustrations and a wealth of new research from Glenn Adamson, Wendy Bellion, Wouter Davidts, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Christopher P. Heuer, Joshua G. Stein, and Jason Weems, it explores viewers' physical relationship to Barnett Newman's abstract canvases, the arduous engineering behind the creation of Mount Rushmore, and the charged significance of liberty poles in the landscape of eighteenth-century New York, among other topics that range from studies of specific works of art to significant conceptual and theoretical concerns.

A definitive exploration of Corita Kent's art, looking beyond her identity as a radical nun to establish her place amid the vibrant pop art movement of the 1960s Known widely as a Catholic nun with an avant-garde flair, Corita Kent (1918-1986) has a personal legacy that has tended to overshadow her extensive career as an artist. This handsomely illustrated catalogue places Kent in her rightful position among the foremost figures of pop art, such as Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, and Roy Lichtenstein. Although Kent has been largely excluded from the academic and critical discourses surrounding 1960s American art, this publication reevaluates her importance and highlights how her work questioned and expanded the boundaries of the pop art movement. Four essays and nearly 90 catalogue entries pull together a variety of topics-art history, religion, politics, linguistics, race, gender, mass media, and advertising-that influenced Kent's life and work during the 1960s. Eminent pop scholars delve into the relationship between her art and that of her contemporaries, and explore how her art both responded to and advanced the changes in modern-day Catholicism stemming from Vatican II. More than 200 vibrant images showcase Kent's ingenious screenprints, which often combine handwritten text and commercial imagery. Offering an unparalleled, rigorous study of an artist who has been largely overlooked, this book is an important contribution to scholarship as well as a fascinating presentation of Kent and her work to a wider audience. Distributed for the Harvard Art Museums Exhibition Schedule: Harvard Art Museums (09/03/15-01/03/16) San Antonio Museum of Art (02/13/16-05/08/16)

Harvard College's 18th-century Philosophy Chamber consisted of paintings, prints, sculptures, scientific instruments, natural specimens, and various indigenous artifacts-it was a rich and varied representation of not only artistic and cultural achievement but also contemporary understandings of the natural world. Dispersed and hidden away for nearly 200 years, this unrivaled collection has been reunited for the first time since it was originally assembled, providing an invaluable window into the art and culture of early America. It attests to the wide-ranging spirit of inquiry that characterized the late 18th and early 19th centuries. With an insightful look at conservation efforts and detailed examination of specific objects, including works by artists such as John Singleton Copley and John Trumbull, this publication explores the social and political stakes that underpinned one of the most remarkable assemblages of artifacts, images, and objects in the Atlantic World, and introduces readers to many long-forgotten icons of American culture. Distributed for the Harvard Art Museums Exhibition Schedule: Harvard Art Museums (05/19/17-12/31/17) The Hunterian, University of Glasgow (03/23/18-06/24/18)