Fine Art Magazine Blog: The Print Center Announces Its Fall Exhibition ULAE: Prints for a New Generation

The Print Center Announces Its Fall Exhibition

ULAE: Prints for a New Generation

September 13 – November 23, 2024

(left to right) Kiki Smith, My Blue Lake, 1995, 3 color lithograph and photogravure, 43 ½” x 54 ¾”, edition of 41, © Kiki Smith / Universal Limited Art Editions; Carroll Dunham, Floating Shape with Backdrop, 1989-90, 4 color photolithograph, 22 ¾” x 28 ¾”, edition of 47. © Carroll Dunham / Universal Limited Art Editions

PHILADELPHIA, PA – The Print Center is pleased to announce the exhibition ULAE: Prints for a New Generation, on view September 13 – November 23, 2024. The show will present printed works by nine leading contemporary American masters made at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), the renowned printmaking studio in Bay Shore, New York: Carroll Dunham, Jane Hammond, Bill Jensen, Julian Lethbridge, Suzanne McClelland, Elizabeth Murray, Susan Rothenberg, Kiki Smith and Terry Winters. This show continues a longstanding series recognizing the work of printshops across the United States that have made extraordinary contributions to contemporary print, including the Brodsky Center, Dieu Donné, Durham Press, Forth Estate and the Lower East Side Printshop. This exhibition is the first institutional show dedicated to the work of ULAE in Philadelphia.

ULAE: Prints for a New Generation will fill all three galleries of The Print Center’s two-story building with work from the venerable studio, including early prints by celebrated artists who went on to greater acclaim in the ensuing decades. The exhibition will unfold in two parts: the first-floor gallery will spotlight the very successful, ongoing collaboration between the exceptional multidisciplinary artist Kiki Smith and ULAE that spans over thirty years, and the second floor will offer a rare opportunity to see artworks from the 1980s and 1990s – a very significant period for the workshop and American printmaking.

Spotlight on Kiki Smith will survey the ongoing collaboration with ULAE, beginning with her first lithograph produced at the studio in 1990 and concluding with a piece from 2020. The exhibition demonstrates how the continuous exchange between Smith and ULAE’s master printers has encouraged one of the finest artists working in print today. Together, they have produced conceptually adventurous, technically ambitious and impressively large-scale prints. These works track along with Smith’s shifting interests in the human body, self-portraiture, gender roles, nature and folklore. This is the first solo installation of Smith’s work in Philadelphia since an exhibition at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in 2002-03.

Kiki Smith, Litter (Fireplace Editions), 1999, 4 color lithograph with gilding, 22” x 30”, edition of 50. Published by Universal Limited Art Editions © Kiki Smith / Universal Limited Art Editions

Terry Winters, Novalis, 1983-89, etching and aquatint, 42 ½” x 31”, edition of 50. Published by Universal Limited Art Editions © Terry Winters / Universal Limited Art Editions

The second-floor galleries will feature prints by Carroll Dunham, Jane Hammond, Bill Jensen, Julian Lethbridge, Suzanne McClelland, Elizabeth Murray, Susan Rothenberg and Terry Winters – who represent two waves of artists who started working at ULAE in the 1980s and 90s. This influx of new artists was initiated after its legendary founder, Tatyana Grosman, passed in 1982. The next director, Bill Goldston, renewed Grosman’s vision by inviting younger painters and sculptors to collaborate. As a group, these works reveal the artists’ preference for a hybrid abstraction that acknowledges the presence of the human figure, along with the natural and man-made worlds.

The artists of the 80s explored the continuum between expressionistic abstraction and representation. Dunham’s surrealist forms border on cartoonish figuration and are amplified by flamboyant color. The abstract intaglio prints by Jensen are explorations of an inner world filled with curvilinear forms and dense textures. Murray’s large-scale lithographs, made by layering numerous sheets of printed and folded paper, employ exuberant lines to show a dog moving around a table. For Rothenberg, images of disembodied heads and fragmented body parts emerge from menacing darkness or glowing light, embodying a heightened state of mind. The abstract lithograph by Winters refers to the minute building blocks of the natural world, such as cells and organisms, blown up to a human scale.

(left to right) Elizabeth Murray working on Up Dog, and Down Dog, 1987-88; Elizabeth Murray, Down Dog, 1988, 9 color lithograph, 41” x 50 ¾”, edition of 65. Published by Universal Limited Art Editions © The Murray Holman Family Trust / Universal Limited Art Editions / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The artists of the 90s brought more varied interests and artistic styles into the studio. They had emerged into a changed art world and made prints that reverberated with their social and political concerns. Hammond’s print is a map of downtown Manhattan, with images drawn from her archive of 276 found images, that create a visually dense topography marked by personal associations. Lethbridge’s lithographs conform to a painting style often described as cerebral abstraction, observable in the black-and-white palette used to compose an image of rhythmic patterns. McClelland’s swashes of color track the path of her boisterous mark-making used to obscure a newspaper page documenting the moment’s political landscape.

All images courtesy of Universal Limited Art Editions.

All artworks published by Universal Limited Art Editions.

About Universal Limited Art Editions

ULAE is celebrated for its nearly seventy years of steadfast dedication to supporting the work of contemporary artists and sustaining the tradition of fine art printmaking in the United States. It was founded in 1957 in a small cottage on Long Island by Tatyana Grosman (1904-1982) as a printmaking workshop dedicated to creating fine art lithography. She established a guiding ethos centered entirely on the artist’s vision by offering exclusive and nearly limitless access to the lithography press. ULAE soon gained recognition for its collaboration with young artists of the sixties, including the luminaries Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and led the way for a revival in the medium in the United States.

Bill Goldston assumed the position of Director in the early 1980s and followed Grosman’s precedent by inviting younger generations of artists. He built a larger, state-of-the-art printmaking facility staffed by several highly skilled master printers to ensure ULAE could meet their ambitions. To this day, under the directorship of Bill’s daughter Larissa Goldston, ULAE continues to collaborate with the most prominent and innovative artists of our times in lithography, intaglio, woodcut and digital processes.

The Museum of Modern Art collects all of their editions, from its first to the most recent. There have been several major exhibitions of work produced at ULAE, including a commemoration of its first twenty-five years at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1990, and a celebration of its fortieth anniversary at the Corcoran Art Gallery, Washington, DC, 1997.

About the Artists

To read the biographies of Carroll Dunham, Jane Hammond, Bill Jensen, Julian Lethbridge, Suzanne McClelland, Elizabeth Murray, Susan Rothenberg, Kiki Smith and Terry Winters, view the complete PDF.

Programs

Gallery Talk & Opening Reception

Thursday, September 12

5:30pm, Gallery Talk with Lauren Rosenblum, Jensen Bryan Curator

6 – 7:30pm, Reception

Conversation with ULAE – Date TBD

All of The Print Center’s exhibitions and programs are free and open to the public. For more information visit printcenter.org.

About The Print Center

Mission

For more than a century, The Print Center has encouraged the growth and understanding of photography and printmaking as vital contemporary arts through exhibitions, publications and educational programs. The Print Center has an international voice and a strong sense of local purpose. Free and open to the public, it presents changing exhibitions, which highlight established and emerging, local, national and international contemporary artists. It mounts one of the oldest annual art competitions in the country, now in its 99th year, provides the Artists-in-Schools Program to Philadelphia public high school students and its Gallery Store offers a carefully selected array of contemporary prints and photographs onsite and online.

Funders

Support for The Print Center is offered by: Edna W. Andrade Fund; Drexel University Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design; Forman Family Fund; Sheila Fortune Foundation; Fund for Children; FS Investments; Allen Hilles Fund; IFPDA Foundation; William King Foundation; Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation; Christopher Ludwick Foundation; National Endowment for the Arts; PA American Rescue Plan Act; William Penn Foundation; Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; Philadelphia Cultural Fund; The Philadelphia Foundation; Rosenlund Family Foundation; Henrietta Tower Wurts Memorial; and our Board of Governors, Luminaries, members and friends.