The Legacy of America's Pioneer Robert Blackburn and the Printmaking Workshop

Robert (Bob) Blackburn is a name that will live in the hearts of printmakers and artists worldwide for generations to come, and the person behind the name was one of the most giving and generous men of his age. Although he left this earthly realm nearly ten years ago in 2003, his was a life full of experience and adventure and at the age of 82, few can have claimed to have done half as much.

"We console ourselves with the knowledge that he had an extraordinary and productive life" - Jane Stephenson, Executive Director, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts

Born in Summit, New Jersey  in 1920 to Jamaican immigrant parents, Robert (Bob) Hamilton Blackburn was raised in the Harlem neighborhood of New York during its Harlem Renaissance period. In addition to the Harlem movement, Blackburn was influenced by European abstract art and American and Mexican social realism. He was mentored by several Harlem Renaissance artists like Charles "Spinky" Alston, Augusta Savage, and James Lesesne Wells and studied lithography, etching, woodblock, and silk-screening with Riva Helfond at the WPA Harlem Community Art Center. The Center was also a gathering place for black writers and artists such as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and Jacob Lawrence. A scholarship to the Art Students League in 1941 made it possible for Blackburn to study painting with Vaclav Vytlacil and lithography with Will Barnet, who later became a close friend. 

Blackburn’s early black and white figurative work gave way to colorful biomorphic abstractions and he became known for his artistic abilities as much as for his teaching and technical skills as a Master Printer for numerous artists of the age. This was due in part to the modernist trends in 1940s-1950s New York, including Abstract Expressionism, and the aesthetics of Atelier 17, a  print shop run by the renowned printmaker Stanley William Hayter.

In 1948 Blackburn and Barnet established the Printmaking Workshop, an 8,000-square-foot loft at 55 West 17th Street in Chelsea as an informal cooperative studio for experimenting with innovative lithographic techniques.

From 1957 to 1963, he was the first master printer at the prestigious Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) lithographic press in Long Island, N.Y. At ULAE, Blackburn collaborated with prominent Abstract Expressionist and Pop artists Larry Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. He printed the first 79 editions for ULAE, setting their technical and aesthetic standard of excellence by which all later American print shops took note.

Blackburn’s own complicated, varicolored abstractions prefigured and complemented projects produced at ULAE, but his early experiments in color lithography during the 1950s literally propelled an American graphic art explosion over the next ten years.

After working at ULAE, Blackburn returned to his Chelsea studio (Printmaking Workshop) in 1963 where he encouraged thousands of artists to work in the printmaking medium. Some of those artists included  Kathy Caraccio, Roy DeCarava, Ernest Crichlow, Mel Edwards, Terry Haass, Antonio Frasconi, Mohammed Khalil, Thomas Laidman, Krishna Reddy, Faith Ringgold, John von Wicht, and Charles White among many others. Under his direction, the Printmaking Workshop became one of the most vital collaborative art studios in the world. It was celebrated in the printmaking community for its open and  innovative atmosphere, and it brought together a wide variety of artists, including longtime friend Romare Bearden.

In his lithograph ‘Faux Pas’, Robert Blackburn refers to Robert Rauschenberg's Accident, the "gaffe" which became a milestone in contemporary printmaking. Through the middle of the image, a white stripe of paper breaks apart the image, alluding to the fragile nature of the limestone. Blackburn continued to explore the broken stone concept with a suite of calligraphic works, that revealed his interest in Sumi ink drawing.

In 1971, the Printmaking Workshop became a non-profit corporation, with a mission to maintain creative and artistic quality, support and encourage innovation, create opportunities for Third-World and minority artists, and foster public appreciation of the fine art print. Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop was directly responsible for fostering similar workshops internationally, including the Lower East Side Printshop in New York City, the Asilah Workshop in Morocco (working with Camille Billops and Mohammed Khalil), and the first Namibian printshop for black artists in post-apartheid South Africa. Blackburn also worked with other internationally-recognized artists such as Diogenes Ballester, Elizabeth Catlett, Pavel Ouporov and Suzanne Scherer.

Due to financial difficulties, Blackburn approached the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in 2001 to maintain his workshop. It is now located on West 39th Street in Manhattan. The Foundation has mounted a fundraising campaign to continue to operate the Printmaking Workshop, and house the Printmaking Workshop's archives and Blackburn's papers at the Library of Congress.

Under his guidance, the Printmaking Workshop has helped artists realize their dreams, and explore a new medium. Side by side in the studio, artists, black, white, young, old, American, foreign born, have sought to render their artistic visions in print.

In addition to his work as a master printer and mentor, Blackburn taught at the Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, School of Visual Arts, Columbia University, New York University, Maryland Institute College of Art, and Rutgers University, amongst many other institutions.

Public Collections:

Library of Congress

Brooklyn Museum

Bronx Museum

the United Negro College Fund

Baltimore Museum of Art

Asilah Museum (Morocco)

Tel Aviv Museum

Achievements:

1953-54 - John Hay Whitney Traveling Fellowship

1957 - first Master Printer hired at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), a lithographic print shop founded by Tatyana & Maurice Grosman, in West Islip, Long Island.

1988 - Governor's Art Award from the New York State Council on the Arts

1992 - New York Artists Equity Award for "dedicated service to the printmaking community."

1992 - John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship

2000 - Lifetime Achievement Awards from the College Art Association and The National Fine Print Association 

"Bob Blackburn's groundbreaking vision and achievements have influenced American Arts, African American culture, and generations of artists throughout the world. Master printer, mentor, teacher, brother, uncle, friend -- Bob made a major difference in the lives of so many of us. His legacy -- as a printmaker and as the founder and director of the Printmaking Workshop -- will long continue in the arts community; his countless acts of kindness to thousands of artists and many others will remain in the hearts of people everywhere," -Ted Berger, Executive Director of the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Elizabeth Catlett Prints: Serving Notice to the People

Alice Elizabeth Catlett was born in Washington DC in 1915 (or 1919), the youngest of three children. Both of her parents were educators, and she, too, chose a profession that blended education as well as the arts. She studied design, printmaking and drawing at Howard University  and received her B.S. degree in 1935. Working as a high school teacher in North Carolina, Catlett left the position after two years, because low wages available to African-Americans. In 1940 Catlett became the first student to receive an M.F.A. in sculpture at the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History. While there, she studied with Grant Wood, at whose urging Catlett began to work with the subject of  African-Americans, especially black women.

Catlett moved to Chicago in 1941, studied ceramics at the Art Institute of Chicago, and printmaking at the Art Students League of New York in 1942-1943. After graduation she moved to New Orleans to teach at the historically black institution Dillard University, and met and married Charles White. Five years later, after her divorce from White, she left New Orleans for New York to study with the sculptor Ossip Zadkine. He encouraged Catlett to work in a more abstract direction. While in New York, she became the Promotion Director of Harlem’s George Washington Carver School which boasted famed photographer Roy DeCarava as one of their students.

In 1946, Catlett received a fellowship that allowed her to travel to Mexico where she studied at the Escuela de Pintura y Escultura, Esmeralda, Mexico. In 1947, she married Mexican artist Francisco Mora, settled there permanently, and later become a Mexican citizen. Eventually she gave up her American citizenship and was declared an ‘undesirable alien’ by the US State Department; a situation which forced her to obtain a special visa to attend the opening of her 1971 solo exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Catlett worked with a group of printmakers at the Taller de Gráfica Popular, (People's Graphic Arts Workshop) in Mexico City. Artists Leopoldo Méndez, Raul Anguiano, Luis Arenal, and Pablo O'Higgins organized the group in 1937, and focused their art toward creating a social change. The TGP inspired her to reach out to the broadest possible audience, which often meant balancing abstraction with figuration. She and other artists created a series of linoleum cuts on black heroes and "did posters, leaflets, collective booklets, illustrations for textbooks, posters and illustrations for the construction of schools, against illiteracy in Mexico."

Catlett was arrested during a railroad workers’ strike in Mexico City in 1949. Like other artists and activists, she felt the political tensions of the McCarthy years. The TGP was thought to have ties to the Communist Party; and although Catlett never joined the party, her first husband had been a member, so she was closely watched by the United States Embassy.

She continued to teach even after becoming a successful artist, and in 1958 she became the first female Professor of Sculpture and Head of the Sculpture Department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s School of Fine Arts in Mexico City. She retired to Cuernavaca, in 1975. Thereafter, she continued to be active in the Cuernavaca art community.In 1980, Catlett donated a collection of her personal papers, exhibition catalogs, and other documentary materials to the Archives of American Art in the Smithsonian Institution.

Catlett was a sculptor and printmaker who was widely regarded as one of the most important African American artists of the 20th century; whose long career stretched from pioneering in academia, blending art with political/social movements like the Chicago Renaissance of the 1940s, the Black Power and Black Arts movements, the Mexican Public Art Movement, Feminism and confronting injustices against African-Americans. Catlett often drew upon her personal experiences as an African-American woman in a period of unbridled racism but she also embraced influences such as pre-Columbian sculpture, and the works of artists Henry Moore and Diego Rivera.

She was concerned with the social dimension of her art. “I have always wanted my art to service my people — to reflect us, to relate to us, to stimulate us, to make us aware of our potential.” For example, her Sharecropper print refers to the injustices of an unfair system exerted on the poor and showed her lifelong concern for the oppressed and the dignity of women. She was a ground-breaking personality and her tenacity to seek a career when segregation presented limited opportunities drove her to make art and speak the truth of her own experiences. She was as much beloved in Mexico as the US, and worked up until her death at age 96.

 

Awards and Honors:

Rosenwald Fund Fellowship, 1946

50 year retrospective exhibition at the Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College, 1998

Women's Caucus For Art, NY

Elizabeth Catlett Week in Berkeley, CA

Elizabeth Catlett Day in Cleveland, OH

Honorary citizen of New Orleans, LA

Honorary Doctorate from Pace University, NY

2003 International Sculpture Center’s Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award

Included in Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “Two Centuries of Black American Art,” , 1976  “Stargazers:Elizabeth Catlett in Conversation w/ 21 Contemporary Artists,” Bronx Museum, NY

Sculpture Commissions:

First prize in sculpture, the American Negro Exposition in Chicago, 1939

The National Council of Negro Women in New York

Louis Armstrong, Louis Armstrong Park, New Orleans, LA

Howard University,  Washington, D.C.

“Invisible Man” Memorial to Ralph Ellison, in Riverside Park, West Harlem, NY

And several in Mexico and Mississippi

Collections:

Institute of Fine Arts, Mexico

The Museum of Modern Art, NY

Museum of Modern Art, Mexico

National Museum of Prague

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C

Worcester Art Museum, MA

The University of Iowa, IA

Howard University, Washington, DC

Fisk University, NY

Atlanta University, GA

the Barnett-Aden Collection, FL

Schomburg Collection, NY

Museum of New Orleans, LA

The High Museum, GA

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY