From the Curator

No More “Howling in the Wilderness”

I became an intern at Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop in Chelsea, 1 New York, in spring 1985. As an art school undergraduate, I emptied the wastebaskets, cleaned the glass inking slabs, and worked as a “sponger,” keeping the litho stone just barely wet between the inking and printing of images. One day that sweltering spring, Bob sent me to Tay Art Supplies to pick up a ream of paper, with two subway tokens. Using one to get there, I soon found out that a ream of 22-inch by 30-inch BFK Rives is five hundred sheets, and a big, heavy thing. But everyone at the shop worked hard, especially Bob. I once I saw him hop on a bicycle and pedal off to City Chemical. Shortly, he returned with a gallon of nitric acid in a glass jug, bouncing in the bike basket. I spent a lot more time at the workshop than required, fascinated by the wildly varied graphic work being produced, and the people hailing from around the world that came and went. Bob had a knack for making introductions, and his shop was a hive of activity, a window onto the global contemporary art scene. Bob was legendary for his generosity, and for the effortless diversity of his shop. Certainly, his example influenced me in ways I am still recognizing. How Bob was moved to become such a crucial figure is a fascinating tale that begins not very far from our Gallery on West 129th Street. However, formal art histories often pay less attention to the critical importance of “contact zones,” where artists meet, exchange, and often become lifelong friends. Nonetheless, Blackburn himself was formed by just such spaces. He was one of the youngest attendees of Charles Alston’s “306” salon, held in Alston’s shared studio with Mike Bannarn on West 141st Street. He also attended Augusta Savage’s Harlem studio laboratory. Savage would serve as the first director of the Harlem Community Art Center in 1938, where Blackburn learned printmaking. The HCAC was the WPA’s largest community art center in New York. The WPA was modeled on a 1922 Mexican artists’ union, the Sindicato Revolucionario de Obreros Técnicos y Plasticos; one of its founders, muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, after working in Los Angeles in the early 1930s with a group he christened the “Bloc of Painters,” established the Siqueiros Experimental Workshop on West 14th Street in 1936 as a common space for experimental projects using modern technologies and materials. A key member in both Siqueiros’s Los Angeles and New York groups, Luis Arenal, returned to Mexico in 1937 and, with Leopoldo Méndez and Pablo O’Higgins, founded the influential Taller de Gráfica Popular. Meanwhile, in New York, the New School had become a haven for European intellectuals and artists fleeing the rise of fascism. In 1940, British engraver Stanley William Hayter relocated his Parisian workshop, Atelier 17, to the New School, where American artists, including Louise Nevelson, Robert Motherwell, Siqueiros’s acolyte, Jackson Pollock, and others met expatriate artists including Louise Bourgeois, Max Ernst, and Matta. Hayter remarked:

Many of them met one another in my workshop, because the situation in New York . . . They were howling in the wilderness, and they were having a very tough time of it—they were working in the most squalid of lofts, on East 10th Street, down in that neighborhood, and also there was no place where they easily got together, where they could meet one another. 2

Such “contact zones” have been fundamental to the development of contemporary art. Art history has been slow to recognize the importance of such experiences, and the spaces that foster them have been understudied. However, this intricate and messy network of human connection—without which we would all be the poorer—has fostered crucial breakthroughs. Though this is just a brief chronology, we can see artists from around the world meeting, remaining in touch, and coming together again and again in various spaces and places, in support of one another. The direct links and influences across countries and between these pioneering, creative sites are clear. Indeed, these very institutions I’ve mentioned shaped Bob Blackburn, and informed his decision to found his own workspace: the largest and longest-running print shop in the U.S. And now I, too, am part of the community of that space, even after 30 years, and it has been a tremendous blessing and strength in my life. I called on some of the workshop artists as recently as the Uptown Triennial, initiated by the Wallach Art Gallery, and held in summer 2017. Despite the fact that we all now supposedly have everything we need flowing from our iPads or iPhones, collaborative spaces and communal ventures continue to spring up. Even in our increasingly “plugged-in” and virtual world, artists still need to come together in real life. Conversation, communication, and contact remain key ingredients to an artist’s development. As Blackburn himself noted, “I think most of our learning was sitting down at the coffee table with [John] Von Wicht and 3 Will [Barnet] and Ronald [Joseph] and drinking coffee and working together.” To the class of 2018, I leave you this partial history to consider, with the wish that you will return, again and again, to the connections and contacts you forged working here at Columbia University School of the Arts. May they nurture you, guide you, and lead you to new and unimagined directions that will take art history many years to unravel.

Deborah Cullen Curator March 26, 2018

1 Robert Hamilton Blackburn (1920-2003, Jamaican American) founded his atelier in Chelsea, New York in October 1947. In 1971, “The Printmaking Workshop, Inc.” was incorporated as a not-for-profit workspace. In 2003, the “Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop” became a program of The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, to continue Blackburn’s vision.

2 Stanley William Hayter, in an interview with Deborah Rosenthal, Paris, May 1980, np; printed in the exhibition catalog Stanley William Hayter in America: Paintings, Drawings and Prints, 1940–1950 (NY: Francis M. Naumann Fine Art LLC, 2009).

3 Robert Blackburn. Paul Cummings interview, December 4, 1970. The Archives of American Art, The Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. Transcript of an audiotape, 31.

Liz Ahn