While the exhibition Printing Women focuses on Henrietta Louisa Koenen’s (1830–1881) collection of female printmakers from the 16th to 19th centuries, it is only appropriate to signal women’s continuing participation in the medium as well as the Library’s longstanding commitment to acquiring and exhibiting prints made by women from around the world. To complement this earlier history, therefore, I worked with the Library’s Digital Experience Team to display online a small sampling of works by contemporary printmakers in the Library’s collection. We began reaching out to artists, asking if we could display their work on the exhibition’s web page and digitize it for our digital collections. The majority were delighted to contribute, many also provided writings about their work and the exhibition. Throughout the exhibition’s run, I will choose and present a piece by one artist every other week on the exhibition’s web page. Additionally, I will produce a blog post about their work as well as about works in the exhibition, featuring their own words when possible. 

For those who are interested in the long history of women’s involvement with the medium of print, there is much more to explore within the Library’s deep and varied holdings. The exhibition features only a smattering of Koenen’s collection (which numbers over 500 prints of which only a little over 80 are shown in the exhibition). In addition, the Print Collection not only owns large numbers of additional prints from the period in which Koenen collected, but also many, many more works from the 20th- and 21st-century.

The third blog post in our series is by Alyson Shotz about her Sequent series, 2013.

Sequent was made at Crown Point Press in San Francisco. Kathan Brown, the legendary printmaker and publisher, founder of CPP, invited me to come and work with them in 2013.  CPP is known for their beautiful aquatint technique, and so that’s the technique I decided to use.  I’m a sculptor and feel a bit more comfortable working in 3d, so I began by folding paper and we put it down directly onto a plate and printed a color over that. I folded the same paper again and placed it on the plate again and we printed a new color. The colors then began to overlay and change shape as I folded more and more. Also the paper we were printing onto became embossed with the image of the three dimensional folded paper. This series of prints shows the progression of the paper being folded and the colors becoming more complex. Because I work with natural light in most of my sculpture, I used the basic colors of the spectrum (red, orange, yellow, green, blue) to create the color scheme. My printmaking team was all women, lead by master printmaker, Ianne Kjorlie, assisted by Fanny Retzak and Emily York.