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 second blog post in our series is by Sara Sanders about her Chair series, 2010. Two of the chairs here are modeled after real ones in the artist's life. Can you guess which are real? Answers will come in the next post.

I believe that the domestic objects with which we spend our lives retain traces of our histories and tell stories about our pasts. These prints are part of an ongoing series of portraits of chairs drawn in the way we imagine them to be. Two of the chairs in this series were drawn from existing objects with a rich history, while the rest are imagined character studies. They are intimate works executed as hand-drawn color lithographs, a process that allows me to build up a drawing in the same manner as glazing is done in oil painting.

The lithograph of Pauline Girardin, Hibiscus et Pastemone, has particular resonance with me.  The artist’s focus on the object only, omitting the stage that the flowers appear upon, grants the object a timeless quality that allows it to inhabit the present, or any place or time that we project upon it. Girardin’s title recognizes that art can capture fleeting moments, and that, although time may pass, we can use art as a means of awakening our memories of a moment and allow our imaginations to transport us.