Printing Women Today: An Evening with April Gornik, Dana Schutz, Shahzia Sikander, and Anne Higonnet

Event Details

In celebration of The New York Public Library's exhibition Printing Women: Three Centuries of Female Printmakers, 1570-1900, please join us for a conversation exploring women in the arts today. Moderated by art historian Anne Higonnet, esteemed artists April Gornik, Dana Schutz, and Shahzia Sikander will discuss their work and their experience as women in the arts.

Program is free, but advance registration is recommended. Priority will be given to those who have registered in advance. Register now. 

6:30pm - Exhibition open for viewing
Rayner Special Collections Wing, 3rd Floor

7-8pm - Program
McGraw Rotunda

Anne Higonnet works on the history of art since the seventeenth century, on childhood, and on collecting.   A 1980 Harvard College B.A, she received her PhD from Yale University in 1988.  She is now Professor of Art History at Barnard College, Columbia University.  Her work has been supported by Guggenheim, Getty, and Social Science Research Council fellowships, as well as by grants from the Mellon, Howard and Kress Foundations. She has published five print books and many essays.  In 2014, together with students, she organized an exhibition, course, catalogue, article, and website project on Anna Hyatt Huntington’s 1902-1936 New York City sculpture. She lectures widely to public audiences, including in the Metropolitan Museum of Art “Events Program.”  Her most recent publications are an Op-Ed in the Congressional magazine The Hill, in favor of putting Sojourner Truth on a new U.S. $20, and the introduction to a website about one of the Met’s 18th century period rooms.

April Gornik lives and works in New York City, where she has been a resident since 1978, and in Sag Harbor, Long Island, NY. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1953, she received a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1976. She has work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the National Museum of American Art in Washington, DC, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, the Cincinnati Museum, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the Modern Art Museum of Art of Fort Worth, the Orlando Museum of Art, and other major public and private collections. She has shown extensively, in one-person and group shows, in the United States and abroad. April Gornik is represented by the Danese/Corey Gallery in New York City, and has had one-person shows in New York regularly since 1981. She received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Guild Hall Museum in 2003, and was the Neuberger Museum’s Annual Honoree in 2004. 

Dana Schutz was born in Livonia Michigan in 1976. She received her BFA at the Cleveland Institute Art and her MFA at Columbia University in New York City in 2002. Schutz has had solo exhibitions at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts; Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland (2006); the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemoranea di Trento e Roverto, Italy (2010); the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta; the Newberger Museum in Purchase, New York (2011); the Miami Art Museum; the Denver Art Museum (2012); the Hepworth Wakefield Museum, Wakefield, United Kingdom (2013); and the Kestnergesellschaft in Hannover, Germany (2014), Musée d’art contemporain de Montéal (2015). Dana Schutz’ paintings and works on paper can be seen in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Contemporary Arts, Los Angeles; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas; The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal; Tel Aviv Museum; Israel, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others.  She is represented by Petzel Gallery in New York and Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin. 

Shahzia Sikander received her BFA from the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan and her MFA in painting and printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design.   Her pioneering practice takes Indo-Persian miniature painting- a traditional art form that is both highly stylized and disciplined – as a point of departure, and examines the forces at stake in contested cultural and political histories.  Her work challenges the strict formal tropes of miniature painting as well as its medium-based restrictions by experimenting with scale and media including animation, video, performance, and large-scale murals and installations, spurring international recognition for this medium within contemporary art practices.  She is the recipient of numerous awards, grants and fellowships including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius Grant”, the inaugural Medal of Art from the US State Department, Asia Society’s Award for Significant Contribution to Contemporary Art and the Joan Mitchell award to name a few.

This exhibition has been made possible by the continuing generosity of Miriam and Ira D. Wallach. Support for The New York Public Library’s Exhibitions Program has been provided by Celeste Bartos, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, Mahnaz Ispahani Bartos and Adam Bartos Exhibitions Fund, and Jonathan Altman