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Contemporary Print Fair at the Baltimore Museum of Art

March 29, 2010

Sam Gilliam print

Last weekend I visited this year’s edition of the annual contemporary print fair hosted by the Baltimore Museum of Art. Fourteen exhibitors were there, representing major presses and dealers from around the country. They showed limited editions and individual prints, often hot off the literal presses, like DC’s own Sam Gilliam’s brand new monoprints made at Tandem Press in Madison, Wisconsin. Our Fair City's Renee Stout was also represented at th Dolphin Press booth.

Renee Stout's work

This print fair is a smallish event, which is a good thing, since you can linger at each booth and talk to the exhibitors. In the best cases, they are master printers themselves, meaning they work closely with other artists to create limited editions. When you see an edition of prints by any major artist, they have been made with a master printer whose knowledge, experience and instinct allows the artist to achieve her intentions and to repeat the print exactly each time for the number required for the edition. The latter is a lot more difficult than you might imagine.

Andrew Mockler of Jungle Press

Markus Linnenbrink print

Many of these people were delighted to share information, unfailingly enthusiastic about their artists and often very free with information about how the work was made. I was delighted to be able to spend a bit of time with a teacher of mine, Andrew Mockler, master printer and owner of Jungle Press in Brooklyn, who works with the painter and printmaker Joan Snyder, among others.
I’ve said this before but this event gave me the opportunity to observe once again how you can always identify the printmakers at an exhibition – they are the ones with their noses pressed as close to the glass as propriety permits, trying to figure out exactly what combination of techniques were used to achieve the effects in the piece.

Mark Mullen work

Henrik Dresher

I am myself a printmaker and something of a print junkie, so I loved a lot of work and pressed the GessoHead nose against a lot of glass. I’d particularly note a German artist named Markus Linnenbrink whose large scale monoprints were made by painting directly on the press bed. I am most definitely going to try that myself. Also Mark Mullan’s stunning etchings, the Joan Snyders in Jungle Press’s booth and the booth run by Dolphin Press and Print @ MICA, a unique endeavor that creates collaborations between resident artists and faculty and student printers from MICA. The quality of their work is outstanding and they are certainly close enough to qualify as local.

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