How an LA Printmaking Workshop Advanced the Career of Women Artists
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Image caption: Anni Albers, “Enmeshed I” (1963), color lithograph, 20 1/4 x 27 inches (Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Martin L. Gleich, San Diego, 1964, © 2021 Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York). Article by
Ruth Asawa, Anni Albers, and others first experimented with printmaking at June Wayne’s Tamarind Lithography Workshop.
When she founded the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles in 1960, artist June Wayne was unequivocal in her ambition. “A handful of people is all that is needed for a renaissance in an art,” she wrote in her 1959 Ford Foundation grant application. “Such a renaissance is the purpose of this project.” During the decade that Tamarind operated in Los Angeles, between 1960 and 1970, Wayne did indeed helm a lithographic revolution. The workshop revived the waning practice of lithography in the United States, became the standard-bearer for this type of print production, and trained a generation of emerging artists and master printers.
The exhibition Experiments on Stone: Four Women Artists from the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, currently on view via the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego’s online platform, MCASD: Digital, presents work produced by Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, Gego, and Louise Nevelson […]