Printmaking

At the Norton Simon Museum, an exhibition examining the L.A. area's postwar printmaking boom begins with a different sort of graphic. It's not a Richard Diebenkorn lithograph, an Ed Ruscha screenprint or any of the 150 or so other works in "Proof: The Rise of Printmaking in Southern California. " Gracing the title wall is a six-foot-wide bubble diagram - what "Proof" curator Leah Lehmbeck calls "a map of all the complexities, crossovers, key institutions and people covered in the show," which runs at the Pasadena museum through April 2. PHOTOS: Richard Diebenkorn The exhibition delves into an important chapter in American art history: the L.A.-based renaissance in the '60s and '70s, during which printmaking was embraced as a contemporary art form.

Elizabeth Catlett, a sculptor and printmaker who was widely considered one of the most important African American artists of the 20th century despite having lived most of her life in Mexico, has died. She was 96. Catlett, whose sculptures became symbols of the civil rights movement, died Monday at her home in Cuernavaca, Mexico, said her eldest son, Francisco. Her imposing blend of art and social consciousness mirrored that of German painter Max Beckmann, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and other artists of the mid-20th century who used art to critique power structures.

The voices of such great American poets as Carl Sandburg, Jack Kerouac and Walker Evans whisper through the galleries housing "From Whistler to Pollock: American Prints From the Collection." On view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through Aug. 6, this selection of 90 works from the museum's permanent collection reveals a little about the evolution of printmaking--which doesn't appear to change that drastically from one decade to the next--and a whole lot about the American Dream.

At the Norton Simon Museum, an exhibition examining the L.A. area's postwar printmaking boom begins with a different sort of graphic. It's not a Richard Diebenkorn lithograph, an Ed Ruscha screenprint or any of the 150 or so other works in "Proof: The Rise of Printmaking in Southern California. " Gracing the title wall is a six-foot-wide bubble diagram - what "Proof" curator Leah Lehmbeck calls "a map of all the complexities, crossovers, key institutions and people covered in the show," which runs at the Pasadena museum through April 2. PHOTOS: Richard Diebenkorn The exhibition delves into an important chapter in American art history: the L.A.-based renaissance in the '60s and '70s, during which printmaking was embraced as a contemporary art form.

"Contemporary Prints/Contemporary Visions," at USC's Fisher Gallery to Dec. 10, shades three artists with the broad umbrella of printmaking, but their "visions" gaze off in three different directions. The disparity is pervasive, running through the artists' printmaking techniques, artistic styles and sources of imagery. So what we have here is not one exhibition but three reasonably well-balanced solo shows by Jiri Anderle, Edward Ruscha and Rufino Tamayo.

In artist Eric Johnson's darkly comic view of the world, the government provides free housing to anyone who wants it. But there's a catch: the skyscraper condos are actually part of an immense nuclear missile aimed at the enemy. The live-in rocket, one of Johnson's anti-war concepts, is realized in the sculpture "Future Building," which is on display with five of his other pieces at the Irvine Fine Arts Center. The exhibit runs through Jan. 22.

Auditions are scheduled this month for an array of free classes to be offered to budding teen-age artists and entertainers. The classes, which will start Oct. 11 for the fall semester and Jan. 31 for the spring, will be offered by the Academy of Performing and Visual Arts at five locations, including Redondo Union High School in Redondo Beach. Sessions in the part-time program will be held on Saturday mornings.

Along Palms Boulevard in Venice, just east of Lincoln Boulevard, residents have enlivened a stretch of otherwise ordinary tract homes with the occasional architectural flourish: a pop-up addition here, a bowed-bamboo fence there. Nothing, however, is quite as eye-catching as the house of Cheri Pann and Gonzalo Duran. The Mosaic Tile House, as it is called, has shades of Antonio Gaudi's spectacular spires, the Watts Towers and the Emerald City, complete with yellow brick -- well, tile -- road.

An exhibit that examines the etchings of Jasper Johns, arguably the greatest printmaker of our time and a venerated painter, opens Tuesday at UCLA's Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery. "Foirades/Fizzles: Echo and Allusion in the Art of Jasper Johns" focuses on prints he made for "Foirades/Fizzles," an illustrated book with text by novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett.

As computer technology continues to be adapted to artistic pursuits and more artists start using it, some people wonder if traditional printmaking processes are a thing of the past. But after viewing the exhibit "New Printmakers 1995," sponsored by the Los Angeles Printmaking Society at Lankershim Arts Center, it seems more likely that Old World print techniques--etching, lithography, the woodcut--will not fade away.

Patrick Merrill Mixed-media artist and printmaker Patrick Merrill, 61, a mixed-media artist and printmaker who was curator of Cal Poly Pomona's art gallery from 1997 to 2009, died Tuesday in Diamond Bar after battling colon cancer, the university announced. Merrill had a studio in Covina where he made etchings, woodcuts, collographs and monoprints. Besides directing and curating the W. Keith and Janet Kellogg University Art Gallery at Cal Poly Pomona, he also was publicity and exhibition director for the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art from 1990 to 2000.

Avigdor Arikha, the Israeli artist who learned the power of art as a boy during the Holocaust when he sketched scenes from a concentration camp onto salvaged scraps of paper, has died in Paris. He was 81. Arikha died Thursday from complications of cancer at his home in Paris, where he spent most of his adult life, said Janis Gardner Cecil, sales director of the Marlborough Gallery in New York, which represented him. Arikha, a painter, draftsman and printmaker, became one of Israel's most important contemporary artists, imbuing his portraits and scenes of daily life — a red umbrella against a wall, an overflowing bookshelf, a jumble of bottles in a cabinet — with enigmatic, disconcerting beauty.

After seeing "Behold the Day: The Color Block Prints of Frances Gearhart," showing at the Pasadena Museum of California Art through Jan. 31, one may wonder why Gearhart isn't better known. Back in the 1930s, at the height of her career, she became one of the top color-block printmakers in America, displaying her work at the Smithsonian and the Brooklyn Museum, as well as at numerous shows on the West Coast. Even if her fame faded in the East, where her mountainous landscapes may not have resonated as much, one would expect her continued popularity in California, where she lived and worked until her death in 1958 at age 89. Over the course of her 30-year career, this Pasadena artist -- one of three sisters, none of them married, all of them teachers in the public school system, all of them artists and travelers -- became her own compelling, uplifting portrait of female achievement and independence.

Nancy Spero, a pioneering feminist artist who examined the treatment of women and the horrors of war, has died. She was 83. Spero died Oct. 18 in a Manhattan hospital of respiratory complications from an infection, said Mary Sabbatino, vice president of Galerie Lelong in New York. Spero's work combined drawing, painting, collage and printmaking. She was active in the women's movement, and in the 1970s decided to focus on the roles of women. "The basis of Spero's artmaking is to isolate and juxtapose images of women," Christopher Hume wrote in the Toronto Star in 1989.

"I don't have to wait for inspiration," says artist Chuck Close in his spacious studio in Lower Manhattan. "I always say that inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. Work kicks open doors. In the process of doing something, other things occur to you, and you end up where you didn't plan to be." Close, 66, hadn't planned to be a printmaker, but here he is surrounded by prints and proofs and plans for more prints.

IN the wake of a long revolution against dictatorship, Mexican artists vowed in the 1920s to create works that would instruct and enrich the masses. They even signed a manifesto proclaiming, "We repudiate so-called easel painting and every kind of art favored by ultra-intellectual circles." Out of this mood came the great murals of modern Mexico, especially the monumental works of Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Celeste Gordon, 70, internationally recognized painter and printmaker. Born in Ekelaka, Mont., Mrs. Gordon grew up in Beverly Hills, attended USC and studied art in Germany and Japan. Married to CIA officer James Gordon, she followed him to posts in Washington, New York, Berlin, Hamburg, Tokyo, Manila and Athens. Her paintings were purchased by museums and private collectors in Germany and exhibited at galleries in Tokyo. She taught printmaking in Manila. On Sunday in Newport Beach of cancer.

About 30 years ago, the Los Angeles Printmaking Society was formed not only to serve those who make prints, but also to educate the public about them and raise the profile of printmaking in the art world. This winter, printmaking will reach new heights of visibility in the Los Angeles area because of the organization's work in conjunction with 21 public and commercial galleries.

In the Japanese Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a retrospective of Munakata Shiko (1903-1975) surveys an unusual career characterized by a mighty struggle to invest new life into a tradition that had faltered. Ambitious, gifted and far more adventuresome than most of his countrymen, Munakata was not altogether successful in his pursuit.

Leonard Edmonson, 86, a widely known printmaker of screen prints, etchings and lithographs, died Tuesday in Los Angeles. A native of Sacramento, Edmonson studied art at UC Berkeley and earned both his bachelor's and master's degrees there. He served in Army intelligence from 1942 to 1946 and traveled widely in Europe, where he was drawn to the work of the Old Masters and Paul Klee. After the war, Edmonson began a five-decade teaching career.