Allentown Art Museum celebrates colorful history of Durham Press

Fine-art PA printer & publisher renowned for pushing boundaries

Allentown, PA— The Allentown Art Museum is marking thirty years of innovative and experimental printmaking in a striking new special exhibition focused on works on paper created at nearby Durham Press. Color & Complexity: 30 Years at Durham Press not only features outstanding prints but also reveals aspects of the fine-art printing process through the display of blocks and matrixes next to finished works. The exhibition opened on January 19 and continues through May 3, 2020.

Founded in 1988 by master printer Jean-Paul Russell and co-owned with partner and wife Ann Marshall, the Bucks County, Pennsylvania, workshop and publisher is internationally recognized. In collaborating with artists, Durham Press develops unique methods to suit each project, whether that involves creating hundreds of intricately carved and shaped woodblocks or marking a metal plate with a bulldozer.

Color & Complexity highlights an impressive body of work from across Durham Press’s history, including prints by some of today’s most groundbreaking artists, such as Hurvin Anderson, Polly Apfelbaum, Chitra Ganesh, John Giorno, Jacob Hashimoto, Michael Heizer, Emil Lukas, Beatriz Milhazes, and Mickalene Thomas. Many of these artists have been returning to Durham Press for years and even decades, noting that the supportiveness and experimental nature of their experience often influences the development of their artwork in other media.

“From the beginning, Durham Press has expanded the notion of what a print can be,” writes Art Museum vice president of curatorial affairs Elaine Mehalakes Lucks in the exhibition catalogue. “Emerging in the context of the downtown New York art scene of the late 1980s, the Press is now famed for the variety, quality, and complexity of their monoprints, portfolios, and large-scale masterpieces of printmaking. Their publications are a reflection of the journey led by Marshall and Russell, and of the inventiveness of the adventurous artists with whom they have grown over the decades.”

The catalogue is available for purchase in the Museum Store for $29.95. 

Color & Complexity is supported through the generosity of the County of Lehigh, the Amaranth Foundation and Joan Miller Moran, Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz, SOTA (Society of the Arts), Nancy Light, William and Mary Ann Heydt, and Tony and Nancy Odorski. 

Additional support is provided by the Harry C. Trexler Trust, the Julius and Katheryn Hommer Foundation, the Century Fund, the Bernard and Audrey Berman Foundation, the Leon C. and June W. Holt Endowment, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Friends of the Museum.

ABOUT THE ALLENTOWN ART MUSEUM

The Allentown Art Museum is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose mission is to use the arts and culture as a catalyst to drive interaction, experimentation, and social change for everyone. By collecting, preserving, studying, exhibiting, interpreting, and teaching visual art, the Museum enlightens, engages, energizes, and empowers people—transforming the community one person and one idea at a time. For more information please visit AllentownArtMuseum.org.

 

Information and image provided to TVL by:
Chris Potash
Manager of Marketing and Public Relations
Allentown Art Museum

 

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