Wisconsin artists anchor a print renaissance

The Elvehjem Museum of Art will present an exhibition of 75 prints by artists who have been part of the vibrant print movement on the university campus during the past 40 years.

“Progressive Printmakers: Wisconsin Artists and the Print Renaissance,” Feb. 10-April 8, includes the work of artists who taught, studied or served as visiting artists at the Department of Art and artists who worked at the UW–Madison’s Tandem Press, thus chronicling the history of both.

When former WPA artist Alfred Sessler joined the Department of Art in 1946, the print area began to flourish. Sessler’s enthusiasm for printmaking and dedication to the medium caused the department to add courses in etching and blockprinting, woodcut, wood engraving, and lithography.

During the next two decades, Sessler was joined by innovative and talented artists Warrington Colescott, Jack Damer, Raymond Gloeckler, Walter Hamady, Dean Meeker and William Weege, who extended the limits of the print medium. Artists Frances Myers and David Becker, joined the faculty in the 1980s.

While these artists were imparting to a new generation the time-honored techniques of traditional printmaking, they were also creating new ways to make prints. UW–Madison’s print faculty developed several major innovations in printmaking.

The department has traditionally brought in visiting artists such as Jack Beal, Wayne Thiebaud and Krishna Reddy to lecture and work with students. Weege offered his own innovative approaches to the print and brought visiting artists of high caliber to Madison to print editions, first at his Jones Road print shop, then at the print workshop he established at the university, Tandem Press. Visits by well-known artists Sam Gilliam, Robert Stackhouse and William Wegman enable Tandem Press to support its operations while providing students the opportunity to work with printmakers with widely varied styles.

The university’s print program has launched the career of successful printmakers such as Robert Burkert and Marko Spalatin. Other alumni continued the high-quality printmaking that they learned at Madison. Joe Wilfer formed collaborations between artists and printing teams at New York’s Pace Editions, and Andrew Balkin’s Madison studio produces portfolios of prints for visiting artists. The results of their efforts will be on view.

Joint curators for the exhibition are emeritus professor of art Colescott; Elvehjem curator of prints, drawings and photographs Andrew Stevens; and special assistant emeritus Arthur Hove.