Prints By Women: Selected Works from the Georgia Museum of Art

On view: January 31 – April 26, 2020
Opening reception: January 30, 2020

This exhibition includes 46 prints—woodcuts, lithographs, drypoints, etchings, screenprints and more—ranging from the 19th through the 21st centuries, each by a different European or American woman artist. “Prints by Women” uses works from the Georgia Museum of Art’s permanent collection to provide a visual chronicle of art by women.

Three of the most important European women artists, Rosa Bonheur (French, 1822–1899), Berthe Morisot (French, 1841–1895) and Käthe Kollwitz (German, 1867–1945), are featured in the exhibition. Bonheur’s hand-tinted lithograph “The Sheep Fold” was among the most widely-distributed and popular images of the 19th century in both Europe and the United States. Morisot’s untitled drypoint of ducks exhibits the influence of both French Impressionism and Japanese printmaking on the artist. Kollwitz was a graphic artist of first importance, male or female, and her etching “Woman by a Church Wall” is typical of her early post-Impressionist images. Three of the American women—Peggy Bacon, Victoria Hutson Huntley and Elizabeth Olds—contributed meaningfully to the growth of early American modernism as taught to them by the popular and influential art teacher and painter, Robert Henri.

Government support of the arts during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration under the auspices of the New Deal’s “alphabet agencies” led to women artists (including Lucienne Bloch, Grace Clements, Minetta Good, Clare Leighton and Jenne Magafan) finding expanded opportunities for employment and work in the fine arts. Minna Citron, an artist associated with Abstract Expressionism in New York in the 1950s, experimented in unorthodox techniques in etching, especially in Stanley Hayter’s Atelier 17 workshop, with an interest in accidental effects and random elements that mirror her abstract paintings. The display also focuses on a handful of living contemporary artists, including Claire Clements, Ynez Johnston, Laquita Thompson and Emily Trueblood.

Organized by the Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia. This program is supported in part by the Georgia Council for the Arts through the appropriations of the Georgia General Assembly. The Council is a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support for this exhibition was provided by the women of The Rockwell Museum Board of Trustees.