There is a holiday song with a lyric, “It’s the most wonderful time of the year,” that runs through my mind every October during New York Print Week. Encompassing three major print fairs—the IFPDA Print Fair, the Editions and Artists Books fair, and the Satellite Fair—there is a cornucopia of wonderful prints to see. There is, of course, also a lot of attendant programming, dinners, and socializing. Oh, and we always try to hit various galleries and museum exhibitions. It’s a super busy week, exhausting and energizing, and it’s so fun to catch up with all the artists, printers, and publishers we’ve gotten to know over the years.

Because of the pandemic, New York Print Week 2020 is occurring virtually. While the IFPDA has really stepped up to the plate with a month’s worth of daily virtual artist talks and studio tours, and each fair has set up online viewing rooms, there is nothing like being there in person.

I will always believe that one must see works of art in person to really absorb them accurately. As a curator on the hunt for contemporary (ish) works on paper, New York Print Week is one-stop shopping. At the IFPDA fair alone there are usually ninety vendors. I thought it would be fun to pick out favorite works from each fair. The caveat being, of course, that seeing the works in person might change my mind. Here’s a group from the IFPDA Print Fair in no particular order.

Derrick Adams
Self Portrait on Float, 2019
Woodblock, gold leaf, collage
40 × 40 in (101.6 × 101.6 cm)
Tandem Press

Richard Long
Speed of the Sound of Loneliness, 2014
A two panel carborundum relief, both panels printed in Black/Ultramarine Blue ink mix
47 3/4 × 152 3/4 in (121.3 × 388 cm)
Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art

William Kentridge
Telephone Lady, 2000
Linoleum cut
85 × 47 in (215.9 × 119.4 cm)
Gallery Neptune & Brown

Shahzia Sikander
Portrait of the Artist, 2016
One in a suite of four etchings
27 × 21 in (68.6 × 53.3 cm)
Pace Prints

Jacob Hashimoto
Tracing the Ever-fragile Balance of Dreamless Silence: This Unruly Forest, These Imaginings, and the Final Exhalation, 2019
Mixografia print on handmade paper
34 1/2 × 61 1/2 in (87.6 × 156.2 cm)
Mixografia

Peter Milton
Interiors VI: The Train from Munich, 1991
Resist-ground etching and engraving,
20 × 35 5/8 in (50.8 × 90.5 cm)
The Old Print Shop

Walton Ford
Benjamin's Emblem, 2000
Etching
44 3/16 × 30 3/8 in (112.2 × 77.2 cm)
Susan Sheehan Gallery

Richard Diebenkorn
High Green, Version I, 1992
Color spit bite and soap ground aquatints with soft ground and hard ground etching and drypoint
52 × 33 in (132.1 × 83.8 cm)
Crown Point Press

Tom Marioni
Drawing a Line, 2012
Drypoint with plate tarnish printed in sepia and black
54 × 16 in (137.2 × 40.6 cm)
Crown Point Press

Tauba Auerbach
Mesh Moire I-VI, 2012
Suite of six color softground etchings on Somerset white paper
86 × 98 in (218.4 × 248.9 cm)
Carolina Nitsch Contemporary Art

Charles Gaines
Numbers and Trees, Tiergarten Series 3: Tree #1, April, 2018
Color aquatint and spitbite aquatint with printed acrylic box.
41 1/4 × 32 × 3 1/2 in (104.8 × 81.3 × 8.9 cm)
Paulson Fontaine Press

​I’m a super fan of intaglio printmaking—intaglio refers to printmaking techniques in which the image is incised into a surface and the incised line or sunken area holds the ink—and I always wanted to do a series of shows on techniques, starting with, of course, intaglio. (Sorry folks, lithography would be last; well, maybe screenprinting.) Stanley William Hayter was a great practitioner of intaglio printmaking, as were all of the artists who worked with him at Atelier 17. Many of them established or ran university printmaking departments, including Gabor Peterdi, who taught at Yale from 1960 to 1986. One of Peterdi’s students was Peter Milton, who must stand as one of the great intaglio printmakers of the latter part of the 20th century.
 
The BMA has a handful of Milton’s prints. One of the most spectacular, Interiors IV: Hotel Paradise Café (1987), is mindblowing for students in MICA professor Tru Ludwig's History of Prints classes. Upon its unveiling one would hear choruses of “wow!” along with mutters of “it’s so not fair.” Its intricacies have both inspired and depressed young printmakers. Tru and I are both fans and when we had the opportunity to hear Milton speak at Jane Haslem’s Washington, D.C., gallery, we jumped at the chance to meet him. After the talk we approached and he and Tru bonded over everything from techniques to history to all the esoteric details that appear in his prints. It was also there that I spied one of his drawings for his series The Aspern Papers, which I eventually acquired for the BMA—more on that in another post. During their conversation, Peter told Tru that he considered the copper plates to be the most beautiful things he makes. The lightbulb went off and the next thing we knew, Tru and I were working together with James Archer Abbott, then director of Evergreen Museum and Library, to curate an exhibition of Milton’s plates, prints, and preparatory drawings.
 
Several trips were made to Milton’s New Hampshire studio and home, where we were welcomed by Peter and his lovely wife, Edith. There we got to interview him, see where the magic happens, and select the plates and other works to be included in the show. To my mind, Milton’s Interiors series is his most important. We included five of the seven plates from that series including The Train from Munich (1995), which focuses on Edith’s 1939 departure from Germany as one of 10,000 children sent on a Kindertransport train taking unaccompanied Jewish children to the United Kingdom for the duration of the war. [Edith and her sister lived with a British family for seven years and she eventually published an excellent memoir about that time called Tiger in the Attic (a NYT review is here: https://bit.ly/MiltonTigerinAttic).] The Train from Munich graces the cover of the catalogue produced for the Evergreen show and it is written about in depth therein. The link to the PDF catalogue is here: https://bit.ly/MiltonCatalogue.
 
Working on the show, I think Tru had the most fun job. He was the muscle responsible for polishing the copper plates. This is no easy task and takes patience and perseverance. In the end, we both agree with Peter. The copper plates are stunningly beautiful and reveal things, objects, and moments that are easily missed in the printed versions. It was an honor to work with this titan of printmaking. And, we owe one last thank you to Jim Abbott for letting us make a dream come true.