print exhibition – Mia Guides

Color Woodcuts in the Arts and Crafts Era

Final panels for the exhibition:

Final Labels:

From artsmia.org:

September 14, 2019 – March 22, 2020
Gallery 315 and 316
Free Exhibition
Color woodcuts enjoyed a revival during the Arts and Crafts movement, whose leaders believed that one antidote to rampant mechanization was a return to handcraft. Artists in the early 20th century thus began carving, inking, and printing each impression by hand. Though demanding, this highly personal process revealed the direct interaction between artists and their materials.

This directness is one of the pleasures of the 80 or so color woodcuts in this exhibition. Most were recently acquired by Mia, and most come from the United States, Britain, and German-speaking countries. A remarkable number—nearly half—are by women. Many works also reveal an interest in the tenets of Japanese design. The delights include Margaret Patterson’s bouquets, Pedro de Lemos’s windblown trees, Frances Gearhart’s paeans to the California coast, Eliza Draper Gardiner’s childhood scenes, and Frank Morley Fletcher’s romantic landscapes.

The Rabblerouser and the Homebody: Minnesota’s Elizabeth Olds and Wanda Gág

The Rabblerouser and the Homebody: Minnesota’s Elizabeth Olds and Wanda Gág:

Exhibition Dates: March 24 – December 9, 2018

Before and after writing her famous children’s book Millions of Cats (1928), Wanda Gág was a printmaker, creating lithographs as intimate and exuberant as her books. Meanwhile, fellow Minnesotan Elizabeth Olds was writing herself into history by helping to transform screenprinting, traditionally a commercial process, into a medium for fine art. Her efforts, part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program of arts patronage, enabled artists to put low-cost art in the hands of a mass audience.

Olds’s prints used humor, satire, and a socially conscious viewpoint to document American life during the unsettled 1930s. Gág’s work came from a more private place: a spinning wheel, tree, or sleeping cat was enough to ignite her one-in-a-million imagination.

This exhibition celebrates these two Minnesota-grown artists with prints, drawings, and preparatory materials for their children’s books.

Exhibition copy:

Olds_Gag labels for G315_FINAL

Olds_Gag labels for G316_FINAL

Panels:

Olds_Gag_Panels_FINAL