"Creative Space: Fifty Years of Robert Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop" is an exhibition that features some 60 pieces of artwork from the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop Archives and Collection, which is now on deposit at the Library of Congress. The exhibition, which opened Feb. 26, 2003, in the Library's Thomas Jefferson Building, includes a core selection of Blackburn's own work and a dazzling array of prints by collaborators and students, as well as friends and colleagues. Blackburn was the first master printer at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), the lithographic venture founded by Tatyana and Maurice Grosman, based in West Islip, Long Island. At ULAE, he printed for an emerging generation of artists, including Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Rauschenberg. His predilections and fluency with the medium contributed to the new "look" of these works, which would go on to define the American "graphics boom."
A. "Girl in Red," by Robert Blackburn, 1950. Lithograph. Prints and Photographs Division. Reproduction information: Used by permission; reproductions not available.
B. "Death of Apartheid," by Faith Ringgold, 1984. Intaglio. Prints and Photographs Division. Reproduction information: Used by permission; reproductions not available.