Chakaia Booker at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, New York.
Barry Schwabsky reviews Press & Pull: Two Decades at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in Artforum, and explores the history of the workshop and Robert Blackburn’s legacy.
”In 1971, Blackburn’s workshop transformed into a nonprofit, and since 2005—two years after his death—it has operated under the auspices of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts as the EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Throughout its history, across the shifts in organizational structure and in address, what Blackburn maintained was the printshop’s ability to function as both a community arts resource where anyone could come to learn and a place where professional artists could come from around the world to experiment with printing as an open-ended artistic process. As Curlee Raven Holton, one of the many artists who was mentored by Blackburn, recalled in the 2014 catalogue, the workshop has been “a place of acceptance where artists from New York City, Ohio, Oklahoma, Greece, Thailand, or South Africa formed an international exchange, the united nations of artists.” (I’m particularly intrigued by the number of Indian or Indian-born artists who passed through, among them Devraj Dakoji, Zarina Hashmi, M. F. Husain, and Krishna Reddy.) “For many artists new to the city,” Holton continued, “the Workshop was the only open door that would embrace them regardless of where they had come from or their professional rank.” It was probably the most truly integrated art space in New York; this, too, was part of Blackburn’s vision. He wanted to make a place that would welcome other Black artists—and a place that would welcome everyone else. His stance was founded on the faith that art and life are not zero-sum games, but fields in which cooperation and collaboration increase the potential of all participants. “I’ve always been an integrationist,” Blackburn declared. “I think an artist’s way of life has to be one that is trying to make things one, and not trying to fragment.”
—Barry Schwabsky, Artforum
Press & Pull: Two Decades at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop is on view through November 15, 2025.
The James Gallery at CUNY Graduate Center
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