Mohammad Omer Khalil: Hyperallergic

EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop’s retrospective of Mohammad Omer Khalil’s work, Common Ground, is now on view at the Blackburn Study Center, and is part of a multi-city exhibition.

Mohammad Omer Khalil with his work in Common Ground at Blackburn Study Center, New York (photo Leslie Jean-Bart, courtesy the artist/Blackburn Study Center)

On view through May 31, 2026
Blackburn Study Center

”In 1964, Mohammad Omer Khalil made his first etching. He was initially dubious about its chemical process, hesitantly dipping his fingertip into the acid to test its safety. But this small print, cautiously rendered during his studies in Florence, Italy, marked the start of a decades-long trajectory toward becoming a master printmaker, working across continents. “Still life (Cafe Roma)” (1964) is now on view through May 31 at the Blackburn Study Center at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, a program of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. The Manhattan gallery serves as the anchor site of Mohammad Omer Khalil: Common Ground, a multi-city retrospective celebrating the New York-based Sudanese artist in his 90th year.

These days, Khalil is sorting through his studio, rediscovering and revitalizing plates from throughout his life. The artist, now and then, celebrates and invites surprise and experimentation. “You have to have your eyes open to whatever happens and see if you can use it or reject it,” he told Hyperallergic.

Though Common Ground is just his third solo exhibition in New York City, Khalil has been celebrated across the Arab and African art worlds, the curators said. They hope the exhibition will raise his profile to deserved new heights. “One of the sparks of our interest in wanting to tell Mohammad’s story is because there were stories that he was left out of,” Hamed said.”

Devin N. Morris at RBPMW: Best Booths at NADA Miami

Devin N. Morris, Shaving Grays, 2025.
Photo: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews

Devin N. Morris at Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop’s booth was featured in ARTnews’ Best Booths of NADA Miami.

“In 2019, Devin N. Morris was a printmaking fellow at New York’s legendary EFA Robert Blackburn Workshop, where he honed his craft in stencil monotypes. Now, Morris has returned to collaborate with Blackburn in support of its year-round printmaking activities, with the sale of his work at NADA. In these works, you see the shadow of Morris’s stencil monotypes depicting various figures. He then collages these elements into larger compositions incorporating found objects—from parts of gold frames to door frames to sets of keys on hooks to deflated balloons.

This presentation, titled “Building Materials,” considers what “the home” represents, or as Morris put it in an artist statement, “as a metaphor for peace” and all that entails. That idea connects directly to his use of collage, which he describes as his “charge, utilizing what one has to make what one needs.” The tableaux on view depict intimate domestic scenes with a surrealist bent. Among the strongest are Shaving Grays (2025), in which a buff man in a towel faces a bathroom mirror as he grooms his groin in a frame resembling a doorway, and Burning (2025), featuring a blinking red telephone in front of an emergency exit door, seen through a circular portal in a hardwood-floor artist frame.”

—Maximilíano Durón, ARTnews

Print Culture: On the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop

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.

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EFA RBPMW Awarded Grants from Dedalus Foundation and DHPSNY

EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop is a recipient of a Dedalus Foundation grant to support an Online Educational Platform for The Only Thing That Lasts: An Oral History of Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop, both an interactive and educational website that will be a source for greater access to the workshop’s rich history. This platform will launch in the fall of 2025, with its 20-Year Survey Exhibition, including free programming: screenings, discussions, and readings.

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EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop has also received a Documentary Heritage and Preservation Services grant for New York’s First Phase: Assessment and Planning of The Printmaking Workshop’s Papers.

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Karen Lederer at Morgan Lehman Gallery

EFA RBPMW Instructor Karen Lederer is part of the group exhibition “Stilleven” at the Morgan Lehman Gallery from January 9 - February 8, 2020.