Exhibition: Imprint- Student Acquisitions from USD's Print Collection

Location

Saints Tekakwitha and Serra Hall, Humanities Center Gallery

Free

This exhibition will span over four galleries across campus, and features more than 75 works highlighting the University of San Diego’s broadening collections of prints and Native American art. In the Hoehn Family Galleries, Imprint will highlight the University’s Print Collection, which has experienced exponential growth in the last four years, nearly tripling in size. Most of this growth has been through donations, gifts and bequests that have been as diverse as the history of the graphic arts itself. Recent acquisitions have reached as far back as the 15th century, and include major works from Asia, Europe, Latin America and the U.S. Also featured are select highlights from the permanent collection, including works by seminal graphic artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Otto Dix, Hendrick Goltzius, Stanley William Hayter, Käthe Kollwtiz, Edward Munch and Anthony van Dyck, among others. The inaugural exhibition in the Humanities Center Gallery, Imprint will feature the initial results of an inspired gift from the Legler Benbough Foundation. The new endowment has enabled University Galleries to launch a student-driven acquisitions program. Undergraduates are given the opportunity to identify and acquire works of art, usually as a group project embedded into the course syllabus of an art history class taught at USD. After nearly five years, seven works have been added to the permanent collection as a result of these projects, a process that helps demystify the art world for our students. Shown together with the successful proposals that led to the acquisition committees’ decisions, these prints represent the invaluable perspective that USD students bring to collection development on this campus and beyond. Finally, a third installation of Imprint will celebrate a small group of new works recently acquired for the May Collection of Native American art in the David W. May Gallery. Several new prints and drawings by notable contemporary Native American artists, such as Preston Singletary, will be on view. In addition to representing the breadth of art assets on campus, this interdisciplinary project suggests the University Galleries’ ambition to represent the broadest possible history of visual representations and material culture for USD’s students while honoring the generous spirit of our supporters.