Past Exhibitions

Harry Sternberg (1904-2001) was an American artist and educator who was born in New York City and taught at the Art Students League of NY during the mid-twentieth century. He moved to Escondido, CA in his later years where he continued his passion for printmaking and educating. His works can be found in many major collections and we are pleased to have an opportunity to share examples of his etchings, lithographs and woodcuts.

Over two decades ago, the university received a generous donation of the Miserere series of prints by French artist Georges Rouault (1871-1958). This extraordinary gift was realized by the generosity of Karen and Robert Hoehn whose only request was that the series of works be exhibited on a regular rotation so that every student who comes through the university has an opportunity to view these prints. This exhibit examines Rouault’s approach to Miserere and how the series compares other works of art the artist made throughout his lifetime. From his working proofs of Les Fleurs du Mal to a bound edition of the Passion, Rouault incorporates his conviction into every subject.

In the middle of the 19th century, Paris underwent massive changes as it was transformed from a choked medieval city to the Paris we know today, with its grand boulevards, imposing apartment blocks, leafy parks, and far-flung suburbs. This unprecedented urban renewal project, spearheaded by Georges-Eugène Haussmann, was documented by the artists and writers who found themselves in the midst of these changes. Parisian Ecologies brings together prints and drawings from Pomona College’s collection—many from a significant gift to the museum in 1980—to highlight the tension between urban development and ecological disappearance from the 1850s through the end of the Belle Époque era in roughly 1914. Works include Démolitions pour le percement de la Rue des Écoles (1862) by Maxime Lalanne, which captures the Latin Quarter in rubble; Charles Heyman’s Rue de Bièvre(1911), which reveals how the Bièvre River became a new sewer system; and Félix Bracquemond’s Hiver (Loups dans la Neige), emblematic of the fantasy of escape entertained by many Parisians. Uncannily paralleling today’s debates about land use, gentrification, disease control, and environmental sustainability, Parisian Ecologies offers a history lesson as well as a demonstration of the wide array of printmaking techniques employed by the artists in their chronicles of the modern city.

This exhibition celebrates Katheryn A. and James E. Whistler's outstanding collection of prints by the artist James McNeil Whistler. The Whistler collection includes over fifty etchings and ten lithographs, featuring superb impressions from the artist's most famous series including the "French Set" and the "First and Second Venice Sets." Bringing together these works at USD's Hoehn Family Galleries, Glorious Harmony explores Whistler;s innovative approach to printmaking, revealing the artist's profound impact on the history of the medium.

Focusing on the dynamic growth of Pop Art during the 1960s and 1970s, this exhibition featured work by key figures of the movement working both in the United States, such as Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, as well as those creating art internationally, such as the Brazilian artist Claudio Tozzi and the British artist Joe Tilson. Through their groundbreaking approaches to printmaking, Pop artists both aided in the development of a thriving market for contemporary prints and propelled the media in dynamic new directions that continue to shape artistic practices to this day.

Comedians, editorial cartoons, and memes harness the power of satire, parody, and hyperbole to provoke laughter, indignation - even action. These forms of expression are usually traced to 18th-century artists, such as William Hogarth, but they are grounded in the unprecedented freedom of artistic expression in the 17th-century Dutch Republic. This exhibition explores the complex visual strategies early modern Dutch printmakers used to memorialize historical events, lionize and demonize domestic and international leaders, and form consensus for collective action.

Bill Kelly is a poignant printmaker, having spent decades expanding and refining his practice in the context of several professional identities – founder of Brighton Press, an internationally recognized fine press artist book publisher established in 1985, and professor in the Department of Art, Architecture, and Art History at the University of San Diego. Witness in the Grass illuminates the full breadth of Kelly’s practice as a printmaker, teacher, and collaborative bookmaker, impressing upon the world through both his image making and cultivation of emerging artists. His practice is intuitive, with a remarkable understanding of the ways in which a print can be pushed and reworked to reveal an image that, while of his own vision, is considered autonomous. The concept of 'witnessing' is central to his images, drawing upon his observations of the subtleties of nature while keenly aware that he, too, is subject to being witnessed.

Presented by Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation in partnership with the University of San Diego

Marie Watt (Seneca, b. 1967) is one of the country’s most celebrated contemporary artists whose work draws on personal experience, indigenous traditions, proto-feminism, mythology and art history. Storywork: The Prints of Marie Watt presented a mid-career retrospective of Watt’s work as a printmaker, demonstrating how the medium of print has served for Watt as a laboratory for large-scale pieces and concepts. In each of her prints Watt demonstrates a tactile appreciation for the particular qualities of wood, copper, or stone, aiming to achieve in her words a “familiarity and intimacy” with the material that adds a layer of thematic resonance to her work.

Celebrated architect, Ernest Born (1898-1992) is best known as a California-based architect and designer, most active in the Bay Area at midcentury. His career was, in fact, far more expansive, with notable accomplishments as an artist, muralist, curator, graphic designer, urban planner, editor, and illustrator.

Ernest Born: The Architect’s Eye is the first exhibition to consider Born’s work as a printmaker. In the 1920s and early 1930s he developed lithographic suites inspired by Europe and New York. His “architect’s eye”—skilled in rendering cross-sections, elevations, and ornament—enabled him to make detailed in situstudies of iconic structures around the world, whether St. Mark’s in Venice, Notre-Dame in Paris, or Grand Central Station in New York.

Christ: Life, Death, and Resurrection included over 40 original drawings and prints by Italian Renaissance artists—including Michelangelo, Fra Filippo Lippi, and others—from the renowned collection of the British Museum. Michelangelo’s drawing entitled The Three Crosses, depicting Christ on the cross between two thieves, is one of the few large-scale, fully finished drawings by the Italian Renaissance painter and sculptor to survive to our present time. The drawing was joined by scenes of the Nativity, Crucifixion and Resurrection in a variety of masterpieces on paper – from woodcuts and etchings – to drawings in chalk and ink.

For centuries artists ranging from Rembrandt to Rauschenberg have made original prints to communicate ideas, respond to current events, experiment with new techniques, and produce bold creative statements. Drawing on USD’s rapidly growing print collection, Press / Process: The Art of Prints explored the history, materials, and methods of printmaking, treating the process as a “way of thinking” as well as a way of making.

Georges Rouault’s (French, 1871-1958) provocative prints and paintings blurred medieval and modern, sacred and secular. In 1936 he began working on an illustrated edition of Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil), the cycle of poems by Charles Baudelaire that caused a scandal when first published in 1857. Featuring notations and instructions by Rouault for his master printer, the portfolio offers rare insight into the process of conceiving and executing an ambitious suite of prints.

This exhibition represented the first time that the career of the legendary Scottish artist, Sir. David Young Cameron (1865-1945), had been surveyed in depth in California. For most of the first half of the 20th century, Cameron was among the most celebrated British printmakers in the world. Collectors competed avidly for his latest prints, paying record-setting prices and inflating the market for his finest impressions. Mystic Beauty and Sacred Space encompassed over 50 works, including etchings, drawings, watercolors, photogravures, and oil paintings by both the artist and his close contemporaries.

Art Cash considered the relationship between currency and fine art prints, focusing on the way that artists have explored the similarities between making art and making money. As the artists in this exhibition observed, paper money and fine art prints are both a kind of printed paper. This exhibition examined the workings of one through the other, from circulation and exchange to counterfeiting. Artists included John Baldessari, Chuck Close, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Robert Dowd, Edward Kienholz, Roy Lichtenstein, Cildo Meireles, Al Ruppersburg and Andy Warhol, among others.

Xerografia revealed the innovative uses of ordinary commercial copying practices by artists working in Brazil across two politically fraught decades. The exhibition introduced audiences to this often overlooked work, including not only the innumerable images made on standard copy paper but also works machine-printed on unconventional materials such as metal, wood, and glass. Eventually, this experimentation led to work in fax, videotext, and other forms of early new media. Photocopy became a new artistic medium, offering exciting possibilities for performance, film, documentation, and even international exchange through mail art strategies.

This exhibition chronicled the graphic work of two of the most significant movements of early 20th century modern art in Britain: Vorticism and the Grosvenor School. Selected from the world-renowned print collection of the British Museum, the exhibition featured around sixty works by exemplars of British modernism.

Imprint highlighted the University’s Print Collection, which has experienced exponential growth in the last four years, nearly tripling in size. Recent acquisitions have reached as far back as the 15^th century, and include major works from Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the U.S.

This exhibition presented the graphic work of Ruth Eckstein (1916 - 2011), an artist who explored the possibilities of printmaking as a vehicle for formal experimentation. Her elegant and refined abstractions often suggest landscapes and evoke the look and feel of different topographies or careful arrangements of land, sea, and sky.

This unique exhibition brought together more than 20 extraordinary works by American painters, sculptors and printmakers from a renowned private collection in the Pacific Northwest. From the Hudson River School to American Impressionism, the exhibition provided a strong overview of artistic practice in the United States from the Civil War to the turn of the last century.

During her prolific career Kent produced more than 700 prints, most often using text and bright colors to deliver messages that she intended to “oppose crass realism, crass materialism, with religious values or at least with real values.” This exhibition included works from all parts of Kent’s career, including many prints from USD’s own collection, in addition to archival materials that had never been exhibited publicly before.

This exhibition examined the career of the celebrated American artist, Wayne Thiebaud, with a special emphasis on his longstanding practice of drawing on his own prints. Through applications of watercolor, pastel, colored pencil and other media on top of these finished etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts, Thiebaud enriches their appreciation and provides insight into the restlessness of his creative pursuits.

This exhibition explored the last ten years of Rembrandt’s graphic output, a period during which the Dutch artist produced some of his best-known prints and his experimentation with graphic media was at its height. Curated by noted British scholar Adrian Eeles, this exhibition examined Rembrandt’s creative process in depth by presenting different impressions of the same print side-by-side to demonstrate the ways Rembrandt employed line and tone to dramatically different effect.

This exhibition explored our enduring curiosity about the animal world through the beautiful and bizarre imagery found in prints from the British Museum’s incredible collection. Curious Beasts featured 86 rare woodcuts, engravings, etchings, mezzotints and lithographs from the 15th to the early 19th centuries by the best known artists of these eras, including singular works such as Albrecht Dürer’s The Rhinoceros (1515) and George Stubbs’s The Sebra (1771).

The Cutri Gift was a selection of over thirty works from a much larger gift that was presented to USD in late 2013. Longtime patrons of the arts and supporters of the local museum community, the Cutri’s assembled this ambitious group of modern images with great care and with special strengths in the area of California prints and printmakers. On view included prints by Anders Zorn; a significant group of images by European artists associated with Art Nouveau; a group of early California landscape prints; and linocuts by Belle Baranceanu—a key figure in the history of printmaking in San Diego.

One of the most skilled artists of his time, Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617) was as important to the art of engraving as Rembrandt would later be to etching. His engaging subjects and highly versatile technique earned him praise and commissions throughout Europe. This exhibition focused on the artist's two most famous series of engravings: the Birth and Early Life of Christ and the Passion.