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To educate the public about printmaking and to provide opportunities for artists to show their work, we organize print exhibitions. Our first was Paradise Endangered, 82 prints from five North and South American countries addressing cultural and environmental changes since 1492, presented at Baltimore City Hall, March - May 1993. We followed that with Edges & Interfaces, 50 prints, paperworks and artists' books by artists who belong to the Alliance's councils, at the borders and creating bridges between cultures. Edges & Interfaces travelled from March 1995 until February 1999 and was seen in Morgantown (West Virginia), Montréal, Toronto, Boston, Miami, Decatur (Georgia), Atlanta and Honolulu. In order to reach a wider audience than usually attends gallery or museum exhibitions, we have shown it at college galleries, community intercultural centers, a former glass factory converted to shops and the lobby of a printing press company.
The current travelling exhibition, Common Ground: A Vital Community of Prints, was selected by Jennifer Saville, Curator of Western Art at the Honolulu Academy of Arts. The call for entries sought prints and artists' books that demonstrate, by content and context, the abilities of these media to engage popular audiences, involve the public in civic concerns from local to international, or in other ways foster a community involving both artists and the general population. It opened in July 1998 at the University of Georgia at Athens, and is travelling to Virginia, California, Colorado, Oregon, Iowa, Texas, Illinois, Arizona and Maryland. A free brochure published for each of these exhibitions contains a short text explaining the theme and the role of printmaking in bringing contemporary concerns to public attention, a list of works shown with some illustrations, and a glossary of printmaking techniques. Each exhibition venue has been encouraged to hold (besides or in place of the traditional "opening reception") public talks and demonstrations. For example, the Printmaking Dialogue Day at Agnes Scott College in 1997 and a papermaking and printmaking workshop at the Robert C. Williams American Museum of Papermaking in 1998 were held in conjunction with showings of Edges & Interfaces. Our latest exhibition is Scrolling the Page, opening in September 1999 on the Internet, an artists' book exhibition in conjunction with a community project in Baton Rouge. Besides linking one of the oldest forms of mass communication of information with one of the newest, we intend to emphasize the artist's role in information design, excellence and ingenuity in printmaking and bookmaking, and quality in cultural programming. And the format allows us to do this in a very cost-effective way that has the potential of reaching thousands of people at the same time.Accomplishments
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