Women in Print: Exhibition Guide

“What if women ruled the world?” asks Judy Chicago. Women in Print makes the case that in the printmaking world, women have been running things for decades. Chicago famously posed this question in a 2020 commission for Dior’s Haute Couture Spring/Summer Show, but she first dreamed it up in 1977 as she was completing her milestone installation piece The Dinner Party. 

This print commemorates the Dior show, capturing the aesthetic of the monumental appliqué and velvet banners that encircled the runway. It is emblazoned with embroidery-mimicking text, emblematic of Chicago’s fiber practice.

Brooklyn-based artist Lesley Dill creates mixed-media assemblages that combine text and images to question how language plays a role in the construction of identity. Dill made this dimensional lithograph with Landfall Press, a legendary print workshop that started in Chicago in 1970 and is now based in Santa Fe. Landfall’s offshoot, Black Rock Editions, is directed by Christina Ziegler Campbell. 

The freestanding litho Rapture’s Germination exemplifies the magic that can emerge in the highly collaborative context of a well-run print studio, where an artist’s vision is uplifted by a master printer’s near-limitless skill and determination. One of the printers who worked with Dill on Rapture’s Germination is Brad Hart, Zane Bennett’s Operations Director.

Collaboratively created during her 2019 artist residency at Tamarind Institute, Danielle Orchard's Smile More invokes several motifs of the Brooklyn-based artist's oeuvre, dangling cigarette included. While the Indiana-born artist first borrowed from Modernist-era figures for their exacting and absolute sense of composition and permanence, she later began to "graft" contemporary life and culture onto her female figures. 

"It wasn't until much later [in my career] that I became interested in revealing to the viewer the empathy I felt while borrowing and re-narrating these female motifs," Orchard writes. Unlike the historical muses of her predecessors, Orchard instills an air of defiance and contemporary misanthropy, seen not only in her subject's habits (emptied wine glasses are featured among other works), but also in her figure's leveled and confident yet jaded gaze. Orchard may be drawn to the women of Picasso and Matisse, but her own female figure is decidedly a woman of today and, more importantly, of the artist herself.