A Collaborative Language: Selections from the Experimental Printmaking Institute

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts celebrates the Experimental Printmaking Institute (EPI) at Lafayette College and its 20-year history as one of the nation’s leaders in fine art prints.

Through the creative vision of its founder, master printmaker Curlee Raven Holton, EPI transcends boundaries, developing innovative visual methodologies that articulate the non-verbal exchanges between environment and experience, medium and process, and ultimately artist and printmaker.

As one of the few mediums intrinsic to cooperative environments, printmaking requires cooperation between artists and creative technicians to produce new visions of printed images. Featuring Holton’s generous gift to PAFA of over 60 EPI prints, A Collaborative Language details how EPI functions as a destination for artists to create fresh vocabularies with printers and Lafayette students, collectively reinventing approaches to surface, form, structure, and technique that allow artists to realize their work in imaginative ways.

The exhibition displays prints by such noted artists as Alison Saar, Sam Gilliam, Robin Holder, David Driskell, Martha Jackson Jarvis, Willie Cole, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Barbara Bullock, Melvin Edwards, and William T. Williams, illuminating EPI’s unique effect on the infinite possibilities of paper.

Since its start in 1996, EPI has produced over 100 editions by more than 80 different artists. The results of these collaborations have been included in museum collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as within the permanent collections of various colleges and universities.