NEW YORK, NY.- Jenny Gibbs, Executive Director of the International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) and David Tunick, President of the IFPDA Board of Directors, announced that the 2019 IFPDA Foundation Richard Hamilton Acquisition Prize has been awarded to the Art Museum of West Virginia University (WVU). This annual prize, made possible by the generosity of Champion & Partners, contributes $10,000 to the chosen museum’s acquisition of one or more prints from any period at the IFPDA Fine Art Print Fair, which ran from October 23-27, 2019, at the Javits Center in New York City. This year, the Art Museum of WVU has selected two pieces from the Fair to further diversify its already formidable collection of prints.

One of the acquired works is Self Portrait on Float (2019), a woodblock print with gold leaf collage by artist Derrick Adams (b. 1970), exhibiting at Tandem Press (Booth 311). Adams is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York, who received the Gordon Parks Fellowship Award in 2018 and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 2009. His work has been exhibited extensively since 2001 and is part of many permanent public and private collections across the country, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, the Birmingham Museum of Art, AL, the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, VA.

The Art Museum of WVU also selected Side (Beijing) (2013), a color aquatint etching by Martin Puryear (b. 1941), from Paulson Fontaine Press (Booth 117) for its collection. Best known as a sculptor, Puryear employs wood, mesh, stone, and metal to create minimalist forms with traditional ways of making. Puryear represented the United States at the Bienal de São Paulo in 1989, where his exhibition won the Grand Prize and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant, and the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY, The Getty Museum, Los Angeles, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., among others.

Robert Bridges, the curator of the Art Museum of WVU, strategically chose both these acquisitions to strengthen the depth and breadth of the museum’s current holdings by African American artists and complement the teaching and research interests of WVU’s Art & Design faculty.

“The Richard Hamilton Acquisition Prize allows the Art Museum of West Virginia University to diversify our holdings through the acquisition of original works by artists under-represented in our collection,” says Bridges, “We are grateful to the IFPDA Foundation and Champion & Partners for providing this opportunity to establish the Art Museum of WVU as an essential repository of fine art prints in West Virginia.”

The Art Museum of WVU is the cultural and artistic heart of West Virginia University’s campus for some 30,000 undergraduate and graduate students, many of whom enter an art museum for the first time upon attending the university. The museum’s collection features an impressive holding of prints, spanning from the 1500s to today, and includes works by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Rembrandt van Rijn, Francisco Goya, Marguerite Zorach, Robert Rauschenberg, Peter Saul, Anni Albers, William Kentridge, Kara Walker, and Polly Apfelbaum, among many others.

“The IFPDA Foundation is grateful to Champion & Partners for the opportunity to award this prize to the talented team at the Art Museum of West Virginia University,” says Gibbs, “We are pleased to honor the museum’s commitment to its community and the primary role of prints within the museum's collection."

Champion & Partners honors the late Richard Hamilton with the name of this prize, an artist who had a profound influence on the company’s appreciation of prints and an unforgettable impact on generations of printmakers.