HUNTINGTON, NY.- The Heckscher Museum of Art is presenting Graphic Appeal: Modern Prints from the Collection and James Rosenquist: Tripartite Prints. Featuring over five dozen exceptional works, these exhibitions highlight the significance of printmaking in 20th-century art, as artists explored the expressive range of traditional processes and developed new techniques.
Graphic Appeal: Modern Prints from the Collection features a selection of landscape, figurative, and abstract works of art produced using a variety of traditional and modern methods, including woodcut, etching, lithography, and screen printing. Together, these works reveal the varied approaches to visual expression and the exploration of process that characterize art of the modern era. Long Island holds a distinctive place in the history of 20th-century printmaking. Americas first print workshop, Universal Limited Art Editions (U.L.A.E.), was established in Islip in 1957, initiating the development of workshops across the country that encouraged the unprecedented exploration of printmaking that continues unabated to the present day.
Graphic Appeal features work by Romare Bearden, John Steuart Curry, Stuart Davis, Red Grooms, Risaburo Kimura, Robert Kipniss, Roy Lichtenstein, Henry Moore, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Emilio Sanchez, Tom Wesselman, and many others. Graphic Appeal: Modern Prints from the Collection is on view from August 15 through November 29.
James Rosenquist: Tripartite Prints features six prints from the Museums collection by one of the pioneers of the Pop Art Movement. In the 1970s, Rosenquist created a series of monumental lithographs that are characterized by their horizontal, three-part compositions. Exhibited together for the first time since they were donated to the collection in 1981 by Susan and Jay Zises, these prints present an expansive view of Rosenquists aesthetic focus, which is encoded with messages about our culture, science and technology, and the artists social and political concerns. Constructed of images depicting various brightly colored icons, including tire tracks, stairs, nails, stars, orbits, and the American flag, these prints reveal some of the artists persistent themes communication, space exploration, and his life altering car crash of 1971 while allowing the viewer an open-ended interpretation. James Rosenquist: Tripartite Prints is on view from August 15 through November 22.
Also on view is Street Life: Private Moments/Public Record, which features a selection of works from the Museums collection that form a portrait of daily life in New York City during the 20th century. This exhibition presents the urban experience as an ever-changing tableau of activity: for young and old, work, relaxation, and play unfold on the citys streets, revealing an anonymous humanity engaged in endeavors familiar to all. Featured artists include Berenice Abbott, N. Jay Jaffee, Martin Lewis, John Sloan, Garry Winogrand, and many others. Street Life: Private Moments/Public Record is on view from August 15 through March 27, 2016.