PHILADELPHIA, PA.- The Print Center celebrates one of our most important and influential contemporary American artists: Martin Puryear. An internationally renowned sculptor, the exhibition, Martin Puryear: Prints, 1962 - 2016, will be the first in Philadelphia dedicated to Puryear in twenty-five years and will offer an in-depth investigation of the printed works created from 1962 to 2016 by this MacArthur Fellow. The Print Center presents a major exhibition of Puryear's woodcuts and etchings, guest curated by independent curator Ruth Fine, in conjunction with the Association for Public Art's (aPA) installation of Puryear's monumental work Big Bling in Philadelphia. Accompanying this landmark exhibition, an essay on Puryear's prints by Fine will be published, in which she states: "[A] critical marker of Martin's Puryear's art in all of its multiple dimensions remains his intense curiosity as to what is possible, inspiring both objects and works on paper, as his practice of more than six decades continues to evolve."

The forms explored in Puryear's sculpture, often rooted in nature, are equally powerful in his prints, the creation of which has been sporadic. As evident in this exhibition, Puryear's most expansive bodies of prints date to the 1960s, and since 1999. During these past two decades, his productivity in printmaking has been extensive, emphasizing the most tactile of the print processes: woodcut, a relief process, and the various etching (intaglio) techniques. -- Ruth Fine

The Print Center is delighted to present the masterful prints of Martin Puryear to Philadelphia. We are honored to work with the talented and generous curator Ruth Fine. It is also a privilege to showcase the artist's rarely seen early self-published prints, as well as publications of the exceptional print publishers Paulson Fontaine and Universal Limited Art Editions, and the esteemed book publisher Arion Press. -- Elizabeth Spungen, Executive Director, The Print Center

Ruth Fine is an independent curator based in Philadelphia; she has been involved with The Print Center since her student days at the University of the Arts. In the 1970's she printed in our lithography studio and later served as an Advisory Board member. She stewarded longtime Board member Lessing Rosenwald's print collection, which she accompanied from his home in Abington, PA to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, taking up a curatorial position there. She recently retired from that institution as Curator of Special Projects in Modern Art after an exceptional career, including the coordination of The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States project. Recently she curated Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (2015) and contributed to the catalog for the Martin Puryear: Multiple Dimensions (2015) exhibition organized by The Art Institute of Chicago, which traveled to the Morgan Library & Museum, NY and Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. 

Martin Puryear was born in 1941 in Washington, DC, and earned his BA at Catholic University of America, Washington, DC in 1963. He provided volunteer service to the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone from 1964 to 1966, after which he attended the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts, Stockholm, from 1966 to 1968. He received his MFA from Yale University, New Haven, CT in 1971. Puryear's first one-person exhibition opened in 1968, and since that time he has exhibited his work throughout the world, including the realization of public commissions in Europe, Asia and the US.

He was the US representative to the 1989 Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil, for which he was awarded the festival's Grand Prize, and in 1992, his work was included in Documenta. In 2007, the Museum of Modern Art, NY, organized a retrospective exhibition of his work which traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. In 2015, the Art Institute of Chicago organized an exhibition of his works on paper, the first to explore this aspect of the his oeuvre, which traveled to  the Morgan Library & Museum, NY and Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. Puryear received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982, a MacArthur Foundation award in 1989, the Gold Medal in Sculpture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2007, the National Medal of Arts in 2011 and the Association for Public Art's Medal of Honor in 2017. Puryear lives and works in the Hudson Valley region of New York and is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery, NY.