Press Release: Limited Editions: Joseph Holston Prints, 1974-2010, A Retrospective
January 03, 2011
A retrospective look at Joseph Holston’s prints to be presented at The David C. Driskell center
COLLEGE PARK, MD – Organized by the David C. Driskell Center and co-curated by Lisa Hodermarsky, the Stuphin Family Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Yale University Art Gallery and Dr. Robert E. Steele, Executive Director of the David C. Driskell Center, the exhibition Limited Editions: Joseph Holston Prints, 1974-2010, A Retrospective features 72 prints by Maryland based artist Joseph Holston. The exhibition is presented at the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland. Limited Editions will open on Thursday, April 21, 2011, with a reception from 5pm to 6:30pm. The Tenth Annual David C. Driskell Distinguished Lecture in the Visual Arts featuring Jock Reynolds, The Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Yale University Art Gallery, presenting his lecture “Afro-American Presence in American Art: From the Battle of Bunker Hill to Now” will follow the opening reception and begin at 6:30pm. To RSVP for the lecture please contact the Driskell Center at 301.314.2615 or driskellcenter@umd.edu. Limited Editions will stay on display at the Driskell Center until Friday, June 17, 2011.
Limited Editions: Joseph Holston Prints, 1974-2010, A Retrospective features a view into the life and works of Joseph Holston. Throughout his career, his colorful screenprints, black and white etchings, and collagraphs have been able to express emotions which viewers are able to immediately identify with. As noted by curator Lisa Hodermarsky, “…along with this simplification of form came a heightening of expressiveness in Holston’s work: of movement, emotion, and feeling. Even the artist’s monochrome etchings became increasingly more colorful as the years passed, and as the forms and lines became more simplified they simultaneously took on a more emotive form of expressiveness.”
The exhibition, featuring prints from 1974 to 2010, highlights “Holston’s ongoing quest for a mastery of line, color and form in printmaking,” as described in Prof. Driskell’s words. Limited Editions also includes four copper plates, four color separation plates, and seven progressive prints for the etching Man in Boat (2006), highlighting the creative process of printmaking. Commissioned by the David C. Driskell Center, Man in Boat was a collaboration between Joseph Holston and Prof. Curlee R. Holton, the David M. '70 and Linda Roth Professor of Art and Founder of Experimental Printing Institute at Lafayette College at Easton, PA. In addition, Limited Editions includes works from the series Color in Freedom: Journey along the Underground Railroad, one of his most recent accomplishments. Color in Freedom tells the story of the crusade to reach freedom through the Underground Railroad. The series is presented in four parts: “The Unknown World”; “Living in Bondage–Life on the Plantation”; “The Journey of Escape”; and “Color in Freedom;” each enticing the viewers’ emotions through his extraordinary use of color as well as expressive line and form. Holston’s Color in Freedom series was inspired by his appreciation for symphonic structure, as he was listening to classical music, as well as jazz, while creating the series. Effortlessly leading viewers through this journey, Holston’s works celebrate all phases of life.
Accompanying the exhibition Limited Editions: Joseph Holston Prints, 1974-2010, A Retrospective is a fully-illustrated, 100-page, scholarly catalogue which includes acknowledgements by Dr. Robert E. Steele, Executive Director for the David C. Driskell Center; an introduction by David C. Driskell, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art; the essay “Joseph Holston, Printmaker,” focusing on Joseph Holston’s career as a printmaker by Elisabeth Hodermarsky, the Sutphin Family Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs for the Yale University Art Gallery; and the essay “Narrative Voice: Joseph Holston’s Color in Freedom Underground Railroad Etchings,” which accentuates the series Color in Freedom by Katherine L. Blood, Curator of Fine Prints for the Library of Congress.
ABOUT JOSEPH HOLSTON
Joseph Holston was born in 1944 at Washington, D. C.’s Freedmen’s Hospital, and grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland. For eight years he worked as a graphic artist while studying and developing his skills as a painter and printmaker. In 1972, he began his career as a full-time studio artist, and has had much success in the ensuing 40 years. He has produced a wide-ranging body of work that is included in permanent collections in public and private museums, universities and other institutions. Among these are the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Butler Institute of American Art; the Yale University Art Gallery; the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design; the Amarillo Museum of Art, Texas; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York; the Washington County Museum of Fine Art, Maryland; the University of Maryland University College; the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland; the Lyndon B. Johnson Library at the University of Texas; and Howard University. Mr. Holston’s work has become renowned and has been exhibited in many of these same museums and venues around the country. His exhibition “Color in Freedom: Journey along the Underground Railroad” has been seen in numerous cities since 2008, and was presented in 2010 at the Palais des Nations of the United Nations Mission in Geneva, Switzerland.
ABOUT JOCK REYNOLDS
Jock Reynolds is the Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. He earned a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an M.F.A. from the University of California, Davis. An Associate Professor and Director of the Graduate Program at the Center for Experimental and Interdisciplinary Art at California State University at San Francisco, he co-founded an alternative artists’ space in San Francisco, CA, which is now called New Langton Arts. He then went on to continue his professional career as the Executive Director of the Washington Project for the Arts before becoming the director of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy, Andover, MA, a position he held until September 1998, when he was appointed as the Director at of the Yale University Art Gallery and professor at Yale University. Mr. Reynolds has won numerous grants and awards, including two National Endowments for the Arts Visual Artists fellowships, a Fulbright fellowship, and multiple National Endowments for the Arts/Art in Public Places project awards.
Mr. Reynolds frequently collaborates in his work with Suzanne Hellmuth, his wife. Their performances, installations, and photographs have been commissioned and exhibited in many solo and group exhibitions and installations in Japan, Australia, France, the Netherlands, and across the United States. Mr. Reynolds’s and Ms. Hellmuth’s artwork is represented in both private and public collections, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery. Jock Reynolds’s work is represented in many collections including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery.
ABOUT THE DAVID C. DRISKELL CENTER
The David C. Driskell Center celebrates the legacy of David C. Driskell – Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Art, Artist, Art Historian, Collector and Curator – by preserving the rich heritage of African American visual art and culture. The Driskell Center is committed to preserving, documenting and presenting African American art, as well as replenishing and expanding the field of African American art. This exhibition is supported in part, by a special fund from the Office of the President at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council.
