Spy Art Review: Centennial Salute to a Printmaking Icon by Steve Parks

A couple dozen chairs were set up for an audience expected to attend a panel discussion with five artists for the opening of the “Transference: Color in Print” exhibit at the Zach Gallery in downtown Easton on Jan. 9. The seating was short by a factor of at least five as an estimated 125 people showed up for the occasion. Standing room was augmented by one or two who chose to sit on the gallery floor.

Surely many of those attending were friends of these artists or admirers of their work. But the late Robert Rauschenberg, the centennial of whose birth on Oct. 22, 2025, is being observed at events all over the art world, was the absentee honoree. Many, if not most, in the audience had seen the current show at the Academy Art Museum, dominated by his legendary100-foot-long “Chinese Summerhall” photographic print. Each of the artists whose works line the walls of the Washington Street gallery said they were deeply influenced by Rauschenberg.

While only a few pieces seemed to directly reflect one example or another of Rauschenberg’s free-ranging creativity in most any visual art medium, together their works picked up on aspects of his groundbreaking techniques in printmaking and transference involving all manner of sources, from drawings and photographs to found-on-the-street flotsam.

Moderated by Anke Von Wagenberg, a former Academy Art curator and currently in charge of curating international collaborations at the American Federation of Arts, the panel of artists fielded questions from her and from members of the audience who demonstrated appreciable expertise of their own.

Stephen Walker, a classically trained artist with a master’s degree from the University of Memphis, cited Andy Warhol and his silkscreens of celebrities in entertainment and politics – from Marilyn Monroe to Mao Zedong – along with Rauschenberg, for expanding his printmaking horizons and to “run with it” in a variety of techniques. In this show, his serigraph entitled “Gauze” oozes a textured, multihued arrangement of that thin, translucent fabric often used in bandages.

Cid Collins Walker said Rauschenberg “influenced me and generations of artists” – almost directly so in her case as she worked for years with Larry Wright, Rauschenberg’s master printmaker. Other influences extended to the performing arts, including designs for Merce Cunningham’s dance company. In this show, her giant serigraph diptych “Saturn’s Gate,” combining print-media transference with colorful abstract shapes on a mahogany surface, is among the most Rauschenberg-inspired pieces, along with her “Homage to Billie Holiday and Marcel Duchamp,” a nod to both performing and visual art.

Rosemary Cooley, a world traveler who spent decades abroad, is likely more familiar with China than Rauschenberg and his collaborator, Donald Saff, on assembling “China Summerhall,” in that she spent four years living in Shanghai. There she studied with an ink-painting master from whom she learned myriad printmaking techniques. Her skills are keenly displayed on her four-square monoprint images on special Arches paper that suggests a whirling galaxy and dying stars, proving that what she learned and mastered in China “satisfies my urge to paint.”

“Transference allows you to do that,” Sheryl Southwick added by way of explanation to the panel audience. As a member of Aqua Regia Press at Anne Arundel Community College, “We all have our own stones,” she said, referring to the flat limestone slabs used for transferring images drawn separately on paper or other material, then applied by chemical process and firm pressure to create a lithograph. Southwick teaches lithography in Academy of Art classes and has exhibited her work there and at Easton galleries, including in this show at the Zach. Her “Floating Monotype” depicts scattered puzzle pieces that appear to be airborne above an abstract background.

Kevin Garber joked that as a teacher and master printer at Washington University in St. Louis, he could “steal ink and paper for my own work,” some of which is part of the Whitney Museum of Art collection in New York. He’s on his own now, supplying material for his prints out of his St. Michaels studio, including many of birds. One of them in the Zach show struck me, a Baltimore Ravens fan, as a sad-sack profile of an ornithological mascot following the team’s recent crushing defeat by the Pittsburgh Steelers that ended its season.

The Zach Gallery show complements the Rauschenberg exhibit running through early May at the Academy Art Museum. See them both if you haven’t already.

‘TRANSFERENCE: COLOR IN PRINT’
Through Feb. 28 at Zach Gallery, Prager Family Center for the Arts, 17 S. Washington St., Easton. zachgalleryeaston.com (See “100 Years/100 Feet of Rauschenberg at the Academy” on the Home Page under “Spy Highlights.”)