Internal collection, RBPW
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Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop Collection

About

Born in Summit, New Jersey, Blackburn was raised in Harlem. In the 1920s and 1930s, he was influenced by the intellectual and artistic legacies of the Harlem Renaissance as well as European abstraction and the artistic and political perspectives and approaches of American social realism and Mexican modernism. He learned lithography as a teenager at the Harlem Arts Community Center, which was sponsored by the Depression-era Works Progress Administration. From 1940 to 1943, Blackburn studied at the Art Students League in New York City. Later, he worked as a freelance graphic designer with arts and culture organizations including Associated American Artists, China Institute of America, and Harmon Foundation. In these same years, he began to forge and refine his signature abstract style. At age 28, he opened the Printmaking Workshop, which became the longest-operating and largest nonprofit print workshop in the United States.

After a period of travel and study in Europe, in 1957 Blackburn became the first master printer for the prestigious Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), where he set standards that established ULAE as a powerful influence on modernist printmaking in America. His own complicated, varicolored abstractions prefigured or complemented more familiar ULAE works and helped fuel the explosion of graphic art that occurred in the 1960s, especially the advancement of color lithography.

In 1971, the Printmaking Workshop was incorporated as a nonprofit organization with a mission to maintain creative and artistic quality, support and encourage innovation, create opportunities for Third World and minority artists, and foster public appreciation of the fine art print. The Printmaking Workshop was renowned for its open, informal, and accommodating atmosphere. Through the workshop, Blackburn changed the course of American art and shaped and enriched the lives and careers of thousands of artists by serving them as a teacher, mentor, champion, and friend.

Health complications led Blackburn to close the Printmaking Workshop in 2002. In 2003, he passed away.  As a program of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (RBPW) reopened in 2005, extending Blackburn’s legacy by making room for multicultural artists to experiment in the graphic arts.

—From Brandywine Workshops and Archives records with excerpts and adaptations from the websites of the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (https://www.rbpmw-efanyc.org/), Library of Congress (https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/blackburn/blackburn-overview.html), and Smithsonian American Art Museum (https://americanart.si.edu/artist/bob-blackburn-5698)
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Artworks in this Collection

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Artists Included in this Collection

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